Professor Ingrid Mainland, Dr Sarah Jane Gibbon and Dr Siobhan Cooke-Miller were three of the 12 Scottish delegates invited to attend the recent Viking Congress in Norway.
At the event, Rauland and Oslo, Siobhan chaired a session focusing on Viking Age historiographies, displays, perceptions and engagements in museums, on social media and the public domain.
Ingrid gave a paper entitled A taste of home? Exploring identity and integration through dietary choices and culinary practices in Late Iron Age and Viking Scotland.
This explored evidence for continuity and change food and dietary choices across the Pictish to Viking transition in the Northern Isles, arguing that while there was some indication for the adoption of new cooking practices and food items during the Viking and Late Norse periods that the consumption of particular foodstuffs, such as seabirds, continued.
Sarah Jane presented a poster on identifying and interpreting Viking and Norse settlement patterns by focusing on bœr, bú, skáli, hus and Stove names to demonstrate spatial and temporal dynamics within wider landscape settings.
This bringing together of recent thinking is embedded in the work of previous Orkney scholars Clouston, Marwick and Thomson, and draws on six landscape settlement studies undertaken by Sarah Jane over the past 25 years.
