'The Viking-age Reuse of Insular Metalwork From Northern Britain' with Dr Adrian Maldonado, National Museum of Scotland 23 February at 7pm

Institute for Northern Studies Online Public Seminar Series

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West of Scotland Mount, National Museum of Scotland

The looting of Christian shrines and reliquaries in the Viking Age is so well-documented that it has been reduced to a cartoonish vision of pillaging heathens. A close look at the evidence for such ‘looting’ tells a different story – or rather a number of different stories. A recent reassessment of Viking-Age objects in National Museums Scotland shows a variety of different ways Insular metalwork was dispersed and reused in the ninth to eleventh centuries, from hacking to careful curation, and from adaptation to emulation. Along the way, we can try and reconstruct the kinds of objects lost to us by looking at survivals in hoards, graves and stray finds.

Dr Adrián Maldonado

Galloway Hoard Researcher, National Museums Scotland

Adrián is currently Galloway Hoard Researcher at National Museums Scotland. He received his PhD in archaeology at the University of Glasgow in 2011, with a thesis entitled Christianity and Burial in late Iron Age Scotland, AD 400-650. Ha has lectured in archaeology at the universities of Glasgow and Chester, and joined the Museum in 2018 as Glenmorangie Research Fellow. That project involved a reassessment of the museum collections covering the 9-12th C AD, which culminated with the publication Crucible of Nations: Scotland from Viking Age to Medieval Kingdom (2021). Currently he is a postdoctoral research assistant on the AHRC-funded project Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard, at NMS.

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