This book is the third in Routledge’s ‘Archaeologies of the Viking World’ series, and maintains the high standard of the others in terms of content.
The book’s core idea is that groups with connections to southern Scandinavia established an often-loose hegemony over a ‘network kingdom’ centred on Dublin and York. This embedded certain areas of Britain and Ireland in a wider network of market-based exchange extending from western Central Asia to the Atlantic between the mid-9th and mid-10th centuries AD.
Employing a refreshing first-person writing style, Tom Horne demonstrates an impressive grasp of the material culture involved, and its associated secondary literature, doing an admirable job of placing Insular distributions of coins, hacksilver, weights, ingots, and so on in their wider context, while also providing chapters on developments in economic archaeology by Scandinavian Viking Age specialists.
