| dc.description.abstract | The thesis titled Challenging Gender: a reconsideration of gender in the Viking Age using the mortuary landscape aims to test the generally accepted belief that gender in the Viking Age was a strictly observed segregation between male and female binary roles and ideologies. Using selected mortuary evidence from the Norwegian county of Vestfold, the thesis seeks to examine the potential support in the material record for a more fluid and contextual understanding of gender. The questions asked include whether or not the burial evidence examined supports a model of gender as binary and absolute and whether it supports a social model where men were more socially prominent than women. Founded in feminist theory which seeks to critically examine knowledge production and accepted dogmas, the thesis uses two different approaches in its analysis: a multivariate analysis of the internal aspects of the burials followed by a landscape analysis of the burial’s external aspects and placements in the landscape. The results from the analysis are further set in context with an overview of scholarship on gender in the Viking Age, with written sources and with comparative archaeological material. Overall, the thesis concludes there is ample support for a theory in which gender is perceived as fluid and contextual, and therefore different from the current western two-sex model. It must be noted that the conclusions drawn in the thesis are from elite material, and can thus be argued to relate to one section of society only. The adherence to familiar models when seeking to understand gender in the past which is prevalent within archaeology is called into question, not least through the perceived inevitability and naturalization which this can lend to modern gender roles. It is argued the thesis provides grounds to question the way in which we assign gender roles in the Viking Age, but also that the way in which archaeology in general perceives gender in the past needs a re-evaluation. | |