The nature of the feast: commensality and the politics of consumption in Viking Age and Early Medieval Northern Europe

ABSTRACT

In Early Medieval Northern Europe, food was more than mere sustenance. Rather, dietary choices were used to define and manipulate identity and shape power politics. Using the Norse Earldom of Orkney as a case study and commensality as an analytical framework, the authors explore how the archaeology of food, and in particular zooarchaeological evidence, can be used alongside near contemporary historical sources to better understand the political and social role of food, as well as the likely scale and impact of commensal activities on farming economies and environments in the Medieval North Atlantic. They argue that feasting and, by extension, the mechanisms by which preferentially consumed foodstuffs were grown, procured and processed, would have had a transformative impact on Norse society at diverse scales, from enabling individuals to participate in social negotiations to driving local and regional economies.

KEYWORDS:

• Commensality
• zooarchaeology
• Viking Age
• Early Medieval
• Scandinavia
• North Atlantic

Acknowledgments

Ingrid Mainland would like to acknowledge the support of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2014–15) for the collation of the data used in this article. We would also like to thank Historic Environment Scotland for post-excavation funding support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ingrid Mainland

Ingrid Mainland is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the UHI Archaeology Institute, University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research has two major themes: sustainability, using environmental data to address long-term trajectories of human–environment relations and societal resilience in North Atlantic island ecosystems; and palaeodiet, providing new insights into the impact of grazing animals on the landscapes of the North Atlantic islands, the impact of early Neolithic herding strategies in Southern Europe and pig domestication in Eurasia.

Colleen Batey

Colleen Batey is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow. For the last 40 years she has been involved in the archaeology of Orkney and Shetland with particular reference to the Viking age and Late Norse period of settlement. Her main focus of expertise lies in the study of material culture in the North Atlantic region for this period, particularly Iceland, and also for the integration of transdisciplinary evidence, ranging from the historical to environmental material.