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Marianne Moen Challenging Gender Part 1 Formatting Challenging Gender A reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape Marianne Moen PhD Thesis 2019 Volume I of II Acknowledgements And so it’s finally come to this: the writing of acknowledgements, which means I am at the very end of three years of PhD research. These past three years have been rewarding and fulfilling. To get to spend three years researching and writing about a subject that is, to my mind, both fascinating and vitally important has been a privilege and not least a great deal of fun. I’ve met a lot of people on my way that deserve my thanks. First and foremost, my supervisor Julie Lund, who has provided invaluable feedback and encouragement: without her sharp and unerring eye for corrections and critical questioning of (sometimes rather shaky) arguments, my thesis would not have been what it is today. Second, Lotte Hedeager, who has been acting supervisor in periods, has likewise been not only a source of inspiration, but an irreplaceable help in guiding my efforts through honest, constructive and always helpful feedback. A sincere thank you to both of you for all your help along the way. My co-supervisor, Alison Wylie, will always be an inspiration. Your guidance on all things related to feminist theory (and indeed the rest of my theoretical platform) has been a great help, without which my grasp of many theoretical concepts would have been much poorer than what it is today. Your feedback has been of enormous value to me. I also wish to extend a sincere thanks to Unn Pedersen, for always making time to listen to my rambling questions, and to always offer sound advice. Similarly, thank you to Ingrid Fuglestvedt for thought-provoking discussions on anthropology, and for the loan of some very useful anthropological literature. For practical help, the first shout must go to Steinar Kristensen, who very kindly used his time to help me not only get access to, but also understand, the Gulli material. Søren Handberg deserves a very big thank you for introducing me to Capca, the program I used for my analysis, and which provided a big part of the material foundation for my arguments. On a similar note, I also wish to thank Mette Løvschal for helping me better understand the applications of correspondence analysis: your help was timely and crucial. Espen Uleberg has helped me understand the complicated world of ArcGis, and has offered sound advice on correspondence analysis, and a thank you to Dagfinn Skre and to Christer Tonning for providing the background for many of my maps must also be extended. Many people have been generous with their time, for which I remain grateful. A special thanks to Frode Iversen for using his time to help me with my maps, to Jon Viðar Sigurðsson for providing excellent reading suggestions and indeed guidance in earlier versions of my project proposal, and to Anne Irene Riisøy for excellent advice on research on written sources. In the course of the last three years, I have also had the good fortune to participate in many inspiring conferences. I cannot include everyone I would like to in this list, but wish to mention the organisers of the Viking World conference in Nottingham 2015 for including my paper, and the Viking Congress in 2017 for accepting my poster proposal and for inviting me to publish in the proceedings. I also wish to thank Christine Ekholst and Jakub Morawiec respectively for including me in two excellent workshops (the Gender and Sexuality during the Nordic Middle Ages Workshop in Stockholm 2017 and the Viking Women in Katowice in 2018). Similarly, a very big thank you to the organisers of the two Dialogues with the Past courses I have attended, especially Politics of Heritage organised in 2016, which has provided me with ongoing inspiration. A big thank you to all the other PhD candidates, both here at Blindernveien, and at KHM, for all the excellent seminar discussions, suggestions and debates we’ve had over the last three years. An especial thank you must go to Rebecca Cannel for being my go-to problem solver, and for reading many pages of my ramblings, to Bettina Ebert for moral support and for help with practical matters, and to Carine Eymondsson for her incredible ArcGis skills, without which I would often have struggled. On a personal note, my partner Richard Attlee gets a big thank you for all your support: your complete incomprehension of my tendencies towards impostor syndrome has been the biggest help of all. To my language consultant Lucy Wadley, I also extend a very big thank you (though I wish I could think of a better way to phrase that), and finally a thank you to my parents who have helped with childcare at all the crucial moments in the last three years, which has certainly helped me finish the thesis within the allotted time. Contents Chapter One: Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 Research aims and questions ........................................................................................................ 1 The Late Iron Age or the Age of Vikings ..................................................................................... 7 The illusion of objectivity in research .......................................................................................... 9 Has gender archaeology worked? ............................................................................................... 13 The mortuary landscape as a social arena .................................................................................. 16 The introduction concluded ........................................................................................................ 17 Chapter Two: The question of sex - history of research in gender archaeology and theoretical platform outlined ............................................................................................................................ 18 Gender as a female pursuit ......................................................................................................... 19 The self-reflective practices of gender archaeology ................................................................... 20 Gender and Archaeology – cordial acquaintances, not yet close friends ................................... 21 The quest to engender the past ................................................................................................... 25 In with the new, but keeping the old: pluralities and choices ..................................................... 35 Gender in today’s theoretical landscape ..................................................................................... 43 Chapter Three: Landscapes of death, landscapes of gender ........................................................... 47 Landscape perspectives .............................................................................................................. 47 Mortuary Archaeology, and to what extent the dead can be argued to bury themselves ........... 56 The pick and mix approach to theory ......................................................................................... 61 Chapter Four: A history of important men: the Viking Age condensed......................................... 63 The Viking heritage .................................................................................................................... 64 Viking Age Social order: a male affair? ..................................................................................... 66 Owned landscapes and the language of power ........................................................................... 81 Viking Age social order summed up .......................................................................................... 85 Chapter Five: Cooking, weaving, fighting and trading – what did women do? ............................. 87 The gendered Viking Age in Norway – A Victorian stereotype perpetuated? ........................... 87 Indexing women: Women and women’s roles in mainstream academia ................................... 90 Different genders, different rules? ............................................................................................ 107 The Birka woman: a change in the weather? ............................................................................ 108 Moving away from gender as an either/or proposition ............................................................. 109 Towards a less biased past ........................................................................................................ 110 Chapter Six: Methodology: how to discuss gender through the mortuary landscape .................. 113 A composite reality – burial in the Viking Age........................................................................ 113 The gendered dead ................................................................................................................... 116 The tools in use: correspondence analysis and understandings of landscape .......................... 129 An approach outlined ............................................................................................................... 135 Chapter Seven: An introduction to the material ........................................................................... 137 Gulli ......................................................................................................................................... 138 Kaupang ..................................................................................................................................
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