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Fellows at Museum of Cultural History

The Museum of Cultural History has today eight PhD research fellow positions, of which two will be announced yearly to applicants within the three research fields of the museum.

All PhD research fellows share one office area, and are connected to one or more of the research groups of the Museum of Cultural History. The PhD research fellows of the Museum of Cultural History have a supervisor at the museum, and follow relevant programs for PhD research fellows at the University of Oslo.

The Museum of Cultural History emphasizes that the PhD research fellows have independent projects of high quality, and offers a professionally stimulating working environment. The KHM encourages to international mobility and networking, and constitutes an arena where the PhD research fellows are inspired to think of the dissemination of research results. 

Fellows

Hólmfriður Sveinsdottír

The Materiality of Medieval Healing Rituals

My PhD project “The Materiality of Medieval Healing Rituals” entails a study of the KHM‘s collection of medieval artefacts connected to illness and healing in the medieval period (including relics, lead amulets and anatomical votives).

The collection will be used as a case study to explore how the material culture at hand was used as a medium in healing rituals, including practices rooted in popular belief as well as miraculous healing, in order to reflect on how the medieval worldview shaped people’s relationships with their bodies as well as attitudes towards illness and impairments.


Anette Sand-Eriksen

A ‘house society’ or a society with houses?

The overarching aim of my project is to explore the economic, social and political structures of the Late Neolithic (LN, ca. 2400–1700 BC) and Bronze Age (BA, ca. 1700–500) societies in South-Eastern Norway through houses and associated settlement material. The synthesis of the project is three-parted, reflecting both the expected workflow, publication and dissemination of the results.

In part one I will examine the placement and patterns of the settlements sites through statistics and geoprocessing of mapped data of natural and cultural parameters (e.g. water, soil types, rock art, grave mounds, stray finds etc.). The aim is to test a null hypothesis of the “ideal” settlement placement, and to further explore if the results can be expressions of subsistence strategies. 

Part two focuses on the actual buildings. Here I aim to create a chronology of the LN and EBA houses of South-Eastern Norway, and to further explore the building material against the results from part one.

The project’s third part will be a larger interpretative discussion where the settlement material from South-Eastern Norway will be evaluated in a larger south-Scandinavian settlement perspective, and discussed within the analytical concept of ‘house society’ (Lévi-Strauss 1982).


Kristine Ødeby

The Archaeology of Seasonality

The overarching aim of this research project is to approach the archaeology of seasonality in the Norwegian Middle Ages. Stark seasonal differences in temperature and light defined the regions of the northern latitudes. This climatic restriction severely limited people’s lives during the season of ‘polar nights’ and restricted the performance of natural all-year activities taken for granted further south. From November to April, frost excluded any form of agricultural activity. Daylight was, and still is, sparse, and artificial sources of heat thus became essential. The absence of light combined with the intense presence of darkness and cold during medieval winters, could easily have resulted in people constantly being cramped together inside around the hearth. However, Scandinavian society adapted to the seasonal variations. I will explore how society found ways around the seasonal variations, to increase their production during the economic expansion of the High Middle Ages.

The term “seasonality” is understood here as the study of society’s adaption and evolving adaption to the changing seasons, when seen in relation to the architecture, craft activity, and production in medieval Oslo. The time perspective of my research focuses on the period 1150–1350. Seeing as the High Middle Ages experienced an economic growth, it is highly relevant to seek out whether adaptation to the seasonal changes limited or facilitated this growth. This corresponds with the fact that the largest portion of the archaeological material preserved in Oslo is dated from the twelfth to the fourteenth century.

I will utilize material from archaeological excavations in Oslo. Recent years have seen an influx in new archaeological material from medieval Oslo. The results from the Follo Line-project (2013–2022) will form the main part of my material. The project was a series of large archaeological excavations in the heart of medieval Oslo that have produced exceptional amounts of new material of both synchronic and diachronic character: From rows of buildings connected through roads and back yards, production sites and church yards, down to everyday objects, food waste, and parasite remains.


Mika Boros

MONETA NOVA – The beginning of coinage in Austria, Norway and Poland in the 11th and 12th century.

There was a time before money as we know it. Even though the concept is much older, some regions of Europe did not have a national coinage until the Middle Ages. But how did we get from the one state of affairs to the other? How does implementing a currency system into a society work?

In this project the process of implementing a first national coinage of the three regions that would become the modern states of Norway, Poland, and Austria, will be compared. Considering the scarcity of contemporary written sources, the main material will be the coins themselves, complemented by archaeological information with a focus on coin find distribution patterns. Monetization is closely linked to other profound changes that took place in Europe in the 11th and 12th century, such as Christianization, urbanisation, or state formation. Although all the regions introduced their first inherent coinage under similar conditions such as these, other political, social, or cultural aspects differed. This led to differences in how the coinage looked, how it was perceived or how fast and wide it got accepted.

By using both quantitative and qualitative comparison methods, I want to work out these similarities and differences with the aim to get a better understanding of how the implementation of currency worked and how it was interconnected with the socio-economic developments of the time.


Lars Morten Fuglevik

Trade, Power and the Development of Urban Food Culture in High Medieval Oslo
A Study of Medieval Pottery and Food Culture 1100-1350

In my thesis, I investigate the relationship between household pottery and urban food culture in the medieval town of Oslo, Norway. 

Archaeological remains are testament to a radical development in medieval household pottery forms in Norway after 1150 CE, from a limited variety of traditional, coarse grey wares to a plethora of fabrics and functions by 1350 CE. Recently classified pottery assemblages from older and recent Oslo excavations now make small-scale statistics and analyses based on a controlled data set possible. 

The High Medieval Period (in Norway 1150-1350 CE) was a time of distinct changes in food culture. This is evident in urban archaeological remains of plants and animals, contemporary recipes, historical documents, and literature as well as visual presentations in art. In this period, the urbanization and Christianization of Norway gradually produced new civil and ecclesial urban strata with a material culture and identity more similar to that of the urban population throughout Northern Europe, than to the great Scandinavian rural hinterland. The town as a distinct place was a constituent in a larger European urban cultural assemblage, connecting citizens over long distances through a common identity in which food and drink were important parts. At the same time, the assemblage profiles are different for every town and site.

Archaeological excavations have shown that ceramic pots were one of the most common kitchen utensils throughout the high medieval period in Oslo. However, no production sites for household pottery have been discovered in Norway despite extensive excavations in all major medieval cities. Moreover, almost no medieval pottery is so far recorded in Norwegian rural areas. All pottery must therefore be considered imported goods (a notion supported by recent provenance analyses), and almost strictly an urban phenomenon. The Oslo pottery assemblage contains sherds from Slavic areas, the eastern Mediterranean, England, and continental Europe. This makes it possible to interpret the Oslo pottery assemblage in light of historically and archaeologically known food-material culture-assemblages. Such analogies may compensate somewhat for the scarcity of documentary sources from medieval Norway. 

Household pottery was seemingly an economic demarcation between town and country, and most likely between different socio-cultural areas or households of the town. The overarching research question of the thesis is: Do variations in household pottery assemblages reflect social differences in food culture across high medieval Oslo?

The analyses and discussion are based on ceramic data from four different sites in Oslo: The Bishop’s Manor, the Monastery of St. Olaf, the area surrounding the first town hall, and the shoemakers’ district.


Maria Kartveit

Meaningful Materialities: The Oscar Mamen Collection as a Source of Empirical Investigation

The museum collection that forms the basis for this research project was collected from 1911 to 1937 in Mongolia by Oscar Mamen, a Norwegian tradesman and traveller. He collected around 500 objects and took over 8000 pictures from Mongolian festivities and every day life. In addition, the collection consists of diaries, books with photo descriptions, travel documents, receipts, film rolls and an unpublished manuscript.

Inspired by Tim Ingold, this PhD project aim to investegate the materiality of the Oscar Mamen material, that is, the meaning such museum collection can evoke through involvement in different practices and contexts (Ingold, 2007). Through book releases, an exhibition and by interviewing Mongolians, I aim to look at the material´s materiality as it unfolds during fieldwork in Mongolia.

The photos from Mongolia are especially interesting. Oscar Mamen took photos in a time of political unrest. He witnessed several events of national importance for Mongolia. Mamen was there when the «living God King», Bogda Khan, was crowned in 1911, the first act of Mongolian independence after the fall of the Chinese Qing dynasty. He photographed the following war between Mongolia and China, officials negotiating peace treaties, the Mongolian revolution and the subsequent transformation into a Soviet satelite state in 1924. His photos cover these politically important events, but also everyday life in Ulan Bator (formerly Urga).

Oscar Mamen was one of few with camera equipment during this period of time. In addition, as a part of the Soviet world, the national culture in Mongolia was to be comprised of “values that were national in form but socialist in essence” (Szynkiewics 1990: 3). In concequence, much of the old Mongolian culture was forbidden, confiscated or destroyed. These two facts make the Oscar Mamen collection exceptional and therefore important to the Mongolian formation of national identity.

References:

  • Ingold, Tim. 2007. “Materials against materiality”. In Archaeological Dialogues, 14 (1): 1–16.
  • Szynkiewics, Slawoj. 1990. “Mythologized Representations in Soviet Thinking on the Nationalities Problem”. In Anthropology Today 6 (2): 3.

Astrid Tvedte Kristoffersen

Heavy metal and silvery tunes. Medieval metal production in Eastern Norway and its impact on the region’s economy and urban development.

The Old Town of Oslo and Hamarkaupangen grew up as urban centres during the early Middle Ages in the beginning of the 11th century. In both Oslo and Hamar archaeologists have uncovered production sites for artefacts from non-ferrous metals, e.g. silver and lead. Silver coins were minted in Hamar under the reign of king Harald Hardråde (1047–1066) and in Oslo under Duke Håkon Magnusson towards the end of the 1200s. The metal itself is believed to have been imported, as the first documented written source on mining in Norway dates to 1490. The region in question is, however, rich in minerals from the geological Oslo Paleorift. By lead isotope analysis, I have recently argued for lead and silver production in the Old Town of Oslo as early as 1150–1200. This is 300 years earlier than previously documented. The scale of the production and the full significance of the local raw material, however, has not yet been studied.

The main objective of the project is to investigate how access to local raw material for silver and lead production has affected the economy and social development in Eastern Norway in the Middle Ages (1030–1536). By interdisciplinary analysis, I will study the scale of production, technical characteristics, the processes, and the actors involved. New methods for non-destructive sampling of collections at the Museum of cultural history at The University of Oslo will be applied. The purpose is to get a better understanding of the medieval society in this region, and shed light on urban growth and decline.


Klaudia Karpinska

On Wings to the Otherworld: Bird Remains in Viking Age Graves from Scandinavia and the British Isles

The main aim of the project is a new analysis and interpretation of graves with eggshells, feather remains, and bird bones dated to the Viking Age discovered in Scandinavia and in the British Isles. In my proposed PhD thesis, I will also compare the conclusions emerging from the analysis of archaeological finds from funerary and other contexts with the meanings of birds in medieval written sources, as well as discussing selected bird depictions in Viking Age iconography.

The project will be conducted in three stages during which different material will be re-examined and described. The first stage will be devoted to the analysis of the bird bones and archaeological reports which were stored in the various museum and archives in Scandinavia, Germany and in the British Isles. During short research stays, finds will be re-examined and described in the extensive database. Next stage of the PhD project will be devoted to the comparative analyses of Viking Age graves from different regions (Northern Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, British Isles). The Viking Age graves from Scandinavia and the British Isles will be juxtaposed with selected Vendel and Anglo-Saxon graves. During this time, in the detailed analyses differences and similarities between graves will be shown and described in the two separate chapters of PhD thesis. In the final stage of the PhD project, Old Norse and non-Scandinavian written sources and depictions of birds in Viking Age art will be examined, described using comparative methods established by the specialist in Scandinavian history and Viking Age art and compared archaeological sources. Finally, details collected during these three stages will be prepared for submission and publications.


David Hauer

Effects of fluctuating climate and deformation characteristics of complex archaeological wooden objects. A study of the hygro-mechanical behaviour and deformation of the Oseberg and Gokstad ships.

The Viking ship museum at Bygdøy (VSH) houses one of the most comprehensive collections of wooden Viking Age objects in the world. Most of the objects are in display cases with a controlled climate. However, three ships, two smaller boats, a burial chamber and some other objects are exhibited openly and exposed to the climate variations within the building envelope Investigations the resent years has also revealed that the current state of deformation issues of the ships on display were larger and more complex than expected. What is quite clear is that the ships are in need of extended and improved support systems.

Large complex wooden structures in cultural heritage, ships in particular, are prone to gradual three-dimensional deformation. Just from the mere size or structural complexity of the objects, it can be hard to assess small deformations on a global level due to creep and crack formations, or movement induced by fluctuating climate. The overall changes can be slow, but gradually developing into more obvious problems.

This PhD project is part of the preventive conservation of the Saving Oseberg project. The main objective of this sub project is to identify relevant behavioural patterns of complex wooden structures with regards to effects of fluctuating climate, and deformation characteristics. It will also be pointed out how deformation (strain), measured by fixed target photogrammetry, can be contextualized with other methodologies such as static and dynamic load distribution (stress), and their correlations with climate monitoring.

The aim of this new methodological approach is to get an improved tool applicable for monitoring mechanical response to fluctuating climate, help evaluating allowable mechanical loads to minimize deformation in an exhibition setting, optimize climate set points, and define basic data input for numerical modelling approaches such as FEM. The methods proposed can be applied on any wood species, historical or archaeological, but are limited to wood in a preservation state capable of structural functionality.

Published Feb. 18, 2015 3:08 PM - Last modified Jan. 9, 2023 3:19 PM