Current Projects:

Social Inequality, Structural Violence, and Marginalisation in Viking-Age Scandinavia (role: PI)

The goal of this project is to develop an interdisciplinary, multi-proxy framework for the identification and study of social inequality among Scandinavian communities during the Viking Age (c. 750-1050 CE). To date, research paradigms in Viking-Age archaeology have focused almost exclusively on elite populations. The lives of lower-status and subaltern groups, in contrast, have been neglected. In redressing this imbalance, the project team will combine bioarchaeological (osteological and isotopic) analyses of skeletal assemblages with critical studies of archaeological materials and context as a means of identifying vulnerable and marginalised populations within the burial record. Drawing on a rich corpus of burial evidence from excavated cemeteries in modern-day Sweden, the team will examine the ways in which overarching social structures, hierarchies, and inequality impacted the health and lifeways of different socio-economic groups. In addition to providing a new and crucially overlooked perspective on daily life and interaction in Viking-Age Scandinavia, the project will also make a positive contribution to salient discussions of systemic inequality and disparity that are of relevance to contemporary society.

Funded by: The Swedish Research Council, 2022-25.

Making a Warrior: The Social Implications of Viking Age Martial Ideologies (role: Co-I)

This project, led by Dr. Marianne Moen (University of Oslo), aims to critically appraise and redefine the concept of warriorhood in Late Iron Age/Viking Age Scandinavia. The initiative, which involves project partners based at research institutions in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland, will adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological, anthropological, historical, and literary perspectives on the life course and social role of warrior groups within the wider milieu of prehistoric Scandinavian society.

Funded by: NordForsk, 2023-26.

The Database of Religious History

The Database of Religious History (DRH) represents ‘the world’s first comprehensive online quantitative and qualitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history’. Directed by Prof. Edward Slingerland at the University of British Columbia, the DRH is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary project involving researchers from all over the globe. The project aims to encourage specialists working across the sphere of religious studies to contribute entries on specific religious belief systems to the database, which can then be used for the purposes of cross-cultural analyses. Each entry comprises several hundred questions that pertain to various aspects of religious belief systems, from the nature of human interaction with their gods, to the intersection of religious belief and socio-political structures and order, to beliefs in the afterlife and perspectives on the origins of the world. My role within the project as the ‘regional editor’ for Northern Europe is to recruit and assist experts in contributing entries to the DRH, to provide feedback to the project leaders and development team, and to assist in the development of new entry types.

Multi-cultural Archaeologies of the Pacific War

In 2014, I was given the opportunity to develop a lifelong interest in the archaeology of the Second World War as part of a joint initiative by the universities of Aberdeen and Uppsala to investigate the 1944 Battle of Peleliu. The project, directed by Profs. Rick Knecht and Neil Price, aims to study the archaeology and legacies of the Pacific War on the island of Peleliu, Palau, with a particular focus on the experiences of indigenous populations and the historical context, going back as far as the colonial period, which underpinned this small island’s involvement in what was arguably the most traumatic conflict in human history. The project was originally fieldwork based, and involved two field seasons on Peleliu in 2010 and 2014, with follow-up visits in 2015 and 2019. The project team has documented hundreds of sites and finds related to the battle, in addition to evidence for the island’s pre-Colonial sacred and settled landscape. In recent years, the project team has sought to broaden its international collaboration with scholars working in Japan, Okinawa, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the Aleutian Islands, the Solomon Islands, and Russia. The project has produced several peer-reviewed journal articles and fieldwork reports, and I am the lead editor for a forthcoming edited volume (in prep, under contract with Routledge).

Past Projects:

The Viking Phenomenon

From 2017-2023 I was employed as part of the Viking Phenomenon project at Uppsala University. The project, which is part of the Swedish Research Council’s Distinguished Professor (Rådsprofessor) programme was established in 2016 under the directorship of Prof. Neil Price. The project seeks to examine and better understand the origins and development of the period that we often refer to as ‘the Viking Age’, with a particular focus on raiding activity and its associated motors, the Viking diaspora, and social and political developments in the Scandinavian homelands in the centuries either side of the year 800.

The project is split into two strands. The first of these – ‘boat grave culture’ – is concerned with the study of social development in Sweden at the time of the Vendel-Viking period transition. The main goal of this research strand is the study and publication of the materials from the boat-burial cemetery at Valsgärde in Uppland, as well as the publication of the Salme ship and boat burials from Salme, Estonia. The second part of the project – ‘Viking economics’ – focuses on the lives of early raiding groups (‘Vikings’ in the truest sense of the term), their origins, organisation and operational structures, their demography, and motivations.

My own work, on the comparative archaeology of Viking-Age slavery, fell within the remit of the ‘Viking economics’ project. Slavery is an underdeveloped topic within Viking studies, with few studies to date having been produced on the origins of this institution and its function within Scandinavian societies during the late Iron Age. Given the archaeologically ‘invisible’ nature of enslaved groups in many historical contexts, my research is underpinned by an anthropologically-orientated, comparative framework, with a principal focus on captivity and slavery among non-state and early-state societies. In addition to peer-reviewed journal articles and magazine pieces, the main output of this work will be a monograph (in prep, under contract with Routledge).

Evolutionary anthropologies of the early Viking-Age

While employed as a postdoctoral research assistant at Simon Fraser University, I conducted research on an interdisciplinary project as part of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), based at the University of British Columbia. My role within the project was to develop research articles that applied theory and data from evolutionary anthropology, psychology, and the cognitive science of religion to the study of religious beliefs and their impact on conflict and cooperation in late Iron Age Scandinavia. These collaborative endeavours resulted in a number of peer-reviewed journal articles focusing on the demography of early Viking-Age society and its impacts on raiding and social interaction in Scandinavia, the origins of Viking raiding, the structure and organisation of Viking warbands, and the role of pre-Christian belief systems in regulating social interaction among Viking-Age societies. Several of these articles have received attention from international media, both in print and online.