Abstract
The three-year ‘Pathways to Power Project: The Rise of the Early Medieval Kingdoms of the North’, which was funded by the University of Aberdeen’s North Theme Fund from 2012-2015, aimed to integrate archaeological and text-based sources to assess the similarities and differences in the ways in which kingdoms in Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia emerged in the early medieval period. Bringing together researchers from the Department of Archaeology and the Centre for Scandinavian Studies, the explicitly interdisciplinary and comparative approach of this project has shed new light on a number of issues that cross-cut preconceived disciplinary and regional/cultural boundaries. This paper will summarise some of the project’s results, and will link them to the issues discussed by some of the other speakers in this double session. In particular, we will discuss key characteristics of seats of power and ritualised practices connected to negotiating or legally claiming power in Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia, highlighting common trends that suggest wide-spread mentalities associated with perceptions of power, as well as regional variations that inform us about local political and environmental conditions.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication status | Unpublished - 2015 |
| Event | International Congress on Medieval Studies - University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, United States Duration: 14 May 2015 → 17 May 2015 Conference number: 50 http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_cong_archive/50/ |
Conference
| Conference | International Congress on Medieval Studies |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Kalamazoo |
| Period | 14/05/15 → 17/05/15 |
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