Of Viking Ships and Harbours: Aspects of the 'Maritime Cultural Landscape'' with Dr Sven Kalmring, National Historical Museums

Maritime Archaeology, especially for the Viking Age, has always been regarded as some kind of supreme discipline, which dealt with the remains of slender and elegant ships forming the very key and catalysts for the whole of the period as such. When Christer Westerdahl published his groundbreaking ideas on a Maritime Cultural Landscape in 1992, however, it caused a scientific earthquake among scholars: In analogy to settlement and landscape archaeology, he offered an entire analytical concept, which should evolve maritime archaeology into much more than the study of boats and ships alone. This lecture will present the different categories of Westerdahl’s Maritime Cultural Landscape ranging from shipwrecks, remains on land, the tradition of usage, the study of natural topography and maritime placenames, with a wide range of examples from the Baltic Sea. At the end of the talk, as an outlook, the practical application of the concept is illustrated by the example of the Scottish Westcoast and by preliminary results gained within the current research project The Norse and the Sea: The Maritime Cultural Landscape of Scandinavian Scotland.

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