Mysteriet på kyrkogården by Torsten Bengtsson

Town Layouts and Central-Site Functions of Contemporaneous Superregional Centres”. The symposium itself was laid-out in two main sections: “Viking-age Urbanism at Lake Mälaren and the Schlei Fjord” and “Early Medieval Urbanism. In order to assure the thematic frame of the conference colleagues were directly requested and asked to give a paper on predefined topics according to the problem. However, due to modern field research important progress has been done regarding questions of structural details, creating a new basis for the aspired discussion.

The problem of Viking age urbanism has not yet found a simple explanation and, while more recent attempts tend tackle the problem via connectivity and network theory, even rather aged theoretical models by renown authors such as e.g. The aim of the conference was particularly the discussion of structural aspects of Viking age urbanism at two specific regions in lake Mälaren in Eastern Sweden and at the Schlei fjord at the margin between the North and Continental Europe. Thereafter, and essentially until now, the long shadow of World War II had put an end to any further efforts. Still in 1941 Herbert Jankuhn penned an article on “Birka und Haithabu” in the Ahnenerbe-periodical Germanien on the sites’ different nature in trade. Hereby, such an attempt to relate and compare just these two sites is not novel at all: As early as in 1926 Sune Lindqvist pointed to the close connections between the two maritime trading centres in his article “Hedeby och Birka“, published in the periodical Fornvännen. The idea to a joint conference arose from the need for a contemporary comparison between the Viking-age sites of Birka and Hedeby in a larger context. AD 750-1000”, published in the series Theses and Papers in Archaeology of the Archaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm university, gather the proceedings of the eponymous conference held at the Historiska museet in Stockholm in 2013. Hard copy available via: The volume “New Aspects of Viking-age Urbanism, c.

Mysteriet på kyrkogården by Torsten Bengtsson