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Introduction and Themes
This article investigates a group of Viking-Late
Norse coastal settlements in the Orkney Islands and,
to a lesser extent, Shetland Islands (Scotland, UK),
and looks at how the character and landscape setting
of these settlements might help us understand the social
organization of the Viking diaspora community.
By the 10th century, this community was well established
under the rule of the Orkney Earldom, a semiindependent
magnate territory with origins in the 9th
century and ruled by one or more peripatetic Earls.
The Earls owed allegiance—sometimes little more
than nominal—to Norway and/or Scotland at different
times; after 1194 AD and the Northern Isles’
involvement in a failed coup in Norway, the Earls’
independence was increasingly constrained. During
the Viking-Late Norse period, Orkney seems to have
maintained particularly strong trade and exchange
links with the west coast of Norway, as demonstrated
by grave-goods and artifacts, such as bone combs
and steatite vessels (e.g., Graham-Campbell and
Batey 1998:25–36), and supported by descriptions
in the Orkneyinga Saga of the sometimes difficult
personal links maintained by the Orkney Earls with
Norway (Palsson and Edwards 1978).
The Viking-Late Norse economy was a broadbased
and successful adaptation to the resources
and strategic location of the Orkney Islands. Crops
were grown (in particular, barley and oats) targeting
the light sandy soils found along the coasts,
and cattle and sheep kept, grazing on higher
ground or less-fertile coastal areas, with evidence
for at least some being sustained through winter on
seaweed, stripped turf, and wetland meadow hay.
The incomers had introduced flax and a comprehensive
exploitation of marine resources: shellfish
were gathered from rocky foreshores, and
seabirds and their eggs were harvested from cliffs.
Fish were not only caught close to the shore, but
also larger cod and saithe from deeper sea fishing
grounds, which required experienced crews and
larger boats. Seaweed was used for fodder, fertilizer,
and fuel. This much has been demonstrated
by evidence from sites on Mainland, Sanday, and
Westray in Orkney and from sites in Caithness
(e.g., Barrett 2012; Dockrill et al. 2010; Griffiths
and Harrison 2005, 2009, 2010, 2012; Griffiths et
al. 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009; Hunter et al. 2007).
The range of artifacts found at sites like Skaill
in Sandwick (Bay of Skaill); Skaill in Deerness,
and on the Bay of Birsay—such as Irish ring-pins
and Norwegian steatite—also highlights the importance
of trade and exchange (Buteux 1997;
Griffiths and Harrison 2011; Morris 1989, 1996),
while written sources document the continued involvement
of Viking war-bands in mercenary and
raiding activities into the 11th century (Owen 2005,
Palsson and Edwards 1978). Burial records in Orkney,
including the Scar boat burial, and the discovery
of the Skaill silver hoard (Ashmore 2003,
Graham-Campbell 1995, Owen and Dalland 1999)
also suggest a military “chiefly” social structure.
A society bound by complex and shifting ties
of duty, local loyalty, and reciprocity, requiring
leaders constantly “to mark and legitimise power
and status” (Jørgensen 2000:76; cf. Scandinavia:
Poulsen and Sindbæk 2011a, Skre 2011). The Orkney
economy fully exploited the resources of the
sea and land to sustain a rural population, but it
was also hierarchical, supporting the enterprises of
Settlement Landscapes in the North Atlantic:
The Northern Isles in Context, ca. 800–1150 AD
Jane Harrison*
Abstract - During the Viking-Late Norse period (ca. 800–1150 AD), a complex network of cultural connections were forged
between Scandinavia and areas of Viking settlement in the North Atlantic. This article focuses on how diaspora communities
settling in the Northern Isles of Scotland adapted familiar ways of constructing their settlement landscape to new environments.
Viking people in this period lived mostly on the coast and islands. Their dispersed settlements were often developed
on natural mounds or mounds created by earlier clusters of buildings. Throughout the Viking-Late Norse age, many such
mounds were built up in a tell-like layering of buildings, yards, and middens, visually dominating the surrounding landscape
and coastal waters. This article argues that the people building settlement mounds were thus monumentalizing claims to
local power. Mounds also physically represented social networks and adapted symbolism already associated with mounds
in Scandinavia.
Across the Sólundarhaf: Connections between Scotland and the Nordic World
Selected Papers from the Inaugural St. Magnus Conference 2011
Journal of the North Atlantic
*Department for Continuing Education - Archaeology, University of Oxford, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA, UK;
jane.harrison@conted.ox.ac.uk.
2013 Special Volume 4:129–147
J. Harrison
2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
130
minor magnates and Earls involved with networks
of trade, exchange, and aggression.
The known Viking-Late Norse settlement that
went with this economy in the Northern and Western
Isles and northeastern Scotland was located on the
coasts, and comprised dispersed clusters of buildings
and outhouses (Harrison 2007, Lamb 1980,
OSMR 2013, RCAHMS 2013). The principal buildings
were stone-built rectangular longhouses, a form
familiar in Scandinavia and across the Viking North
Atlantic (e.g., Hamerow 2002, Stummann Hansen
2003). Longhouse buildings tended to expand organically
with the addition of annexes and smaller
linked buildings. As will be discussed below, in the
Northern and Western Isles, these longhouse settlements
were built on either natural or archaeological
mounds, sited to visually dominate bays and sea
approaches. This attraction to mound locations has
been previously documented in the Western Isles
(Sharples 2005, 2012) and in Iceland (Vésteinsson
2010). In the Northern Isles, coastal settlements
were also surrounded by a range of archaeological
mounds from earlier periods. Mounds made by
people were unavoidable in the landscape, and the
Viking-Late Norse diaspora community apparently
chose to create their own variation on the mound
theme. But what was the significance of mounds?
In this article, I will consider the social and economic
implications of living on settlement mounds:
how local power relationships embedded in socioeconomic
networks might have been affirmed by the
nature of the settlement landscape. In this examination,
mounds are central. The remainder of the article
will look more closely at the nature of settlement in
Orkney, briefly at the Scandinavian background and
at the detail of settlement mounds. It will be argued
that considerable effort was invested in building
such settlements because they translated an effective
vocabulary of landscape symbolism from Scandinavia
and adapted it to the social imperatives of a
diaspora community. This symbolism was linked to
the assertion of local power and the mound-located
clusters of buildings played a key role in the social,
political, and economic organization of the most
valuable coastal areas.
Settlement in Orkney
As outlined above, Viking-Late Norse settlement
in Orkney is found almost exclusively on the coastal
margins of the islands, and all the excavated, dated
sites of size and significance are located on either the
windblown-sand bays of West and East Mainland
(Mainland is the largest island in the archipelago), or
of the islands of Sanday and Westray (including Papa
Westray), or on the fertile coastal strip of the island
of Rousay (Fig. 2; Graham-Campbell and Batey
1998:155–172, 180–200; Harrison 2007; OSMR
2013; RCAHMS 2013; Ritchie 1993). The same pattern
is found in the Western Isles where evidence of
Viking-Late Norse settlement is found exclusively
on the sandy coastal machair (Parker Pearson 2012).
Although the majority of Viking sites have been
found on the coast of the Shetland Isles, settlement
off the coastal margin has been discovered in excavations
at Unst (e.g., Bond 2007).
These coastal areas, such as along West mainland
in Orkney, were extremely attractive to Viking settlers,
providing sheltered locations well-situated to
following a broad-based economy exploiting land
and sea (Fig. 1). The sandy soils were easy to work,
and the combination of shore, lowland, and higher
ground provided an accessible range of environments.
Apart from the relatively few excavated sites,
settlement distribution has to an extent been inferred
from relevant Norse place-names (e.g., Thomson
2008b:57–74), but marine erosion of coastal
mounds in soft sand landscapes has also exposed
long stretches of layered settlement (Dawson 2003,
Lamb 1980, Steedman 1980). Some of these erosion
exposures have produced Viking-Late Norse finds,
for example around Ladykirk in Sanday, the Bay of
Skaill in Westray, and Newark in Deerness (OSMR
records 00144, 680, 682, 683, 02883). Viking-Late
Norse settlement sites have been excavated at Pool
on Sanday (Hunter et al. 2007); Tuquoy, Langskaill,
and Quoygrew on Westray (Barrett 2012, Moore and
Wilson 2003, Owen 1993); Westness and Swandro
on Rousay (Kaland 1995, NABO 2012); Marwick
Bay (Griffiths and Harrison 2009); Birsay Bay (Morris
1989, 1996; Ritchie 1977) including the mound
known as Saevar Howe (Hedges 1983); the Bay of
Skaill on West Mainland (Griffiths and Harrison
2005, 2009, 2010, 2012; Griffiths et al. 2006, 2007,
2008, 2009); and Skaill in Deerness, East Mainland
(Buteux 1997, Gelling 1984). All of these sites are
on the coast-edge, some have been partially eroded
by the sea, and several are known to be multi-period,
including Marwick Bay, Buckquoy in Birsay Bay,
Pool on Sanday, Swandro on Rousay, and Skaill in
Deerness. And all—except perhaps Westness, which
is not fully published—are sites built on natural eminences
and/or over earlier settlement, which were
subsequently built up further during the Viking-Late
Norse period by the superimposition of buildings,
yards, activity areas, and middens. (Some of this
build-up was achieved rapidly by infilling earlier
buildings, sometimes over 0.5 m at once.)
These settlement sites are “tell-like” (Lamb
1980), with deep stratigraphy and evidence for the
incorporation of earlier structures and deposits in
new building. In some cases, sequences begin with
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
pre-Viking elements, for example at Pool on Sanday
and at Buckquoy in Birsay (Ritchie 1977). But the
re-working also encompasses sequences of buildings
and yards within the Viking-Late Norse period, as at
the Bay of Skaill; Tuquoy and Quoygrew on Westray;
Marwick Bay, West Mainland, and probably Saevar
Howe on Birsay Bay. Building sequences beginning
in the Viking period were also initiated in prominent
locations or on existing natural mounds, for example
on the Bay of Skaill, West Mainland. This pattern
may also be true of some of the Sanday settlement
mounds such as Beafield (OSMR 003290). The resultant
mounds varied in size, but are usually over
20 m and up to 80 m in diameter and up to 4 m high.
Similar economically well-placed coastal settlements
on mounds or prominent locations—many
also on sand—are found elsewhere: in the Western
Isles (Crawford 1978; Sharples 2005, 2012); in NE
Scotland, for example at Freswick in Caithness (Batey
1987); and in Shetland, for example at Jarlshof,
Sandwick, Unst, and Old Scatness (Bigelow 1985;
Bond 1998, 2007; Dockrill et al. 2010; Hamilton
1956). Interestingly, Northern Norway is notable for
its so-called “farm mounds”, which have a similar
coastal distribution and multi-period character, although
so few have been extensively excavated that
drawing conclusions about their origins and dating is
problematic (Urbánczyk 1992:105–121). However,
several have a Viking-Late Norse sequence and,
unlike the excavated Orkney coast-side mounds,
many continue into the post-medieval period
(Bertelsen1979, 1984, 2011). Mounds on Sanday,
in particular, are a slightly different case. While
many—Pool and probably Crosskirk and Ladykirk
(OSMR records 00144, 00710)—end with a Late
Norse sequence, other mounds—like Beafield—are
still occupied by modern farms. This difference may
be partly because Sanday’s overwhelmingly sandy,
flat, and narrow arms of land offered even less potential
for settlement movement. It is interesting
that mound locations were also targeted by Viking
settlers in Iceland, although the imperatives shaping
Figure 1. location of the Orkney Islands and some sites mentioned in the text.
J. Harrison
2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
132
settlement in not-yet-settled landscapes must have
been different (Vésteinsson 2010). Despite this
pattern, settlement mounds have not been considered
as a related group across the North Atlantic
and, while there is only space in this article to focus
on Orkney, the author’s Ph.D. research ranges more
widely.
However, the settlement mounds were not the
only mounds in the coastal landscape. The sandy
bays and prime coastal strips in Orkney are also
rich in other, often uncharacterized archaeological
mounds. 946 mounds of any period or sort are
recorded for the entire archipelago; around 75% of
them are on Mainland, Westray/Papa Westray, Sanday,
and Rousay (OSMR 2013, RCAHMS 2013).
Unexcavated archaeological mounds are obviously
difficult to classify with confidence, especially the
larger ones, which may be multi-period or comprise
a structural sequence ending with re-use for
burial. But the vast majority of the smaller mounds
(up to about 8 m diameter) are interpreted as burial
mounds or enigmatic “burnt” mounds (633 OSMR
records—114 are larger, chambered tomb mounds).
Around a third of the total remains unclassified.
However, the smaller burial/burnt mound-types are
usually to be found on low, wet meadow lands in the
center of bays, on higher ground encircling the bays,
and even in more inland areas—a wider and slightly
different distribution than the larger settlement
mounds (Harrison 2007, Steedman 1980). Fifty-two
of the mounds recorded in the OSMR are characterized
as “settlement mounds”; the overwhelming
majority of those remain unexcavated and any
dating assayed on the basis of finds only, with four
having been interpreted as Viking-Late Norse. However,
these mounds are, like the excavated examples
above, larger and coastal, often located on the arms
of bays, and sited to dominate either the surrounding
landscape or the sea approach. (One of the excavated
sites is included in this group, but many were
assigned other categories; one of the Bay of Skaill
mounds is classified as a possible broch.) Thus, in
Viking-Late Norse Orkney, mounds of various sizes
and in a range of locations were a regularly encountered
landscape element for the diaspora community.
Furthermore, the known Viking mound settlements
had a landscape relationship with surrounding
mounds, even if only of topographical similarity.
Windblown sand-dominated Marwick Bay (West
Mainland) provides a good example of mound distribution
in a sandy bay: smaller mounds such as the
Know of Flaws occupy the lower central area, and
at least two burnt mounds are found on the higher
ground; larger mounds cluster on the fertile land in
the center, such as “The Castle” (the Castle name
appears to be only that, with no physical evidence
or memory of any castle structure) between the
farms of Langskaill and Netherskaill, and the known
settlement mound on the southern arm of the bay
(Fig. 2; Harrison 2007). The settlement site is being
eroded by the sea, and radiocarbon dates from recent
rescue excavation indicate that the mound was occupied
first in at least the Iron Age, with upper levels of
superimposed Viking-Late Norse structures, activity
areas, and midden (Griffiths and Harrison 2010;
Griffiths et al. 2009). This mound is particularly visible
when approached by sea; it is also next to what
appears from topographical and geophysical survey
to be an early chapel site. A similar pattern to that
in Marwick Bay is found for most of the excavated
sites: Viking settlement built over earlier settlement,
or on natural mounds, sharing a prime landscape
unit with earlier smaller mounds (and indeed often
with broch mounds, or—in the case of the Bay of
Skaill—the mounds covering prehistoric settlement
at Skara Brae) and having an association with
early or important ecclesiastical sites. This pattern
is true, for example, of the Birsay Bay sites, Skaill
in Deerness, the Bay of Skaill in West Mainland,
Tuquoy and Langskaill on Westray, and probably
Westness in Rousay. Some of the eroding coastal
mound sites with possible Viking-Late Norse dates
observed during RCAHMS surveys, in more recent
coastal surveys, and by the author may be included
in this pattern: for example, the Cross Kirk site in
Backaskail Bay; Sanday, which sits by a chapel site
and on a bay with a known broch site; Langskaill in
northwest Sanday; and Saviskaill in north Rousay
(Harrison 2007, Lamb 1980, OSMR records 00710,
00386, 00481).
These areas are not only predominantly on windblown
sand but the distribution is almost identical to
that of Skaill (ON skáli) and ~skaill names (Langskaill,
Backaskaill/Backaskail/Backiskaill, and
Saviskaill) (Fig. 3; Harrison 2007: Marwick 1952,
1970; Thomson 2008b:1–24). There are 41 OSMR
“~skaill” archaeological records; allowing for duplications
of records for different aspects of the same
site, all but five (in St. Andrew’s and Orphir in Mainland,
Eday, Gairsay, and Egilsay) are located within
one of the coastal areas identified above, rich in
mounds and Viking settlement archaeology (around
a quarter are directly linked to known Viking-Late
Norse archaeology). Of those five, the Langskaill
records on the tiny strategic island of Gairsay relate
in part to a supposed Viking-Late Norse stronghold,
and the two Egilsay Skaill records include a possible
Viking-Late Norse coastal mound. J. Storer Clouston
(1932) identified 33 Skaill sites in his History
of Orkney, including, interestingly, a long vanished
Langskaill in Birsay Bay and another on the Bay
of Skaill. All but four of the over 50 Skaill/~skaill
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
names surviving today share the same coastal/prime
location distribution. This coincident distribution of
coastal settlement mounds, significant Viking-Late
Norse sites, and Skaill names warrants investigation.
However, the meaning of the Skaill place name
is disputed. It has not been as closely studied by
place-name scholars in the specifically Orcadian
context as have other Norse names like, for example,
Houseby or ~staðir (e.g., Crawford 2006).
Skaill has two contrasting meanings in Old Norse:
one meaning used in Viking-Late Norse Orkney and
the other, more widely at least, in Scandinavia, and
in northern England (where more intensive studies
have been made; e.g., Fellows-Jensen 2000). Skaill
(ON skáli) can mean hut/shed, temporary dwelling
place or hall, or sleeping-hall (Cleasby et al. 1957;
Rygh 1898:74). In northern England, the meaning
hut/shed seems to apply (Fellows-Jensen 2000). In
Orkney, however, skáli seems to refer to a hall and
even a quite specific sort of hall. In the Orkneyinga
Saga, compiled in the late 12th and early 13th century
by an Icelandic historian, skáli is consistently
used with a high-status connection. The drinking
and feasting halls of the Earls themselves and their
leading henchmen such as Thorkel Fostri and Svein
Asleifsson are referred to using skáli or lángskali.
Thorkel entertained and assassinated Earl Einar Sigurdsson
in a skáli (Palsson and Edwards 1978:Ch.
16); Earl Erlend and his followers drank for several
days in another (ibid.:Ch. 94, see also Ch. 66). Raymond
Lamb notes that Skaill names were linked
to prime agricultural land and significant or head
farms where the parish church is found (for example
Skaill in Deerness, Bay of Skaill, and Rousay); yet
their medieval rental assessments are consistently
low (Lamb 1997, Marwick 1952, Thomson 2008b).
Lamb (1997:15) and Thomson (1995, 2008b) have
both suggested this may be because the skális, rather
than rich farms with high tax assessments, held public
functions within the local community; in other
words, the name referred to a function—to a “social
role”—linked with the leading figures in Viking-Late
Norse Orcadian society. More straightforwardly, it
would perhaps be surprising to find so many bays
in the Orkney Islands called “temporary shed” Bay!
Skaill names were linked to several of the excavated
Viking-Late Norse longhouse settlements: Skaill in
Deerness; Skaill in Sandwick (Bay of Skaill); Birsay
Bay; Westness and Swandro on Rousay; and Langskaill/
Tuquoy on Westray. Considering skáli place
names in conjunction with significant Viking-Late
Norse mound sites might, therefore, contribute to
Figure 2. Mounds on Marwick Bay, West Mainland, Orkney Islands.
J. Harrison
2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
134
an understanding of the social
structures shaping the
settlement landscape. As
explored further below, the
concurrence might imply
a network of focal social
points spread across the
main islands.
In the more detailed
study of settlement
mounds, the main case
study will be the structures
and features excavated
between 2005–2011
by the Birsay-Skaill Landscape
Archaeology Project
at the Bay of Skaill, West
Mainland (Fig. 4; Griffiths
and Harrison 2005, 2009,
2010, 2011, 2012; Griffiths
et al. 2006, 2007, 2008,
2009). The excavations
in wind-blown sand-drift
geology revealed a highstatus
Viking-Late Norse
longhouse over 26 m long
with associated outbuildings,
middens, and working
areas on the so-called East
Mound (≈65 m in diameter,
≈3 m high; Fig. 5),
and the more fragmentary
remains of another considerable
longhouse, with an
Figure 3. Orkney Islands sand-drift geology, Viking-Late Norse sites, and Skaill names. extensive and deep mid-
Figure 4. Castle of Snusgar mound and East mound on the Bay of Skaill, West Mainland, Orkney Islands, looking northwest.
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
excavated settlement mounds, like the one recorded
by the Project in Marwick Bay 5 km north, were
constructed of “tell-like” deep stratigraphy formed
through a complex process of infilling, rebuilding
over, and incorporating elements of existing stone
structures, activity areas, and middens. Viking-
Late Norse building began on pre-existing natural
mounds, probably also for the Snusgar mound over
earlier archaeology, and between 2–3 m in depth
of stratigraphy survives (Fig. 6; Griffiths and Harrison
2009, 2010, 2012 in particular). This deep
superimposition of structures and middens has
been revealed at all the sites in the coastal mound
group excavated sufficiently extensively: the Birsay
Bay sites; Skaill in Deerness, Pool on Sanday,
Langskaill and Tuquoy on Westray, Quoygrew on
Westray (Barrett 2012), and is also seen in coastal
mound erosion exposures, as well as in Shetland
sites including Jarlshof and Old Scatness (Dockrill
et al. 2010, Hamilton 1956), and the western Isles
site of Bornais (Sharples 2005, 2012).
Viking-Late Norse settlement sometimes encompassed
more than one mound, including at Skaill
in Deerness, Birsay Bay and probably Quoygrew
den sequence on the mound to the west, called the
Castle of Snusgar (≈75 m in diameter, over 3 m
high). A sequence of radio-carbon dates suggest
that the Snusgar mound may have been first occupied
in the Iron Age and that Viking-Late Norse
activity began in the 10th century, while the structures
on the East Mound may have originated in
the late 10th century, but the main focus of activity
was the 11th century (Griffiths and Harrison 2009,
2010). Both were abandoned in the twelfth century.
The mounds are a bare half kilometer from
an early church site—St. Peter’s Kirk—and are the
find-spot of Scotland’s largest Viking silver hoard
(later 10th century; Graham-Campbell 1995). Burial
mounds have been recorded in the center of the bay
and on higher ground. A Viking burial was identified
in the top of an otherwise uncharacterized
but possibly Viking-Late Norse settlement mound
subject to marine erosion on the south arm of the
bay (Morris 1985). This site lies next to the prehistoric
settlement of Skara Brae. The main farm has
a Skaill name like the bay itself; a broch is being
eroded from the headland of the north arm of the
bay (OSMR record 01256; Harrison 2007). The two
Figure 5. The longhouse on the East mound, Bay of Skaill looking southeast. Photograph © Birsay-Skaill Landscape Archaeology
Project.
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
136
in Westray, and on Marwick Bay. At Bornais, like
at the Bay of Skaill, the main focus of settlement
over the period may have shifted between mounds
(Sharples 2012). Thus, these sites were probably
more than single “farmsteads”, but rather a cluster
of ancillary buildings around a central hall or longhouse
or what have in other contexts been called
magnate farms (see below). The combination of
prime economic coastal location, longhouse-focused
settlement, early churches, and often a range of traded/
exchanged items suggests that these may have
been locally focal sites—“central places”—during
the Viking-Late Norse period.
These coastal landscapes will be now examined in
more detail; crucially, what was it about mounds that
motivated Viking-Late Norse people to construct and
reconstruct settlement on natural mounds, or mounds
including earlier structures? How did this interest in
mounds fit with economic and social arrangements?
To tackle these questions the following themes will
be considered: was the focus on settlement-mound
building in Orkney drawing on ideas about mounds
imported from Scandinavia, or was the emphasis
new; how might the mounds have reinforced local
social organization; and what links with the local environment
were revealed in the building of settlement
mounds? It will be argued that the crafting of mounds
was a purposeful process embedded in cultural ideas,
creating a settlement landscape that underpinned the
social organization of local communities. Not only
is the location and landscape context of these settlements
informative, but so is the manner in which the
increase of mound width and height was achieved and
the range of materials used in that process. Finally,
the significance of mounded coastal landscapes in the
development of Viking Age socio-economic structures
in Orkney will be discussed.
Mounds in Scandinavia
The social and economic character of coastal
Northern Norway in the Early Viking Age (ca.
800–1050 AD) provides perhaps the best analogy
with the Northern Isles after ca. 850 AD. Both were
rugged coastal economies with wide trading and
exchange links, remaining relatively politically independent
from developing polities to the south (and
east) until the 12th century (Skre 2008). Both were
governed by hierarchical magnate cultures characterized
by personal power relationships negotiated
in public assemblies (Poulsen and Sindbæk 2011a).
Perhaps significantly, the “farm mounds” of coastal
Figure 6. Structured midden on the Castle of Snusgar mound facing southeast.
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
largest Central Places, such as Uppåkra, continued as
stable power centers into the early Viking period, but
the tunanlegg declined in number (Larsson 2007).
Inger Storli notes that those tunanlegg sites that did
persist held particularly dominant landscape positions;
it was increasingly important for competing
elites to find mechanisms for validating power (Storli
2010:138–139). The hall also emerged as a central
motif in the physical expression of dominance:
“structures of power were related physically to the
great halls” (Poulsen and Sindbæk 2011b:27). Halls
may have provided a ritual space; certainly they hosted
assemblies that reinforced authority (Herschend
1993, Munch et al. 2003:265–272).
In Scandinavia, the narrative of authority was
often expressed using burial mounds—interpreted
as both territorial and social markers (Myhre 2000).
(Viking burial mounds on the Isle of Man were
described as the “land charters of illiterate men”
[Fletcher and Reilly 1988:97]). They helped define
farmstead boundaries before the Viking Age, but the
increase in burial mound numbers in Norway after
800 AD may have signalled increasing competition
for status as well as land rights (Jørgensen 2000:79).
The mounds represented the important dead and
made visible a farmer’s right to the surrounding
land’s resources, but they were also physical signals
of social position.
The symbolism associated with burial mounds
may have been complex and dynamic. Neil Price
(2010) re-examined evidence from the Kaupang
cemeteries in particular, to explore the impact of
the process of interring the dead. He argued that
elaborate mortuary ritual forged close associations
between ancestry and the mounded burial landscape.
Also highlighted were several burials in which later
graves were positioned—clearly deliberately—directly
over earlier inhumations. This positioning
fashioned clear links with earlier important people
and perhaps implied the handing down of position
and status. Eva Thäte surveyed the frequent re-use of
burial mounds in Viking Age Scandinavia; she also
noted briefly that, in a variation of the idiom, Norse
settlers in the Northern Isles used the houses of previous
inhabitants for burials (Thäte 2007:120–127).
This is a very interesting difference. We have
seen how prime Viking-Norse settlement in Orkney
was located close to prehistoric burial mounds.
However, Orcadian Viking burials made into existing
features have, so far, been found more often dug
into midden or earlier settlement, than into older
burial mounds, for example at Buckquoy, Saevar
Howe, Oxtro Broch, Bay of Skaill, and Sties of
Brough on Sanday (Harrison 2007; Hedges 1983;
Morris 1989, 1996; Ritchie 1977). This pattern
suggests that settlers, coming to a place already
Northern Norway also provide the closest comparison
to the settlement mounds of the Northern Isles
(Bertelsen 1979, etc.). These farm mounds—layers
of turf building material and midden—were under
construction from ca. 900 BC, but appear to take a
particularly significant part in landscape organization
from the Viking Age (Berglund 1997).
The predominantly coastal settlement in Norway
was dominated by physically isolated single
or clustered farmsteads economically linked with
other farms in their area, such as Lurekalven in
Nordhordland, western Norway, although villages
such as the classic site of Vorbasse had developed in
the more fertile areas of SW Norway and southern
Scandinavia (Magnus 2002:11–13, 21). At a regional
level, settlement was more complicated and varied
than this; for example in Northern Norway, first
tunanlegg assembly sites and then magnate farms
developed as local central places (Berglund 1997,
Grimm 2010, Storli 2006). Mounds of various kinds
were prominent in the Scandinavian landscape, and
this section focuses on this array of mounds in their
settlement context.
The nature of lordship before the medieval period
meant that sustaining power over people and
resources hinged on appropriate places—places
that made rights visible and at which public assemblies
could be held. Mounds played a particularly
significant part in the creation of such places
in Scandinavia from ca. 800 AD. (Although, as in
the Northern Isles, elevated locations and settlement
continuity were established ways of emphasizing
power before the Viking period.) The language of
mounds in the Viking Age landscape was complex,
so the following elements need to be considered
briefly: burial mounds, “Central Place” complexes
and other assembly sites, and the north Norwegian
“farm mounds”.
From the Migration period in Scandinavia (ca.
350–550 AD), power was gradually consolidating
into fewer hands, especially in the fertile southwest
and the resources-rich Lofoten Islands. During this
time, high-status courtyard or tunanlegg sites were
first constructed, especially in southwest and northern
Norway; these locations seemed to serve as local,
probably elite-managed, assembly sites (Grimm
2010). Southern Sweden (Skåne and the Mälaren
region) and southern Scandinavia saw the rise of
major “Central Place” complexes with large highstatus
halls in conspicuous locations, such as Gudme
in Lundeberg and Tissø in Zealand (Magnus 2002).
Then from the Early Viking Age, ca. 800 AD, with
more dynamic hierarchies and fiercer competition for
power, magnate farms with major hall buildings, such
as Borg in Lofoten, became more conspicuous in the
settlement landscape (Munch et al 2003). Some of the
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
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large feasting halls (for more on Central Place theory,
see Fabech and Ringtved 1999, Grimm 2010, Skre
2011). Such complexes were long-lived features in
the Scandinavian landscape creating dramatic venues
for socially vital assemblies for feasting, ritual,
gift-giving, and the offering of tax-in-kind. Stable
power centers in southern Scandinavia like Jelling,
Gudme, and Uppåkra were exceptionally rich
and enduring. Uppåkra, for example, spanned the
whole 1st millennium AD (Larsson 2007, Randsborg
2008). Yet they used the same language of mounds
as the locally significant “magnate farm” Central
Places of Early Viking Age northern Norway, such
as Borg in Lofoten (Munch et al. 2003).
All these Central Places deployed some or all
of a range of what might be termed mound-related
characteristics in their construction. Firstly and
obviously, large prestige halls were built in a prominent
location. Secondly, central halls usually stayed
in one place as structures around changed, but the
hall itself was also rebuilt several times on that
same spot. The largest longhouse among the farms
at Vorbasse, unlike the other houses, “rested in more
or less the same location through ten generations”
(Magnus 2002:12). The large hall at Lejre, Sjæland
“had been built and rebuilt on the same spot over
centuries”, as had that at Borg in Lofoten; and at
Uppåkra, the hall had been built and rebuilt in seven
phases (Larsson 2007, Munch et al. 2003, Poulsen
and Sindbæk 2011b). Thirdly, many mound halls
shared the landscape with existing mounds, usually
burial mounds, for example at Borg in Lofoten and
other northern Central Places like Tjøtta in Nordland
and Bjarkøy in Troms (Storli 2010). Then the
halls were often purposefully built over older significant
features; the high-status 8th–10th century
AD hall at Huseby in Skiringssal was built over
deliberately flattened barrows, and the first hall at
Borg in Lofoten was built over two early Iron Age
burials (Munch et al. 2003, Skre 2007). Finally, the
construction of major buildings in visually dominant
mound locations demanded extra construction work.
The exposed positions were not necessarily the most
topographically sensible locations for, or the easiest
places on which to raise, substantial longhouses.
When first hall at Borg in Lofoten was re-fashioned
into a huge longhouse 82 m long, it seemed imperative
to whoever commissioned the building not only
to retain the elevated location, and to emphasize it
by directly superimposing one hall on another, but
to stay on precisely the same spot. This construction
involved considerable preparation: a substantial
rubble platform had to be laid to keep the heart of the
longer building exactly over that of the preceding
hall (Munch et al. 2003). At Huseby in Skiringssal,
only the preparation of a substantial soil and stone
occupied by others, considered the appropriation of
non-burial-related landscape features more relevant
to establishing authority. As most Pictish burials
on Orkney seem to have been only stone-marked,
or covered with small cairns, the ancestors under
earlier prehistoric mounds belonged to a distant and
non-contiguous period (Ashmore 2003, Graham-
Campbell and Batey 1998). Perhaps for the incomers,
using midden mounds, representing fertility and
abundance, or recent structures for burials made a
more relevant gesture. Thus, rather than superimposing
graves to recall the significant dead, they evoked
enduring power by layering settlement. In Orkney,
therefore, the narrative of success was written with
settlement mounds.
Recent evidence from a burial mound site in Norway
highlights the possible significance of investigating
the composition and detail of mound stratigraphy.
Terje Gansum and Terje Oestigaard (2004)
studied the deep stratigraphy of two huge supposed
burial mounds at Haugar in Tønsberg. The mounds
were found to be huge cenotaphs, despite being
claimed by13th-century historian Snorri Sturluson
as the burial mounds of the sons of Harald Finehair
(ca. 860–940 AD), the first king to claim sovereignty
over “all” Norway. The mounds’ creation in the 9th
century had involved the manufacture, transportation,
and spreading of vast quantities of charcoal,
along with turf and soils, apparently from different
parts of Tønsberg. Considerable organizational
power must have been exercised to bring together
people from across the area to build these imposing
status-symbols. The mound itself, without a burial,
seems to have been enough. Mounds and the process
of building mounds were thus more broadly associated
with the signalling of local power.
The mounds were also connected with formal
assemblies—the gatherings of leaders and retainers
for feasting, decision-making, and affirmation
of authority. Such events were enshrined in early
Norse law as regional law-giving and administrative
thing assemblies, where mounds provided both
focal points and physical references to landscape
history (Sanmark and Semple 2010). But, before
the process was formalized, similar gatherings must
have been held, and at other suitable locations such
as the tunanlegg sites and central longhouses. Interestingly,
the tunanlegg also incorporated small
constructed mounds into their layout, mounds often
built over earlier features (Grimm 2010:ch. 4).
There was an increasingly nuanced association between
mounds and the affirmation of leadership in a
public context, and this association was a persistent
landscape metaphor.
This metaphor continues to be compelling when
considering Central Place complexes built around
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building platform on the summit ensured the conspicuous
hall could dominate the landscape around.
Similarly, the visually dominant halls of Uppåkra in
Scania were raised on preparatory house platforms
(Larsson 2007).
Many of these characteristics can be discovered
in “lesser” Central Places, that is relatively minor
magnate farms providing central functions for surrounding
communities. For example, an otherwise
unexceptional building in Alby in Sweden, interpreted
as a small feasting venue, was raised on a considerable
stone terrace to ensure visual dominance
(Hjulström et al. 2008). The metaphor translated
down the social scale as a way of demonstrating ever
more local significance.
Farm mounds are an interesting case. No convincing
overall practical argument for the creation
of these accumulations of turf building material
and midden has been forthcoming (although
Mook and Bertelsen [2007] suggest that living on
mounds rich in gradually decaying material helped
raise the temperature inside the farm [see also Urbánczyk
1992:105–121]). A significant number of
these mounds originate in the Late Norse period
(ca. 1100 AD), and it is perhaps in this period that
farm mounds stood out as one of the few landscape
features marking local (non-religious) authority
(Berglund 1997). Imposing burial mounds were a
thing of the past in Christian Norway, as were chiefly
feasting halls. However, a powerful local farmer
could still use a settlement mound to proclaim the
time-depth of rights held over land, and the family’s
dominance of the immediately surrounding area.
Viking settlers therefore took a rich mound-related
landscape vocabulary into the Orcadian context.
They were familiar with landscapes in which visually
dominant mounds were associated with the physical
expression of rights and status. Earlier features
were sometimes subsumed into mounds, or mounds
re-used—in any case, earlier monuments were widely
referenced by the form. Halls and mounds were
a particularly powerful combination, with the main
building often staying in a precisely fixed location
despite being frequently reconstructed. The stability
of location and the constructing of layers perhaps
suggested the accumulation of a history of authority.
Mounds and mound-related buildings seemed to take
a focal role: whether in the process of construction,
or in what they represented, or in what transpired in
the buildings.
The Orcadian Mounds
What happened, then, as Viking leaders and settlers
negotiated, or otherwise acquired, land rights
and places to live and work in already well-settled
Orkney? The next sections look at the settlement
landscape in more detail to assess which elements
of the mound “vocabulary” suggested above can be
discerned in the Orcadian context.
As we have seen, there were many constructed
mounds in the pre-Viking settlement landscape of
Orkney, especially in the sandy bays predominantly
selected by the incomers. In the Western Isles, the
machair was also rich in earlier archaeological
mounds (Sharples 2012). Just as in Marwick Bay
and at the Bay of Skaill (see above; Griffiths and
Harrison 2012, Griffiths et al. 2009), the Viking-
Norse settlement at Skaill in Deerness shares the bay
with a broch mound, earlier settlement mounds, and
burnt mounds (Buteux 1997), the landscape at Westness
(Skaill) on Rousay is scattered with mounds
and reminders of past settlement (Kaland 1995), and
coastal mounds at Northskaill in northwest Sanday
share the area with prehistoric mounds (Harrison
2007, Owen and Dalland 1999).
Arriving in this already structured and well-exploited
landscape, the first Viking settlers on Orkney
needed to exercise all possible means to legitimize
their claims to control land and to reinforce their
growing cultural dominance. Shaping the landscape
was one means, and might be done deliberately and
also achieved incidentally as the result of actions
integral to everyday life. The latter activity was routine
and unexceptional, but a vital part of living in
and exploiting environments. It is argued that landscapes
thus became “infused with meaning” (Parker
Pearson 1999:139). They came to bear the changing
imprint of a creative and essentially material
relationship between people and their surroundings,
particularly potent in a pre-Modern context (Thomas
2007). Places—or spaces with association and history—
were and are “produced by people” in many
different ways (Giddens 1984; Thomas 1999:83–89,
2012). Ordinary subsistence routines—fishing,
cooking, and cleaning out the byre—contributed to
that process, as much as grander schemes like constructing
a longhouse. The concept of habitus—the
significance of habitual, everyday actions—suggests
that routine activities wove social norms into
the physical fabric (Bourdieu 1977). Nor was that
engagement solely practical, even in the challenging
environments Viking-Norse people encountered in
Orkney or Northern Norway. Landscapes offer—afford—
both practical and symbolic potential (Gibson
1977). So a burial mound, physically marking a
boundary, also reminded passers-by of ancestral
rights over land; a longhouse provided dignified
shelter and reminded locals of the outcomes of
the important meetings it hosted. Tim Ingold has
developed these ideas with a more kinetic analysis
of the constantly formative, reflexive, and material
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
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relationship built over time between people and their
places—observing the movements of everyday practice
that become enmeshed in the landscape (e.g.,
Ingold 1993:52–58). These ideas of process and the
role of routine tasks in creating visually informative,
socially significant landscapes are of particular relevance
in this analysis, as will be discussed further
in the next section.
How did the diaspora community “produce”
their landscapes? In the already mound-rich coastal
areas, many of the Viking-Norse longhouse settlements
were built literally over and into the mounds
of Pictish/Iron Age, and earlier, dwellings: on the
Bay of Skaill, at Skaill in Deerness, and at sites on
Birsay Bay such as at Pool on Sanday, at Langskaill
on Westray, and on Marwick Bay. Building over
and incorporating existing structures sent an unambiguous
and unsubtle message: the past of the area
was co-opted and the land takeover demonstrated
beyond doubt. An immediate link was created
with previous important people, and in referencing
mounds the arrivistes appropriated landscape
symbolism familiar to their own communities and
indigenous groups. Those with social ambitions
continued the theme, settled in a prime location on
a visually dominant mound, whether natural or created
by earlier settlement, and built a hall—perhaps
a skáli. Then succeeding generations increased the
mound, a process that wrote a narrative of dominance
into the landscape.
The exceptional aspect of this narrative in Orkney
is the extent to which the focus was on augmenting
settlement mounds, during the later 10th and
11th centuries in particular. This process was reliant
on organic material and midden-type deposits and
thus analogous to the methods used to create Norwegian
farm mounds. The known Viking-Late Norse
settlement was dominated by these mound forms,
and therefore by a particular approach to building,
until the marked 12th-century change in the settlement
pattern (see below). (The question of where
any obviously lower status settlement was located
in the Northern Isles is interesting and problematic.
Very few settlements less notable for trade/exchange
goods, size, or location have been discovered, except
perhaps Quoys in Deerness [Steedman 1980]
and possibly Beachview in Birsay Bay [Morris
1996]. Even Quoygrew in Westray, characterized as
wealthy but perhaps not high status, remains debatable,
as the main building may still lie unexcavated
within one of the mounds [Barrett 2012]. It may be
that many of the less wealthy were housed within the
longhouse clusters, and that any other less substantial
buildings are either still beneath occupied buildings—
now mostly found on then less-favored land,
higher up around the bays—or that archaeologists
have yet to find or recognize a different category of
settlement less vulnerable to coastal erosion. However,
it is also probably the case that the mound settlements,
although dominant in their area, were not
the most socially elevated sites of this period; those
were perhaps the “chiefly citadels” on the Brough of
Deerness [Barrett and Slater 2009] and Brough of
Birsay and the Bu sites like Orphir on Mainland.)
The settled mounds undoubtedly increased in
size—both widened and were built higher—as
Viking-Late Norse buildings, yards, and middens
were superimposed. To achieve this in virtually treeless
Orkney and Shetland, local building practices
were adopted, using stone and some turf rather than
wood, construction materials that were also familiar
to settlers from western and in particular northern
Norway. The Rousay flagstone formations of the
Orkney Islands and the abundant beach cobbles
provided useful and plentiful stone for building. But
the settlement form was distinctive, as rectilinear
longhouses took over from curvilinear cells (Buteux
1997, Ritchie 1977). Just as elements of local
construction and economic practice were amalgamated
with imported practices, the representational
landscape language of mounds seems to have been
adapted. The focus was on settlement and on the
process of building mounds that incorporated stonebuilt
hall-longhouses, their ancillary buildings, and
middens. The remainder of the article explores how
the translated idiom acquired substance. The landscape
social context was not dissimilar to western
Norway, although more generally fertile, but it was
for the Vikings recently settled, not ancestral, land.
The Mounding Process:
Building a Settlement Mound
This section will study the archaeological detail
of settlement mounds to reveal the effort and
deliberation involved in repeated rebuilding on
such sites (Harrison 2007). These mounds were not
usually in places so space-limited that direct superimposition
was the only option, nor were stone
and turf, the basic building materials for walls and
floors, in short supply or difficult to access. These
facts seem to suggest that building over was purposeful.
This method also necessitated the use of
the highly organic materials produced by agriculture
and fishing and therefore relied on the farmers’
understanding of such products’ properties. The
majority of the Viking-Norse settlement mounds in
Orkney are built in pure windblown-shell sand-drift
geology (including the Bay of Skaill, Marwick Bay,
and Birsay Bay sites; Skaill in Deerness; the Sanday
sites; and Tuquoy and Langskaill in Westray).
The drifting and rapid piling of sand itself added
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
were only partially demolished so their remnants
could be incorporated into the foundations of higherlaid
surfaces. Other surfaces around and between
structures were consolidated with organic middenmaterial
or levelled through selective building up.
Such efforts on a sand-rich mound would have been
impossible without the supplementing and stabilizing
of loose sand with a range of organic material.
Various combinations of ash, byre cleanings (principally
dung, hay, and turf), curated domestic midden
(waste from bait and food preparation and cooking)
and old turf were used—spread over and mixed with
sandy surfaces. The following sequence illustrates
these techniques.
On the East Mound, Bay of Skaill, the earliest
datable excavated structure, ancillary to the longhouse,
was a small north–south building possibly in
use in the late 10th century. A stretch of wall belonging
to that structure was then incorporated into the
walling of a new and differently aligned building.
The original floor of the second building was a third
of a meter higher, laid on old floors and a levelling
infill of midden-rich sand. Then that building was
filled with nearly a meter depth of more organic
sand to prepare for a further realignment of the
out-building. An original wall had to be re-faced
to allow its upper courses to be re-used as foundations.
Later again, when the building was shortened
to the west, this wall was lowered and, along with
the accumulated infill, capped with clay and flags
to form a passage-way. This process was revealed
on excavation as an archaeological “layer-cake”
comprising structural stone and more or less sandy
deposits augmented with decayed turf and peat, ash,
byre cleanings, and domestic rubbish (Griffiths and
Harrison 2010).
A metal-working area was in use to the west of
that out-building during the middle period of its
history. As a result of all the alterations to the structure,
the thick sand-interleaved sequence of metalworking
floors was discovered at a level well above
the original, capped eastern wall, but sealed below
the bottom courses of the western wall of the final
structure. These changes seemed to have happened
(along with at least one further reconfiguration)
over less than a century and within an area less than
8 m2. The building was abandoned sometime in the
12th century. Space available for expansion was not
used. The archaeological evidence suggests it was
as much work to superimpose structures as it would
have been to prepare new foundations on virgin
windblown sand.
Long trenches excavated down the flanks of
both the East and Snusgar mounds revealed how
spreads of sand with midden material and rich midden
together also provided bulk for the mounds
to the mounds’ bulk. But flying in the face of the
biblical injunction on wise places to build also demanded
a particular approach to construction. Pure
windblown sand is freely moving under pressure
and in the wind so, before any walls were built or
flags lain, pure sand had to be stabilized (see Crawford’s
1978 lament on the difficulties of containing
pure sand when excavating). As structures, yards,
drains, and middens were superimposed in sand
mounds, surfaces had to be prepared with organic
additions. Only by repeating this process as sand
drifted, could stone wall foundations be reconfigured
and re-aligned, or various surfaces re-used and
built over. Two brief case studies will illustrate the
techniques required by the process of concentrating
on building over rather than out or anew. These are,
however, methods that can be detected in reports
on similar sites already published, recorded in the
local Sites and Monuments Records, or visible in
eroding sections across the Northern Isles (Harrison
2007).
On the East mound and the Castle of Snusgar
mound in the Bay of Skaill, careful preparation and
particular construction approaches were required to
re-build on one location, sometimes on pure sand,
often to exploit existing features. Those techniques
included: spreading clay layers or organic midden
material to create firm surfaces on pure or mainly
sand layers; digging wall foundations down into
older, settled middens, or into areas already consolidated
with organic material (yards for example);
infilling older buildings, quite often in one, or a
rapid series of events, to create a platform for a new
building; and re-aligning and re-facing walls, or
re-using stretches of partially buried walls to build
annexes or differently configured structures (Figs.
5, 6). Floors accumulated rapidly within buildings,
even without deliberate in-filling; flagged floors
were usually repaired by adding a second or more
layer of slabs. Sand blows would adhere to organicrich
yards, middens and surfaces adding, more
gradually, to the bulk of the mound and requiring
the laying down of further often quite thick layers
of stabilizing midden-enriched sand or turf. Storage
middens themselves were carefully managed, and
their accumulation also added bulk and structure
(see below) to mounds. All these techniques created
deep mound stratigraphy. The East Mound at the Bay
of Skaill, Sandwick developed well over 2 m of extra
height in what may have been little more than three
generations (radiocarbon dates for the site are still
undergoing final Bayesian analysis).
On that East Mound, in the main longhouse and
the smaller buildings linked to it in the south, some
lengths of walls were strengthened, shored, or realigned
to allow re-building; other redundant walls
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2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
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Did this work with midden-type material also in any
way strengthen the ideological construction of the
settlement mounds?
This much-moved and used “rubbish” resulted
from daily agricultural, fishing, and domestic activities
and therefore encapsulated the rhythms and actions
of everyday life. Economic activity was essential
to the building program as well as to sustenance;
more midden material enabled more, and more
effective, building, and thus economic success was
reflected in the development of mound settlements.
The targeted re-use of such material also demonstrated
the fisher-farmers’ awareness of the full potential
of agricultural and domestic by-products. In
prehistoric archaeology, it has been argued that the
accumulation and re-use of middens helped create
a strong sense of place: “a visual reminder of past
presence and activity” (Lamdin-Whymark 2008:57,
Thomas 2012). Joshua Pollard (2001) has suggested
that the residues from settlement activity deposited
in Neolithic pits and on large midden accumulations
had gained potency from their involvement in social,
and indeed economic, life. This enhanced significance
may have been particularly true of the remains
of feasting (McOmish 1996). The use of midden
material in building mounds may have had similar
resonances in the Viking-Late Norse period—connecting
control over land, and people’s use of that
land, with the development of the settlements.
There are certainly examples of the careful management
of middens, as stores of material for other
purposes as well as “terracing” or structural midden
spreads. At the Bay of Skaill sites, several accumulations
of ash were found carefully clay-capped to secure
the material (one of these also had spade marks
showing where material had been removed for
redeposition). At Pool, one area of midden was even
centrally located in the settlement and surrounded by
a wall (Hunter et al. 1993, 2007). Thus organic-rich
material was not only re-used immediately, but also
stored for later use to stabilize and build-up surfaces,
and terraced to help create the curves of the mounds.
Settlement mounds were visual representations of
past activity in the surrounding landscape, and their
bulk demonstrated the inhabitants’ control over local
economic resources. However, perhaps more specifically
for mounds associated with halls, the plentiful
midden used in their construction proclaimed not
only ownership of plenty of stock and successful
fishing, farming, and gathering, but also generous
feasting and control over local labor. The conspicuous
curves of growing sand mounds intimated success
and social dominance.
The regular, perhaps generational, remodelling
of buildings may also have been significant,
to be compared perhaps with superimposed graves
beyond the buildings. The deep stratigraphy of the
Snusgar mound in particular showed how different
combinations of material were laid at different
times and how layers were often contained using
rough curves of stone, clearly not paths, which followed
the mounds’ contours (Fig. 6; Griffiths and
Harrison 2009).
These same layering techniques and use of organic
material are found at Pool on Sanday, as well
as at Old Scatness in Shetland (Dockrill et al. 2010),
Bornais in South Uist (Sharples 2005), Tuquoy and
Langskaill in Westray, and Skaill in Deerness. Pool,
for example, was a multi-period mound originating
in the Neolithic, within which the layering of
Viking structures over Iron Age buildings and the
continued superimposition of buildings into the
late Norse period is recorded (Hunter et al. 2007).
Midden-rich material was spread to create working
surfaces, as thick foundations for flagging and site
levelling before re-structuring. The incorporation
of idiosyncratic relict walling is recorded, often
conditioned partly by what went before, and it is
suggested that “the location itself was somehow
more important than the design” (ibid.:112). Midden
spreads were also carefully structured as at the Bay
of Skaill. The excavators of Pool term such extensive
midden deposits retained by low arced walling
“terraced” midden. Again at Pool, as at most of the
excavated sites, there seems to have been sufficient
space to spread settlement. Thus, building sequences
on coastal settlement mounds concentrated effort
on referencing and incorporating older buildings.
Structural alterations seem to have been aimed at
achieving change while maintaining a very particular
location in a visually dominant position.
Midden accumulations were crucial to this
layering-up of mounds. Some midden will have
been used to fertilize infields (and small kitchen
gardens like the one found on the Castle of Snusgar
mound). But some must have been stored for subsequent
use in building, and material otherwise found
in middens was also used directly from the source
(byre or hearth, etc.)—to consolidate surfaces for
example, or as managed spreads to enhance and firm
the slopes of the mound itself. As buildings were
remodelled to incorporate elements of the preceding
one, ash (especially seaweed and peat ash), turf,
domestic midden and byre waste were all essential
to construction. Different recipes were used according
to location: ash from cooking hearths was
used to create firm working surfaces, midden and
byre cleanings were applied to outside surfaces and
wall cores, while old turf was used to back stone
wall facings and to level up areas. As Hunter et al.
(2007:142) observed, all this necessitated a “complex
cycle of deposition, removal and redeposition” .
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coincidence of skáli—feasting-hall—place names
with the areas dominated by significant Viking-
Late Norse mound sites might provide further clues
to the social organization of areas around Skaill in
Deerness, the Bay of Skaill, the Skaills on Rousay,
Langskaill on Westray, and the ~skaill sites on Sanday
and in Marwick Bay.
The halls and their cluster of buildings, perhaps
encompassing more than one mound, may have acted
as focal locations for their areas in two different
but linked ways: as places where passing, powerful
men stopped to exercise their authority and largesse,
but also central places regulating the activities of
the local population. The skáli sites are linked in the
Orkneyinga Saga with the veizla system, the reciprocal
arrangements through which peripatetic Earls
and important men demanded formal hospitality, or
veizla, from supporters, who were in return offered
protection, gifts, and the chance of advancement
(Lamb 1997:14–15, Thomson 2008b:16–17). There
are references in the Orkneyinga Saga to important
political players being á veizlu in Skaill locations
during the negotiation of alliances and attempts to
heal quarrels (e.g., Palsson and Edwards 1978:ch.
16 dealing with Earl Einar and Skaill in Deerness,
chs 65 and 74 dealing with Earl Paul Håkonsson and
Skaill, Rousay). This veizla system would operate
through a network of linked sites across the cultural
landscape of the Orkney Earldom. At Snusgar, the
size of the hall—at over 26 m, one of the longest in
the Orkney Isles—allowed for a considerable gathering
to feast, and the outbuildings’ capacity provided
for ample storage (while, interestingly, the barn-end
of the longhouse allowed for very few animals to be
quartered; the emphasis was on storage and working
areas). There was a need in the settlement structure
of Orkney to have focal social points—to have halls
associated with formal hospitality and the activities
and decisions of powerful groups.
So, on the one hand, skális were places that
important people passed through, stages for public
feasting where tribute-in-kind could be collected
and consumed. On the other hand, the local economy
and society also needed a focus for local collaboration.
Although the settlement pattern was dominated
by scattered farmsteads, aspects of the broad-based
economy demanded that groups co-operated—in
deep-sea fishing, harvesting, building, maintaining
the health of flocks and herds, and making decisions
about land-use and common land. The skáli-type
halls on mounds could have acted as local central
places, gathering points where local decision-making
meshed with the demands of the over-arching
Earldom system. For the farmers, fighters, and fisherman
of Bay of Skaill must surely have also had to
co-operate to meet the demands of the veizla system.
and re-use of burial mounds in Scandinavia. All
the alterations made to main longhouse buildings
seemed to have remained obvious. There was little
if any attempt to disguise the process of accretion.
At the Bay of Skaill sites, at Pool on Sanday, and at
sites in Birsay Bay—and clearly visible in plans of
Jarlshof—reconfigured stretches of walls are often
built in a different way, of different widths and on
noticeably different alignments. Both Hunter et al.
(2007) and Niall Sharples (2005) remarked on the
piecemeal and varied walls at Pool and Bornais,
respectively. In the long East-mound longhouse,
changes in coursing and alignment are clear; the
contrasts seem deliberate. Perhaps the visibility of
change helped remind those using the buildings of
settlement longevity and enduring local dominance,
despite inevitable personal leadership change.
Thus, elements of the landscape vocabulary of
mounds in Orkney reflected those discussed for
Scandinavia. But the emphasis was much more
on the settlement mound and its cluster of buildings.
The main building stayed in a precisely fixed
location while being frequently reconstructed, relying
on the extensive and particular use of organic
material to achieve that result. Buildings, including
previous structures, and what happened in them and
around them were being referenced. The next section
looks at the socio-political context and argues
that social position in the landscape was monumentalized
in the building process.
Mounds and the Socio-political Landscape
What role might have been played in the development
of Viking Age socio-political structures in Orkney,
by the crafting of mounded coastal settlements?
Here mound symbolism is examined in the context of
the developing and, by the early 10th century, established
Orkney Earldom. The Earldom was a hierarchical
society and, at least until the 12th century, structured
by personal contacts maintained by a peripatetic
leadership through formalized hospitality.
The first section discussed the coincident distribution
of the prime coastal mounded landscapes
so environmentally attractive to Viking-Norse
settlers, with Skaill—ON skáli—or ~skaill place
names. This place-name evidence can contribute
to a reconstruction of how power relationships
in the Earldom might have been organized. Place
names are of course difficult to work with: their
age is uncertain, their locations shift, they change
in meaning, and they disappear. Two disappeared
Langskaills have already been noted (and see Barrett
[2012:27–28] regarding historical changes in
the “Quoygrew” settlement). Against this cautionary
background, I would only suggest that the
J. Harrison
2013 Journal of the North Atlantic Special Volume 4
144
In the Orkneyinga Saga, the farmers are repeatedly
referred to as a group who are both put upon and together
wield a degree of power, such as in Thorkel’s
negotiations with Earl Einar (Palsson and Edwards
1978:ch. 14). This degree of cooperation suggests
groups who would have needed places to meet.
Power centers on the Brough of Deerness and the
Brough of Birsay may have been the pinnacle of the
Earldom settlement pattern, but the mound settlements
seemed to have articulated the wider social
landscape of the coast.
Conclusion
Thus, skáli-places and mounds played an important
role within the settlement organization of
the Viking-Late Norse Orkney Islands. The mounds
were social reference points in the landscape as well
as geographic ones. They were visually dominant
and played a “central place” role. They referenced
earlier Viking and pre-Viking settlement, as well
as other mound forms, creating an association
with land rights and power; they also represented
the linkage of daily activity across the landscape
to veizla-related feasting and assembly. They thus
reflected and reinforced the social organization of
the Earldom during the period from perhaps the
early 10th century into the 12th century. The emphasis
was on mound-located settlement and the process of
building mounds. In Norway, the language was more
diverse and, although some high-status settlement
mounds took similar roles in this period and in particular
in Northern Norway, burial mounds remained
potent landscape symbols in the negotiation of local
power relationships into the 11th century.
In Orkney, high-status Viking-Norse mound
settlements were therefore part of the symbolism
underpinning Earldom power structures. It was a
settlement landscape appropriate to that culture.
Economy, social organization, and long-rooted but
evolving symbolism had constructed a landscape
which reflected and reinforced social arrangements.
In the 12th century, the settlement landscape began
to change. Many of the mound settlements were
abandoned into the 12th century or, like Tuquoy on
Westray and Skaill in Deerness, seemed to change
character. Most settlement moved off high-maintenance
mounds and the sand, onto higher ground
around the bays: this shift of settlement was less
obvious only on predominantly flat and sandy Sanday,
where there were few alternative locations (Davidson
et al. 1983, 1986). Some of the few coastal
sites that continued became lower-status specialized
sites, for example, in fishing as at St. Boniface on
Papa Westray (Lowe 1998) and perhaps Quoygrew
on Westray. One or two were reconstructed as minor
“castle sites”, as at Westness on Rousay and probably
Skaill in Deerness—small rectangular or square
buildings with a tower (Grieve 1999). The same
12th-century abandonment of the sand coastal sites is
seen in the Western Isles (Parker Pearson 2012). The
authority of the Earls declined after the 1194 battle
of Florvåg, and their opportunities for mercenary
and trading activity diminished. The administrative
systems of Latinate Christian kingship began to permeate
the Earldom; the economy became more specialized.
Much of the settlement of authority moved
to the proto-urban center of Kirkwall on Mainland.
Thus, the veizla system no longer dominated the
relationship between magnates and the local communities.
The symbolism of the settlement mounds
lost social relevance, and mound building no longer
seemed worth the effort.
It is at this time, when coastal settlement mounds
were being abandoned in the Northern and Western
Isles, that the farm mounds of northern Norway
show a flourishing and new dominance of the landscape.
Perhaps across the network of cultural connections
linking the Northern Isles and Scandinavia,
the symbolism of settlement mounds had found a
renewed currency in the local power structures of
later Viking northern Norway.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to David Griffiths, the Project Director
of the Birsay-Skaill Landscape Archaeology Project, for
which I have been privileged to be Assistant Director and
Excavation Supervisor, and to Carol and Bruce Hallenbeck,
who have so generously provided financial support
for my DPhil at the University of Oxford. Thanks also
to all the experts, supervisors, students, and volunteers
who have joined us on the Project. You have been a great
pleasure to work with. I would like to thank in particular:
Diane Alldritt and Ingrid Mainland; Kat Hamilton, Vix
Hughes, and Andy Beverton; Sue Hanshaw and Fay Pendell;
and, of course, Pauline, Freddie, and Michael Brass,
the wonderful landowners. I am also very grateful for
the encouragement and comments of James Barrett and
Alex Sanmark in preparing the article and for the help, in
particular on research trips, of Julie Gibson, the Orkney
County Archaeologist, and Roderick Thorne on Sanday.
All remaining mistakes are mine.
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