Multispecies Vikings: Animals, people, and cyborgs in the Late Iron and Viking Ages

Abstract

Several stimulating studies over the last decades have shown how animals played a major role in Viking ritual practice and cosmology. Simultaneously, social theory has moved leaps and bounds in decentring humans as the default masters of the world, rather accepting that the world is and always has been more-than-human. Recent turns to animals, multispecies archaeology and post-anthropocentrism provide powerful new thinking tools that cast many of our assumptions about the world in a radically new light. This chapter approaches the role of animals in the Viking Age anew through case studies of animals in burial and animals in ritual deposition in settlements. Are these animal bodies straightforward expressions of 'property', 'wealth' or 'sacrifice'? How do we approach past practices that do not fit our preconceived categories and notions?