Update on the Borgund Kaupang Project, March 2020

In January, Brita Hope (iron) and Mathias Blobel (pottery and soapstone vessels) started their PhD projects. In addition, Ben Allport, who is a post doc at UIB, has joined the project. Ben studies community and social networks in Viking Age and medieval Møre. We welcome them to the team! You can read more about their projects in sub-studies.

In January, Heidi came to Bergen to study leather and shoes from Borgund. We now have the results from ZooMs investigations of leather used in several Borgund shoes. Heidi has studied the results and compared them with her morphological studies of leather. In addition to the shoes which Heidi has studied morphologically, we have species identification on an additional number of shoes where the hair follicle pattern was so worn that species could not be identified.

Heidi also returned a car-load of objects and building fragments from the old permanent exhibition in the Middelaldermuseum at Sunnmøre to Bergen. The small objects are now back in the storerooms of the University Museum. Alf Tore has identified some of the building fragments as part of documented buildings from the Borgund site. With some luck the wood can be sampled for C14 and perhaps also for dendro-chronology and dendro-provenance.

In addition, there are boxes and bags containing finds and small notes of context information found in the University Museum’s storerooms. We have identified these as finds from Borgund. These are different types of samples taken from cultural layers and waste pits, and production waste such as burnt and unburnt clay, slag etc. The finds have been catalogued and are now part of the source material from Borgund.

Since Christmas Gitte and Therese have continued working on research tools for the team to use. Databases for digital information on objects and their context have been established, as well as topographical data to be used in GIS. We are making the first digital surveys of the spatial distribution of object groups. This will help us understand how meaningful this distribution is: Have objects been moved around in an arbitrary pattern e.g. by agriculture activities or are there meaningful patterns in the distribution? Homogenization of object classifications still has to be completed before spatial survey can be a really powerful tool, but we are getting there. Of essence is also the efforts to date contexts, and the first overview of contexts ordered by 7 x 7 m grids and mechanical layers has been established. Also objects which can be dated typologically or are diagnostic for the Viking Age or the Middle Ages are identified in the dataset. Such objects are for instance pottery, soapstone vessels, combs, jewelry, bakestones. We can use the ‘diagnostic finds’ to date the culture layers, as well as buildings and objects in the same contexts.

There is a lot of imported pottery found at Borgund (about 10.000 shards). If we can identify specific types, some such have known production time, and can be dated to relatively narrow timespans, so they are valuable for dating purposes. Last week Mathias and Gitte started the classification job on pottery. During the week we managed to establish working routines for the enormous job. During the starting phase of the job we got assistance from specialist colleagues on pottery. Both Gitte and Mathias felt we were getting into a good flow… But then, we had to pack up due to the Corona situation, and now must work from home for a while.

We hope to still have good progress on the Borgund Kaupang Project from home and continue our work on sub-studies, dating contexts and spatial analysis. Take a look at our Facebook page (ekstern lenke) for more pictures.