Nordic Research

Dr Marika Mägi

Date: Friday 25 November 2016- 5:15pm (doors open at 5:00pm)

In Austrvegr: Revisiting the Viking Age Eastern Baltic

Events details

Dr Marika Mägi – Senior Lecturer

Venue: Project Room, 50 George Square

Biography

Marika Mägi is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Art History at Tallinn University. She graduated as a historian from Tartu University in 1991, before obtaining her MA in Archaeology (1993) and subsequent PhD (2002) there. Since then, she has been working at Tallinn University, and has been part of several international research projects in Sweden. As well as supervising some of these projects, she was a Professor of Archaeology at Tallinn University between 2007 and 2012.

Marika’s research predominantly deals with the Viking Age and early Middle Ages, although she has excavated and published studies on earlier periods. Her main interest is social archaeology and communication in Northern Europe, with a particular focus on harbours, maritime landscapes, burials, and social and gender aspects in society. Her next monograph, concerning the Eastern Baltic and its role in Viking Age communication, is due to be published soon.

Information on her publications can be found at the Estonian Research Portal (external link)

Lecture abstract

This lecture considers the Viking Age societies on the eastern coast of the Baltic. Alongside present-day northwestern Russia, this was a region the Nordic sagas called Austrvegr, ‘the Eastern Way’. Today it comprises the three Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This is a region still not particularly well-known by global audiences of archaeologists, in part due to language barriers and twentieth-century political circumstances, from which a tradition evolved to treat Viking Age processes in the Baltic Rim primarily with a focus on Scandinavia or Russia. In addition, discussions on Viking Age societies and communication have been habitually restricted to the individual Baltic States, thus hampering our understanding of overaching prehistoric processes, occurring before the establishment of any such polity.

Many foreign archaeologists have failed to grasp the extensive cultural variability within this comparatively restricted coastal area. This region was, and is still, linguistically divided between the contrasting Finnic and Baltic languages. Viking Age evidence from the present-day Baltic States suggests two major cultural areas, roughly embracing the northern and the southern halves of the Eastern Baltic. These cultural spheres and their associated characteristics will be considered during this lecture.

All northern communication routes between the East and the West ran through the Eastern Baltic, and the role of these societies for interregional communication during the Viking Age cannot be underestimated. The northern half of the Eastern Baltic, with its strong maritime culture and relevant coastal water routes, developed a warrior culture very similar to that of Eastern Scandinavia. Communications with Scandinavians in these areas seems to have differed from those in the southern half of the Baltic region, which was characterised by a peculiar material culture.

Since communication between the Viking Age East and West also included the Kiev-Rus State, a brief overview will be given on the role of the Eastern Baltic peoples in the establishment and early history of state formations in the East.