Viking Age Environments

In Episode 2, Rebecca talks to Ingar Mørkestøl Gundersen about how modern flooding in Norway’s Gudbrandsdalen valley led him to consider the effects of big climatic events in the lead-up to the Viking Age. Ingar Mørkestøl Gundersen is an archaeologist with the Cultural History Museum in Oslo. He graduated from the University of Oslo with a major in archeology in 2007 before going to work as a field archaeologist in Norway, England, Russia, Greece and Sweden. Ingar is completing his PhD thesis entitled Years without summers. AD 536: Crisis or adaptation in conjunction with the Museum and the University of Oslo.  His interests lie in the junctures between rescue archaeology, extreme weather events (floods and volcanoes), the effects of climate cooling and the nature of societal vulnerability to these events.

2,15 Gudbrandsdalen archaeological complex
3,30 6th century cooling, disaster theory & societal vulnerability
6,30 6th century crisis, but not the same crisis everywhere
8,30 Explainer of Fimbulwinter
9,45 1815 Mount Tambora eruption
13,30 Ragnarok and volcanic eruptions
15,00 What happens in the 6th century in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe
19,30 Agriculture, wheat and barley crops and modelling growing temperatures
23,00 Regional variations, complexity
24,00 Pollen cores in the Gudbrandsvalley & population changes
26,45 6th century as collapse or transition?
29,45 Anticipating crisis before crisis happens? Catastrophisation at work
33,35 Justinian Plague & population centres
37,00 Crisis as catalyst or 'a window of opportunity'
37,30 Warrior aristocracies in Scandinavia & 'the charismatic leader'
40,30 What's the most important thing we need to do when we examine this data?
42,45 Vulnerability as a concept
46,30 Combine the grand narrative with the detail of the data

In Episode 1, Rebecca talks to Annalee Newitz about their new book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate. Here, listen to Rebecca and Annalee talk about what it is that makes urban life urban, what happens in cities, and how people come together in cities. 

2,20 "The delightful chance meetings and life-changing random encounters" of urban life
5,30 Feasts and parties
7,30 Role of farming, city versus country, agriculture as a part of the urban process
11,30 Change and transition in community,
14,30 Early Viking Dublin
18,00 Towns and Cities along travel routes
20,30 Cahokia & its pyramids
25,00 Role of religion in coming together to create urban places
30,00 Populations and comparative sizes of settlements
34,15 Migration to cities & labour forces
38,00 Slavery
40,00 Responses of cities to their environments, resilience and materiality of settlement
47,00 Hinterland relationships
51,30 City at the centre of its network