Projects

The Assembly Project

An international collaborative project which investigated the first systems of governance in Northern Europe.  The first systems of governance in Europe have long been a neglected research theme, with the significance of these places in the medieval world highlighted only in recent publications. TAP built on previous research and offered a new, innovative, and large scale study of thing sites in the context of the transition from localised polities to large-scale kingdoms and nation states.  TAP was officially launched in June 2010 and ran until 2013, with regular project workshops held in Austria, Scandinavia, Orkney and the UK.

The Hjaltland Research Network

The Hjaltland Network received £17,000 from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to bring together national and international scholars of folklore, onomastics, genetics, isotope research, archaeology and history for a large-scale research project entitled Mapping Viking Age Shetland.  The project, through the digitising and mapping of the datasets of each discipline, engaged with many of the unresolved questions about Shetland’s Viking Age, such as:

• What happened to the pre-Viking population
• The date of Viking settlements
• The origins of the Norse settlers and the anomaly of the divergent origins of the male and female lines
• The nature of Shetland’s connections to the Celtic world
• The intensity of settlement and the extent and duration of Norse pagan beliefs and folk traditions.

Mapping Viking Age Shetland was a truly interdisciplinary approach to Viking-Age research, applying the latest technological advances and innovative new research in the various scientific and technological fields, allowing analysis of additional information from existing sources and uncovered new onomastic, genetic and isotopic evidence.