Crafts and Social Networks in Viking Towns

Crafting Communities explores the interface between craft, communication networks, and urbanization in Viking-age Northern Europe. Viking-period towns were the hubs of cross-cultural communication of their age, and innovations in specialized crafts provide archaeologists with some of the best evidence for studying this communication. The integrated results presented in these papers have been made possible through the sustained collaboration of a group of experts with complementary insights into individual crafts. Results emerge from recent scholarly advances in the study of artifacts and production: first, the application of new analytical techniques in artifact studies (e.g. metallographic, isotopic, and biomolecular techniques) and second, the shifted in interpretative focus of medieval artifact studies from a concern with object function to considerations of processes of production, and of the social agency of technology. Furthermore, the introduction of social network theory and actor-network theory has redirected attention toward the process of communication, and highlighted the significance of material culture in the learning and transmission of cultural knowledge, including technology.

The volume brings together leading UK and Scandinavian archaeological specialists to explore crafted products and workshop-assemblages from these towns, in order to clarify how such long-range communication worked in pre-modern Northern Europe. Contributors assess the implications for our understanding of early towns and the long-term societal change catalysed by them, including the initial steps towards commercial economies. Results are analyzed in relation to social network theory, social and economic history, and models of communication, setting an agenda for further research. Crafting Communities provides a landmark statement on our knowledge of Viking-Age craft and communication

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Feb 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789251616

Book preview

Chapter 1

Crafting the urban network

Steven P. Ashby and Søren M. Sindbæk

The practice of crafts is a central element of human experience. It ranges from the fashioning of everyday objects in a household setting, to the exclusive work of skilled artisans, or workshop-based specialisation in a single material or product. It can be solitary work, or a complex endeavour combining the skills of many specialists. It is a venue for technologies and innovations that permeate and transform societies.

The history of crafts is intimately connected with that of urbanism. For millennia, towns and cities have provided craftspeople with prime meeting places and communities, access to raw materials, markets for their products and arenas for learning, comparison and competition. In turn, crafts are an important part of what makes places and societies urban. They are occasion to complex connections between people, spaces and materials that are different to those that characterise most other settings, and give towns and cities some of their special character.

In many parts of northern Europe – from Ireland to the Baltic Sea area – the Viking Age is the period in which urban life either first emerges, or recovers from a lengthy hiatus following the demise of the western Roman Empire. Since the mid-20th century, many Viking towns have been investigated by archaeologists, and have offered up extraordinary remains from their earliest communities. One of the major revelations brought about by these discoveries is the wealth of evidence pertaining to the practice of crafts. These structures and assemblages testify to a wide range of skilled town-dwellers: blacksmiths, cup-makers, weavers, combmakers, jewellers and more (Fig. 1.1). The products manufactured by these specialists are known to us from graves, hoards and settlement contexts, but excavated workshops reveal how and where these craftspeople actually practised. The evidence found in urban sites does not appear primarily in the form of finished products, but in the debris of raw materials, tools and production waste like slag, metal droplets or cut-off pieces of bone and antler (Fig. 1.2). These have turned out to be an archaeological treasure.

Figure 1.1 The Coppergate blacksmith. This ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ display was a striking component of the Jorvik Viking Centre’s Artefact Gallery, prior to its redesign in 2016. The exhibition was pioneering in highlighting the interactions and interdependence of early urban craftspeople. © York Archaeological Trust.

Together, crafted products and the refuse from workshops are among the richest and most informative categories of archaeological evidence pertaining to urban sites of the Viking Age. Over the decades, a wealth of studies have explored such materials to reveal the details of how early craftspeople in north European towns practised their skills: the networks they could access to obtain raw materials, the techniques they applied to process them and the range of products they manufactured. Such studies have transformed our understanding of the role of towns, and of the social networks that characterised the Viking Age more broadly.

Crafting practices represent some of the situations in which networks between people and material become most evident and illuminating. This coincidence provides archaeology with a special opportunity, as craft workshops are also places that generate a rich archaeological record of materials to study and compare. Paradoxically, the very richness of this evidence has hampered some areas of study. The challenge of analysing and comprehending assemblages often consisting of thousands of finds is considerable. Identifying dozens of enigmatic pieces and unknown materials, and establishing their contexts in buildings, areas, stratigraphies and phases: these are daunting research tasks. As a consequence, most assemblages have hitherto been analysed only on a single-site basis.

Figure 1.2 Craftworking debris from Ribe. (a) Mould fragments related to non-ferrous metalworking; (b) Antler debris produced in the manufacture of combs. Photographs courtesy of the Museums of South-west Jutland.

The many questions that might be answered by comparing sites have seen less attention: where did craftspeople learn their skills? Did they develop their crafts within communities tied to particular towns or regions, perhaps guarding the valuable tricks of their trade; or did they travel frequently between distant places, bringing new innovations and inspirations with them? The finds from Viking towns could indeed inform such questions, widening the focus from individual skills to social networks, if we could compare in detail the rich evidence of practices, workshop by workshop.

Today such comparative work seems more attainable. Recent years have seen significant changes in the study of artefacts and production. These developments have been threefold. First, the application of new techniques for material analysis in artefact studies (e.g. metallographic, isotopic and biomolecular techniques) has unleashed a ‘Science Revolution’ (Kristiansen 2014), which has enabled us to revisit previous research. Many previously accepted results are now being considered in the light of this new evidence. Scientific methods now facilitate the identification and provenancing of raw materials (e.g. Hunter et al. 1993; Smith and Clark 2004; Palanivel and Meyvel 2010; Frahm and Doonan 2013; Buckley 2018), while photogrammetry, 3D- and CT-scanning and high-magnification microscopic techniques allow for the fine-grained characterisation of manufacturing process, through the identification of surface modifications that are diagnostic of particular tools or techniques (e.g. Di Maida 2013; Nicolae et al. 2014) (Fig. 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Viking-Age metalwork undergoing Micro-XRF analysis at AGiR Lab, Aarhus University. Photograph by Søren Sindbæk.

Second, the interpretative focus of artefact studies has shifted from the functional treatment of objects that characterises the main body of basic research literature, to a concern with processes of production and the social agency of technology and of things. This idea, sometimes labelled the ‘material turn’, is transformative in that it re-characterises artefact study: what was once seen as an important but second-order concern is now central to the informed study of past society and economics (see Lemonnier 1993a; Latour 2005).

Third, the introduction of social network theory has redirected attention toward the process of communication, and pointed to the significance of towns and other centres in the learning and transmission of cultural knowledge, including technology (Knappett 2013). Recent network studies have demonstrated how interaction across large, complex groups and societies involves patterns and dynamics which may sustain or impede cultural exchange, and how material and technological choices may bear witness to such processes. These ideas remain to be explored in relation to specific and detailed evidence.

Focused research in this field has the potential to revitalise scholarly discourse in several key areas. An important question surrounds the relationship between technological innovation and social, economic and political change (Ashby in press). In a rapidly developing trade network characterised by the power of magnates and kings, the entrepreneurial practice of merchants, the urbanisation and specialisation of craft and the increasing carrying capacity of ships, how does one discern the dynamics of causation? It will often be misleading to ask how a particular technique or way of doing was invented or transferred, and more relevant to explore how and why it became useful at a particular time and place. In the words of Levi-Strauss (1974), ‘things are not known because they are useful, they become useful because they are known’. Humans are always collecting and curating a surplus of knowledge and things. Thus, we need not seek to fit technological change to grand narrative, nor view it as a driver of political, social and economic change. Rather, we may find meaning in analysis of how people went about doing things.

Technological adoption does not appear to act as a direct proxy for communication, but rather seems to emerge in new choices, or in combinations of practices arising from broader developments and social transformations (Arthur 2010). There is thus a need to distinguish between the intensification and specialisation associated with accelerating urbanisation on the one hand, and the effects of cultural communication and technological transfer on the other. Indeed, in sorting out the fine detail of technology and its communication, we may provide a context for social action that is resolvable at the micro-scale, allowing us to consider not only the workings of systems and networks over centuries, but the actions and fortunes of individuals over the course of a lifetime, or even a single season. This kind of ‘high-definition archaeology’ (Raja and Sindbæk 2018; Croix et al. 2019a), made possible by newly developed approaches to excavation, recording and artefactual analysis, has the potential not only to provide finer-grained data, but to fundamentally transform grand narratives.

The archaeology of crafts

Urban craft has long been a focus in the study of archaeology. The occurrence of manufacturing activities in Viking towns was noted in the earliest excavations of the North Sea emporia (e.g. Stolpe 1876), but until the 1970s most excavations were too limited to assess the scale of production. Specialised crafts were largely assumed to occur as a secondary activity in response to trading opportunities, and were argued to confirm the operation of the specialised activities and hinterland interaction that defined urban societies in prevailing historical and sociological models (Arbman 1939, 129; Jankuhn 1944; 1956, 217; Ennen 1985, 8; Clarke and Ambrosiani 1991, 167).

Few researchers at the time could envisage how synthesised studies of the production of Viking-Age ornamental metalwork might be ‘of outstanding interest for the interpretation for the early medieval towns’ (Callmer 1971, 279). However, from the late 1970s onward, greater quantities of material became available for analysis, as a result of a series of urban excavations, and the details of both artefacts and manufacturing evidence from these sites became more widely known (e.g. Davidan 1977; 1982; 1992; Ulbricht 1978; Ambrosiani 1981; Brinch Madsen 1984; Duczko 1985; Ottaway 1989; Mainman 1990; Fanning 1994). Meanwhile, reports were emerging from excavations in actual workshop areas (Bencard et al. 1979; Vierck 1983; Callmer 1984; Hall 1984). One result of this was a nuancing of interpretative models, as studies of individual crafts identified more specific patterning. In the case of non-ferrous metalwork or the production of bone and antler combs, for example, the results seemed initially to confirm a picture of mobile artisans, who worked individually in simple, even seasonal workshops, and who supplied a well-defined end product to individual consumers. The craftspeople were widely supposed to have been either itinerant specialists, who took ‘rounds’ between a number of production sites, or else part-time generalists, living more sedentary lives in which they engaged with their craft in a less intensive fashion (Ulbricht 1978, 118; Bencard et al. 1979; Ambrosiani 1981, 157; Christophersen 1980; 1982; Brinch Madsen 1984, 95).

A change came in the 1990s, with the publication of the large-scale excavations in Ribe (Bencard and Bender Jørgensen 1990), Southampton (Andrews 1997), and York (e.g. Bayley 1992; Mainman and Rogers 2000; Fig. 1.4). These volumes documented the fact that production in (some) towns had taken place on a much greater scale and level of complexity than had hitherto been realised. Surveys such as Justine Bayley’s (1991) review of the evidence for metalworking provided a new foundation for analysis, and studies of textiles and textile tools proposed important comparative perspectives (see Bender Jørgensen 1992; Walton Rogers 1997). The implications of these revelations were emphasised by Richard Hodges, also influenced by recent finds of abundant craft-working materials from excavations in the 9th-century monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno in southern Italy. He argued that specialised craft production had been a distinctive aspect of the character of early medieval trading towns, and questioned the previous focus on long-distance trade (Hodges 2000, 83). Hence, craftspeople were accorded a more permanent presence and an integral role in the activities taking place in emporia.

Figure 1.4 Hearth under excavation at Coppergate, York. © York Archaeological Trust.

The high degree of specialisation involved in urban craft activities has been confirmed by subsequent investigations in ironworking (Westphalen 2002), goldsmithing (Armbruster 2002) and textile manufacture (Andersson 2003). Excavations in Birka between 1990 and 1995 uncovered the remains of a non-ferrous metalworking workshop that had maintained a substantial volume of highly standardised production over several decades between the late 8th and the mid-9th centuries (Ambrosiani 2013). Meanwhile, a series of seminal studies by Johan Callmer drew attention to connections between artisans and early medieval urbanisation (Callmer 2002; 2003 with further reference).

More recently, Unn Pedersen’s detailed studies of workshops in 9th-century Kaupang, Norway demonstrate how non-ferrous production practised in this emporium involved the mastery of a diversity of metalworking techniques, and a detailed knowledge of a wide range of metals and alloys, in addition to a costly set of specialised tools (Pedersen 2015, 55). Even if tasks associated with non-ferrous metalworking required the use and manufacture of metallurgical ceramics, or the working of leather, bone and wood, a master of the craft was a specialist with a profound skill set and knowledge base, which could only be acquired through years of experience. Moreover, many tasks could not be performed by a craftsperson operating in isolation, but were rather dependent on the presence of a master overseeing one or more apprentices and assistants (Pedersen 2015, 57). Such inferences hint at the potential of craft-production data to inform our conception of social and economic dynamics. The material provides us with the opportunity to understand the means by which the details and practice of technology were communicated within and between workshop contexts, not only across space, but also through time.

Pedersen’s work provides one example among many of the ways in which focused artefactual study has begun to transform our understanding of urban communities and activities. The UK and Scandinavia have seen a resurgence in the study of artefacts (e.g. ten Harkel 2010; Tsigaridas Glørstad 2012; Kershaw 2013; Weetch 2013; Jervis 2014; Martin 2015; Leonard 2016; contributions in Tsigaridas Glørstad and Loftsgarden 2017) fed by a new found realisation that, when positioned within the right theoretical framework, artefacts have the ability to answer some of the big social questions in medieval archaeology. It is true that, in many such studies, the focus has been on consumption and use, rather than production. Nonetheless, the last 10 to 15 years have seen diverse and detailed publications on the working of stone (Forster and Turner 2009; Baug 2015), bone and antler (Smirnova 2005; Ashby 2014), ceramics (Perry 2016) and non-ferrous metal (Pedersen 2016a), as well as discussions of the complex ways in which craft-workers interact in urban contexts (Callmer 2003; Hansen 2005; Christophersen 2015a; 2015b; Hansen et al. 2015). In Scandinavia at least, recent projects appear to be taking more of an interest in the individuals involved in craft production (e.g. Iversen 2005; Skre 2011; Hansen et al. 2015).

Crafts in Viking towns

The emergence of urban settlements is one of the developments that mark out the Viking Age in northern Europe. This begins with the trading ports, often termed emporia, which from the end of the 7th century CE emerged along the seaboards of northern Europe, from southern England and the Channel area, to the coasts of the North Sea, and into Scandinavia and the Baltic (Clarke and Ambrosiani 1991; Skre 2007; Hodges 2012, 93; Kleingärtner 2013). While the earliest emporia emerged in western Europe, Scandinavian sites – Ribe, Kaupang, Birka and Hedeby – grew in the course of the 8th and early 9th centuries as centres of expanding maritime interactions. Merchants and sailors from this network were also closely involved in the foundation of Truso and Wolin in the Baltic Sea, and Staraja Ladoga, Gnezdovo and Novgorod in European Russia (Duczko 2004). Similarly, Scandinavians were active in the founding of Dublin as Ireland’s earliest town, and in the revival of urban life in York, Lincoln, Norwich and other centres of late 9th-/10th-century England (Jones et al. 2003; Hadley and ten Harkel 2013; Hall et al. 2014; Wallace 2015).

Craft activities are conspicuous in these settings. Compared to other pre-modern towns, the emporia were small; indeed, by demographic criteria many might fall below the threshold for urban settlements (cf. Fletcher 2007; Smith 2017). What gives them an urban character is rather the combination of practices and economy focused in them. Their significance as places for trade in materials and commodities is well attested, as is their role as nodal points in long-distance communication networks (Sindbæk 2007; Ashby et al. 2015). Yet the occurrence of volumes of workshop debris from crafts including ironworking, bone and antler carving, glass bead-making and, notably, non-ferrous metalworking is another feature that lends an urban character to the archaeology of these sites (Callmer 2007 with further references).

The early emporia are sometimes said to lack a ‘true’ urban character (e.g. Verhulst 1994, 370; Hodges 2000, 122), with their inhabitants being ‘… not so firmly bound to the wik as later town dwellers were to be to their settlements’ (Ennen 1979, 44f.). A key element of this view is the idea of craft-workers operating as itinerant traders. However, as detailed in the chapters that follow, one of the striking characteristics of Viking-Age urban craft is its spatially anchored persistence. While the long-distance connections and cosmopolitan populations of Scandinavia towns are well evidenced, it is difficult to overlook the indications that workshops preserved manufacturing techniques that were, in important respects, locally distinctive. Such an impression is difficult to reconcile with the popular idea that the key actors in the promotion of urban crafts were highly mobile specialist artisans. Rather, perhaps we should envision a situation in which communities of craftspeople were embedded in the populations of Viking towns, being dependent on local networks of fellow artisans and drawing upon technical traditions that were often locally conservative.

The apparent contrast between itinerant and settled roles might resolve itself if we could follow people in the perspective of life histories: the same craftsperson may have travelled widely for years, and later settled in one place for decades. Thus, notwithstanding their oft-remarked-upon long-range communication, Viking-Age towns are best seen to comprise relatively settled communities of people, many of whom were engaged in specialist craft or associated mercantile activities.

The association between urbanism and crafts is by no means ubiquitous or self-evident. In many societies, other settings have provided competitive alternatives. Prior to industrialisation, when manufacturing industries became spatially centralised according to the availability of machinery, many pre-industrial artisans operated in a rural setting; in the case of medieval Europe, such labour could be situated in manorial estates, monasteries or ‘commodity villages’ (Hodges 2012, 60). From the point of view of the surrounding social matrix, including authorities and consumers, it is evident that specialised crafts contributed to the material complexity associated with urbanism (Schortman and Urban 2004). It is less evident why craftspeople should themselves be a dynamic working towards the process of urbanisation.

A common view is that specialised craftspeople would operate in towns because, as markets for trade, they gave privileged access to consumers (e.g. McCormick 2007, 47). However, even if products were to be distributed through urban markets, this does not determine that production should be located here. The demand for quantities of fuel, raw materials and provisions for the craftspeople and their families might have been better served in hinterland villages, from where they could have supplied merchants in towns. A similar point may be raised against the argument that maritime centrality, which made towns favourable to merchants, was equally important to craftspeople as a means of securing adequate access to indispensable imported raw materials (Sindbæk 2007; Ashby et al. 2015). A bead-maker, combmaker or non-ferrous metalworker might have secured access to rare raw materials from an urban market, while still operating from a workshop in a rural setting, with better access to bulk resources such as fuel.

Others have suggested that the condition that made craftspeople settle in towns was that these were privileged by the protection of authority. Richard Hodges has argued that the impetus was institutional: ‘a huge, organised investment was made, almost certainly by a king or similar authority in order strategically to control the production and distribution of a region’ (Hodges 2000, 80; cf. also Bencard and Bender Jørgensen 1990, 146; Lebecq 2007). The tight management implied by this model has been questioned by other researchers (McCormick 2007; Skre 2008). If indeed a ‘king or similar authority’ wanted to control production in a region, this might have been better achieved in a manorial centre than in a port, where constant maritime traffic made it more difficult to regulate the movement of things and people than at most other locations.

A third suggestion is that it was the social networks of craftspeople as well as merchants that brought them together in towns and emporia. According to Johan Callmer, both groups were characterised by a lifestyle and culture that set them apart from the inhabitants of the various regions. The ‘mobility of craftsmen and merchants was perhaps from the beginning (in the days before the permanent or partly permanent sites) the main reason for the development of a close symbiotic relationship between the two categories’ (Callmer 2002, 156). Dagfinn Skre has made a similar point in maintaining that towns were essentially communities with special opportunities emerging from their particular configuration of social networks (Skre 2007). Callmer’s and Skre’s models echo Weber’s (1921) conception of urban communities’ particular form of society, partly detached from kin-based relationships, and arguably anticipating guilds. However, they do not point to any obvious cause for the emergence of this phenomenon, other than a mutual solidarity, supposedly fuelled by common economic interest and by marginalisation from the mainstream of rural society and its powers.

The models discussed evoke the spectrum of social structure from markets to hierarchies and organisations. In most cases, though, the discussion has been isolated from consideration of what was actually produced in towns, and thus from a real consideration of the actual relationship of craftspeople to others by way of their raison d’être: the production of craft products (Croix et al. 2019b, 2). The re-evaluations presented in this volume show that the practices and products of several artisans were often closely entangled, and point to a material and social interdependence that has often been neglected: the production sequences had a direct, practical implication for the process of organising specialised production in an urban environment.

Over the centuries of the Viking Age, networks developed, transformed, collapsed and reconfigured in surprising forms (Sindbæk 2017). Beyond emporia, archaeology has revealed the existence of a range of more regionally focused trading sites in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea area, combining favourable coastal locations with some evidence for crafts, albeit at a lower level of intensity than that seen in the major emporia (Carlsson 1991; Ulriksen 1998; 2018; Kleingärtner 2013; Peschel et al. 2017). These ‘specialised landing places’ are unlikely to have housed permanent communities of craftspeople, but may have been important stations for seasonal markets. Places of this order can be traced back far into the Iron Age, at sites such as Uppåkra (Hårdh 2000) or Helgö (Clarke and Lamm 2017), and persisted throughout the Viking Age, before ceding their role to market towns after the 11th century.

Recent research on 9th-century Scandinavian military campaigns in Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England – emerging from the identification of historically attested Viking camps – has revealed the scale and character of these transient sites to be something approaching the urban (Sheehan 2008; Hadley and Richards 2016). Moreover, the role of these temporary settlements in catalysing urban development is striking, not least in that craft specialisation appears to play an important part in this phenomenon (e.g. Perry 2016; see also Kilmurry 1980). Recent work by Hadley and Richards (2016; 2018) has demonstrated that the campsites of the Micel Here in mid-9th-century Mercia could be places characterised by a previously unsuspected scale of trade and craft production. Though their networks have yet to be explored in detail, from a certain perspective it is reasonable to bracket these sites with the settlements we would refer to as towns, and their impact on the local and regional economy was arguably comparable. Recent exploratory analysis of metal-detected data (Haldenby and Richards 2016; Hadley and Richards 2018; Richards and Haldenby 2018) suggests that more such sites remain to be investigated. The degree to which such sites were integrated with existing towns, rural settlements and their communities on the one hand, and Scandinavian and continental networks on the other, remains a question for the future.

A distinction is frequently drawn between the emporia and their later medieval successors, which are seen as the result of a more intensive urban development. The towns of England and the North Sea area from the later 9th, 10th and 11th centuries seem to have been organised around particular principles, with the actions of both the church and the secular elite being much more visible. It is clear that towns such as York and Lincoln, and the artisans and merchants who operated at them, were tied into wider networks of communication and movement, but these networks were different in character to those of the later 8th century (see Sindbæk 2012a).

The notable expansion of urbanisation across northern Europe after AD 1000 was underpinned by agricultural intensification and by concentration of resources through land-holding, maintained in particular by ecclesiastical institutions. In this situation, a key economic function of towns was to convert surplus from regional aristocratic land-holdings into goods and services. This added a greater element of consumer economy to the pre-existing commercial activities (cf. Blumin 1983). Before the full development of this pattern, the economic basis for urbanism was unquestionably smaller. But, importantly, it also needed to respond to a different geographical logic. This logic had significant implications for the character of the earlier centres, and in particular for the organisation of craft production.

The geographers Hohenberg and Lees (1985) have outlined how a pattern of ‘network urbanism’ can be said to supplement the more familiar mechanism of ‘central place’ urbanism. Network urbanism was sustained primarily by the need for stations for long-distance interactions, rather than by engagement with an immediate hinterland. The essence of network towns was long-distance travel. For this reason, they did not manifest as a large number of small centres, but as a small group of large, specialised sites, situated at the edge of travel-zones. Despite their rarity – or, in fact, because of it – the network towns of Viking-Age Scandinavia hosted specialised crafts as part of a wider range of distinctive activities. These activities were no less ‘urban’ in nature than those taking place in towns situated in other regions of early medieval Europe, where a denser pattern of urbanism could be sustained (Sindbæk 2007). Communication with these places was infrequent, but socially significant. While the majority of people in Viking-Age Scandinavia may never have visited a town, archaeology suggests that in each hamlet or community there were people in possession of objects that had been produced in or acquired through an urban settlement, or who were involved in producing things that were eventually to be marketed in such sites.

For craftspeople, the pattern of network urbanism will have held particular implications. It meant that imported materials – for example, non-ferrous metals and glass – could be expected to become regularly available in quantity only at these few centres. Sustained demand for special products was directed to the same places. Outside these centres, there was no comparable mechanism for focusing demand, in contrast to feudal economies in which great estates and ecclesiastic centres formed alternative foci of considerable strength. Network urbanism also implied that the nearest colleagues, as sources of learning, inspiration, apprenticeship or competition, might be in a place located hundreds of kilometres away in a different cultural setting. While maritime routes ensured steady communication across these distances, the cultural differences they bridged were significant. This situation may well have catalysed the emergence of a sense of identity from the sites that gave craft-workers their lives, livelihood and character: the birth of an urban identity. These circumstances all contributed to the creation of a pattern of specialised production that was essentially urban, though for rather different reasons than those invoked in the classic models used to explain medieval urbanisation. Specialised artisans crafted the networks that catalysed not only urbanism, but arguably the Viking Age itself.

Network approaches to crafts

The frameworks outlined above are essential in any effort to contextualise and articulate regional diversity and convergence in manufacturing practice. Identification of such patterning is no less straightforward, but is rendered more intelligible by recent advances in the study of crafted products and waste. Meanwhile, more theoretically informed approaches to experimental archaeology have the potential to significantly enhance the utility of such work to the study of workshop assemblages (see papers in Burke and Spencer-Wood 2018). The benefits of these developments are being felt in the study of Viking crafts (e.g. Ashby et al. 2015; Pedersen et al. 2016; Perry 2016; Hansen and Storemyr 2017; Croix et al. 2019b).

These methodological and technological breakthroughs have been presaged by developments at the conceptual level. Here, important groundwork has been done in the social sciences. From the 1990s onward, the influence of anthropologists (Ingold 1989; Lemonnier 1992; Pfaffenberger 1992) and sociologists (Pinch and Bijker 1987; Bijker and Law 1994) of a school that has come to be known as STS (Science and Technology Studies) began to be felt in some corners of archaeology and archaeological science (e.g. papers in Lemonnier 1993a, particularly Ingold 1993, Lemonnier 1993b, and van der Leeuw 1993; Sillar and Tite 2000). This scholarship drew attention as it recognised the significance of social setting: rather than seeing technology as following in the wake of economic development, or investing innovation with the power to actually drive cultural change, the body of theory referred to as SCOT (Social Construction of Technology) acknowledged the degree to which technological choices were conditioned by their social setting.

One easily applicable iteration of the approach was that laid out by Lemonnier (e.g. Lemonnier 1993b). The physical properties of particular materials do constrain the manufacturing techniques that may be applied, but they are also characterised by what has been termed in design theory ‘affordance’: the ability to open up opportunities for creative innovation and experiment (Gibson 1986; Norman 2013; see Conneller 2011 for an effective application of this idea in prehistoric archaeology). Lemonnier’s contribution is to point out that the choices available to an artisan are not restricted to those relating to the physical properties of materials, but rather include a whole suite of economic, social, political, even religious and ideological factors. Technological choice is not always about conscious decision-making, but Lemonnier shows that the operative sequence of manufacture is nonetheless conditioned by a whole range of concerns that go well beyond what a given raw material makes physically possible. Technology consists of the coming together of materials, tools, energy sources, techniques and sequence, any and all of which may be subject to beliefs, biases and experiences about the best or ‘correct’ way to do things. Tim Ingold (2000; 2013) has shown that we learn how to undertake tasks not simply by listening to and following instructions, but through the guided experience of living and working in a particular environment. Manufacturing traditions tend to be conservative, such that without external pressure to do otherwise, the default is to continue undertaking tasks in the way one was trained to do them. This helps to explain why crafts are often carried out in subtly different ways across time and space: choices were driven by far more than an aspiration to some sort of objectively determined efficiency.

The counterpoint to this idea is an explanation for why change does happen. What might lead to a particular innovation being widely adopted, rather than rejected? Again, STS may guide us here, as the close scrutiny of numerous contemporary and historical case studies demonstrates that the ultimate success or failure of an innovation has less to do with technical excellence than it does the particulars of the social, political and economic environment of the time (e.g. examples in Pinch and Bijker 1987; Ozaki and Dodgson 2010). Does the innovation fulfil a perceived need? Does it accomplish this in an efficient and affordable manner? Is it socially and culturally acceptable? Does it have strong advocates or competitors? Are there political, economic or ideological barriers to its widespread adoption? These factors combine in complex and unpredictable ways to determine the ultimate success or otherwise of an innovation.

The utility of these ideas from STS was recognised by artefact researchers with particular interests in technology (e.g. Sillar and Tite 2000), but the potential has only partly been exploited in archaeological contexts. Only in recent years have the tenets of the social constructivist approach been applied in medieval archaeology, and then largely