Papers by Alix Thoeming
Mathematical analysis is becoming ever more useful when dealing with large amounts of archaeologi... more Mathematical analysis is becoming ever more useful when dealing with large amounts of archaeological data, due to the precision and certainty with which results can be produced. This article will discuss the use of a relatively new tool in deciphering and dealing with archaeological data, the Naïve Bayes Classifier. The ‘Bayesian’ approach was first proposed in the early 1990s, by archaeological statisticians, Clive Orton (see Orton 1992:139; Buck et al. 1996:1), though at that time the lack of computational power available made use of the Classifier prohibitively difficult. Today a Naïve Bayes Classifier can be employed by anyone with a computer, without any need for particularly specialised computer skills. Programs such as Orange use a graphical interface as a way to circumvent the need for specific mathematical knowledge of the process, and the use of this program is detailed in the paper. The Naïve Bayes Classifier is most useful in attempting to identify unseen patterns in a large amount of data, such as a database with thousands of entries, and potential uses will be illustrated here. This paper presents a case study using a Naïve Bayes Classifier in an attempt to date the rune-stones of Viking-age rune-stones of Sweden which remain undated through conventional methods Two variables were identified as showing some small trace of temporal evolution, the Christian crosses and runic inscriptions on the stones, and the Classifier was utilized to explore their further use.
ASCILITE Publications, Nov 18, 2022
Developing a sense of belonging is intimately linked to a successful transition and to student. T... more Developing a sense of belonging is intimately linked to a successful transition and to student. The pandemic has acerbated existing problems with students across the sector reporting difficulties connecting with each other and their universities. This paper reports a simple activity to encourage meaningful dialogue between students and teachers in the first weeks of study. The 'My journey' activity involves students and teachers discussing key points and decisions in their educational journeys. It has been successfully used in-class, and synchronously and asynchronously online. The journeys are also captured through an interactive map to celebrate diversity.
ASCILITE Publications
Although teachers design learning experiences, their pedagogical and pastoral connections to stud... more Although teachers design learning experiences, their pedagogical and pastoral connections to students and teaching are often unaccounted for in learning analytics approaches. What is needed for analytics to reconnect teachers and students at a unit and program level, and help unit and program coordinators support those students who need it most? We present the approaches and findings from a pilot initiative where a freely available learning analytics platform allowed unit coordinators to define their own contextually unique measures of engagement and allowed program coordinators to see across units. We discuss the forms of outreach afforded by the initiative, the support provided to coordinators, and the implications of learning analytics that are not one-size-fits-all on using data meaningfully to support human connection.
I would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land upon which this... more I would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land upon which this work has been produced; the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. It is upon their ancestral lands that the University of Sydney is built. As we share our own knowledge, teaching, learning and research practices within this university may we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country.
BMC Medical Education, 2021
Background Rare diseases may be defined as occurring in less than 1 in 2000 patients. Such condit... more Background Rare diseases may be defined as occurring in less than 1 in 2000 patients. Such conditions are, however, so numerous that up to 5.9% of the population is afflicted by a rare disease. The gambling industry attests that few people have native skill evaluating probabilities. We believe that both students and academics, under-estimate the likelihood of encountering rare diseases. This combines with pressure on curriculum time, to reduce both student interest in studying rare diseases, and academic content preparing students for clinical practice. Underestimation of rare diseases, may also contribute to unhelpful blindness to considering such conditions in the clinic. Methods We first developed a computer simulation, modelling the number of cases of increasingly rare conditions encountered by a cohort of clinicians. The simulation captured results for each year of practice, and for each clinician throughout the entirety of their careers. Four hundred sixty-two theoretical cond...
Conference Presentations by Alix Thoeming
Panel presentation given at the 2018 Sydney Digital Humanities Pathways forum at the University o... more Panel presentation given at the 2018 Sydney Digital Humanities Pathways forum at the University of Sydney
CAA Australasia Digital Archaeology Conference, 2020
Photogrammetry is an increasingly common component of archaeological recording and analysis. In a... more Photogrammetry is an increasingly common component of archaeological recording and analysis. In a museum context, photogrammetric models provide both a new method to display objects and create interactivity within exhibits and also a tool for artefact digitisation which can democratise access to collections. In a professional context, photogrammetry has become a highly sought-after skill in complement with existing artefact management protocols. To date, though, there has been little formal discussion around the use of photogrammetric models as pedagogical tools. First-year archaeology students at the University of Sydney have traditionally been given supervised hands-on access to artefacts from the Nicholson Collection of the Chau Chak Wing Museum (CCWM) as part of their tutorials. This however excludes objects that are too fragile to be handled and also restricts student interaction with the objects to a very narrow temporal window due to the requirement that all object handling take place under staff supervision.
The New Eyes on Old Objects project was a trial digitisation initiative between the University of Sydney Department of Archaeology, Arts eLearning and Sydney University Museums that aimed to both increase student access to the collection and support its use in practical assessment tasks. Selected objects from the West Asian and ancient Mediterranean collections were digitised using a low-cost photogrammetric method. Students were initially given access to the physical objects in class and then were able to access their models online afterwards, before incorporation into object-based assessments. This paper will present the architecture of the NEOO project, staff and student reception, and the lessons we learned in its implementation. Digital accessibility, in particular, remains a challenge for projects of this sort. We argue that through the use of this relatively simple tool, archaeology departments can leverage their collections in increasingly adaptive and progressive ways.
European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting, 2019
In 2018 the University of Sydney introduced Open Learning Environment (or OLE) units into degree ... more In 2018 the University of Sydney introduced Open Learning Environment (or OLE) units into degree programs across the university. These units were introduced and designed with the aim of diversifying the experience of the student cohort across the University, and the specific agenda delivered to individual departments was to present a topic which could be considered broadly relevant to an audience outside their discipline. Students are required to take between two and six of these almost entirely online OLE units, however, as they do not count towards a major, yet are mandatory for the satisfaction of degree requirements, it has generally been thought that unit selection would be informed either by the desire to learn a particular skill, or for pure interest. The Department of Archaeology decided upon cultural heritage, or more precisely the World Heritage List, as its departmental offering. In selecting this topic, it is hoped that students across the humanities in diverse majors and degree programs will see an area in which they can both make use of their own expertise and extend their learning experience. The unit interrogates UNESCO’s Outstanding Universal Value criteria, explores the legal frameworks on which the World Heritage Convention is built, and encourages students to consider the impact of politics and process on sites inscribed upon the World Heritage List. This paper will provide an overview of the unit, including demographic information about the students who chose to add it to their programs, and both a pedagogical and heritage-focussed reflection on the experience.
European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting, 2019
In academic discourse and popular perception, current research still inherits and perpetuates man... more In academic discourse and popular perception, current research still inherits and perpetuates many long-held questionable truths about Vikings and the Viking period. In this spirit, we seek to present new interpretations of the 8th-11th centuries AD in Scandinavia, the Baltic, the British Isles, and the North Atlantic that combat many persistent characterisations and interpretations of the evidence of that period known today that – due to lack of review – have vitrified into the likeness of 'fact'. Focusing on the Viking period, the session aims to brush the dust off some old paradigms and critically examine examples of archaeological, historical, and epigraphical 'facts' that on closer examination do not deserve this name. We hope to probe views, tackle puzzles and controversies, re-visit doctrines, debunk old readings, clear up ambiguities, and provide new ideas for those pesky 'factoids' that have far too long obscured our understanding of the Viking world. In particular, this session invites contributions from postgraduate and early career researchers seeking to put old doctrines of the Viking Age to the test, introducing new conceptual, theoretical, and methodological methods and approaches. Together, we aim to challenge vitrified views of the Viking
One of the great challenges inherent in archaeology is the fact that what humans say, and what th... more One of the great challenges inherent in archaeology is the fact that what humans say, and what they do, are very often different things. In the same way, as similar material forms may correspond to different socio-economic phenomena, so may the reverse be true. Deterministic approaches to either as a direct informant of the other are not only reductive, they can more often than not be a logical liability. Settlement analysis would be more adequately served by the introduction of a triadic model proposed by Fletcher, in which settlement success is measured not only by a relationship between material form and socio-economic situation, but also by the outcome of their relationships
The case study for this paper will be the initial urban development which took place in the Baltic region during the early medieval period. New and unusual settlements of very similar form, albeit with varying emphases on elements such as ritual, royal power, politics and trade, appear across the landscape between the 7th and 9th centuries CE. This development comes ostensibly in response to the changes happening in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the establishment of new trade routes from the north is seen as a significant contributor both here and in the North Sea region. These Baltic settlements - for which terminology has proven notoriously difficult - mostly exist in their initial form for no more than a quarter of a millennium, before transforming into a more recognisable, high medieval town-like form. This process, however, is variable in its execution. The settlements, among other outcomes, experience destruction, abandonment, conquest, and re-use in conjunction with a younger settlement close by, revealing this particular space-time context as incredibly valuable in exploring the social-material-outcome triad.
For more than two millennia the unique geographical characteristics of the Baltic Sea have made i... more For more than two millennia the unique geographical characteristics of the Baltic Sea have made it a nexus for trade and exchange. The emergence of a large number of trade settlements in the early medieval period cemented its place as a hub for the diffusion of goods and ideas on a scale not seen before, in part because of the opening up of the eastern trade routes - those that negotiated rivers such as the Dnieper, the Bug and the Vistula. Parts of Europe previously inhabited by relatively insular tribes were then integrated into the wider community which existed outside of the consolidating powers of the Carolingian and Byzantine Empires. Within this region, which broadly consists of Scandinavia, the Baltic, the lands of the Rus’, modern-day Poland and the Baltic states, a variety of different forms of settlement became increasingly visible in the landscape, indicating that the increased interconnectivity related to the formalising of trade networks must be intricately connected to their growth and development.
While these sites all have their own distinct, regional characteristics, their contemporaneity, analogous circumstances, and rapid development links them in a significant way, suggesting the additional value of a cross-regional comparative study. This paper will present the background research and preliminary observations of a PhD thesis which aims to analyse the relationship between regionally unique trajectories and broader inter-regional patterns in this remarkable community of settlements.
"Mathematical analysis is becoming ever more useful when dealing with large amounts of archaeolog... more "Mathematical analysis is becoming ever more useful when dealing with large amounts of archaeological data, due to the precision and certainty with which results can be produced. This presentation will propose the use of new mathematical tools in deciphering and dealing with archaeological data, with a specific focus on the Naïve Bayes Classifier and the promotion of its wider use by budding archaeologists. The ‘Bayesian’ approach was first proposed in the early ‘90s, by the most well known of archaeological statisticians (Orton, 1992:139, Buck et. al., 1996:1), though at that time the lack of computational power available made use of the classifier prohibitively difficult. Today, a Naïve Bayes Classifier can be utilised by anyone with a computer, without any need for particularly specialized computer skills. Programs such as Orange use a graphical interface as a way to circumvent the need for specific mathematical knowledge of the process, and the use of this program will be detailed in the presentation. The Naïve Bayes Classifier is most useful in attempting to identify unseen patterns in a large amount of data, such as a spreadsheet or database with thousands of entries. The analysis of the ~2700 rune-stones in Sweden as accomplished in my Honours thesis will be used to illustrate the ease with which this tool can be utilised, as well as the many situations for which use of the Naïve Bayes Classifier is appropriate."
""In recent years scholarship on the Viking Age rune-stones has tended to focus on single aspects... more ""In recent years scholarship on the Viking Age rune-stones has tended to focus on single aspects of the stones and their features, without a ‘bigger-picture’ view. This paper sets out to begin filling in this gap, through a focus on a larger-scale interpretation of the rune-stones and what they disclose (implicitly) about the people(s) of Sweden in the late Viking Age, rather than what they were intended to reflect socially. Temporal and regional differentiation was identified as a vehicle to explore this approach. Data analysis, e.g. PCA and Bayesian statistics were established as the best methods to address these goals, and to that end a database (of sorts) was established, based on Rundata and incorporating other information from a variety of sources. The most important components of this analysis were Linn Lager’s cross-classification system, Birgit Sawyer’s catalogue from The Viking-Age Rune-Stones, and the inscription text files provided along with Rundata. While well established as separate social groups in the historical record, there was found to be very little work attempting to identify large-scale differentiation between the rune-stones of Svealand and Götaland. This was attempted using a variety of techniques, including PCA and cross-type analysis, and some differences were identified.
In order to explore temporal differentiation in the rune-stones, a way was sought to investigate just how to rectify the large number of undated stones in the corpus. Using Gräslund’s stylistic dating, a distribution pattern of four separate ‘phases’ (Early, M1, M2, Late) was established, and a Naīve Bayes Classifier was built. Bayes Classifiers are seeing more and more use in archaeological analysis, often in situations where a date-range for an assemblage has been established, but dating an entire corpus of artefacts is either impossible, or prohibitively expensive. Data assembled from the database was input into a test-learner, and the classifier attempted to assign values to the undated rune-stones based on the information obtained from those already assigned to a phase. Ultimately very low levels of differentiation were detected by the classifier, making it difficult to assign dates, but this homogeneity is in itself significant, as it can be interpreted as being symptomatic of high levels of cultural similarity across the various Scandinavian communities of the Viking Age. The implications of the use of the Bayes Classifier, among other forms of analysis, will be discussed, and possibilities for future use explored.""
Public outreach papers by Alix Thoeming
Teaching History, 2019
Models and replicas of ancient artefacts have been utilised by archaeologists and museums for tea... more Models and replicas of ancient artefacts have been utilised by archaeologists and museums for teaching and research purposes for hundreds of years. In the last twenty years the use of laser scanning, CT scanning, photogrammetry, and other forms of digital three-dimensional model-making has skyrocketed. While digital models have become increasingly commonplace, most of the methods used to make them are prohibitively expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars. One method, however, is both affordable and requires only basic training - photogrammetry. Photogrammetry not only presents an opportunity for students to actively engage with historical artefacts normally hidden away in museum storerooms, participation in this process encourages them to begin thinking about objects in a different way
Teaching Documents by Alix Thoeming
This guide was prepared for the 2019 class of ARCO1000 at the University of Sydney. It may be use... more This guide was prepared for the 2019 class of ARCO1000 at the University of Sydney. It may be useful for any undergraduate humanities student, but the audience for which it was written is specifically first-year archaeology students. You are welcome to redistribute this work, but please do not remove the authorship attribution or modify it in any way without my express permission. Please let me know if you and your students find it useful!
Thesis by Alix Thoeming
Doctoral thesis, The University of Sydney, 2018
**please contact me if you would like a copy of my thesis**
The development of urbanism in the V... more **please contact me if you would like a copy of my thesis**
The development of urbanism in the Viking Age is undoubtedly one of the best-studied fields in the archaeology of the period. The Viking towns of Birka, Kaupang, Hedeby and Ribe have captured the imagination of archaeologists and the public alike, presenting the lives of their enigmatic inhabitants. Discussed in the literature but only occasionally discussed comparatively are a significant number of other settlements founded across the Baltic coast in the Early Medieval Period, from northern Germany to the tributary rivers of north-western Russia. These settlements appear across the Mare Barbarum at a very similar time, in similar forms, in response to ostensibly similar circumstances. Some survive through to today, most meet a variety of different ends, but all transformed in some way into the world of the later, more easily recognisable High Medieval town.
This thesis presents a model of Early Medieval settlement in the Baltic region, acknowledging the modern day historical and political reasons for the lack of representation of the southern and eastern Baltic countries and emphasizing a comparative approach to remove these barriers of recent history. Thirteen settlements have been chosen for analysis, selected for the availability of information for the development of a quantitative model of settlement trajectory. Despite their similar beginnings, the settlements all met very different ends, and a triadic framework of settlement analysis is applied to this problem, emphasizing interconnection between material form, social operation, and settlement outcome. Regardless of just what these settlements were, as indeed discussions around the terminology of urbanism have predominated in recent years, they undoubtedly were something, strangers in an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural landscape, situated outside contemporary political and social systems. As the Viking-centric focus on archaeology of the Early Medieval period in Northern Europe begins to change, this thesis illustrates the role of comparative analysis in revealing the importance of sites less well-studied.
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Papers by Alix Thoeming
Conference Presentations by Alix Thoeming
The New Eyes on Old Objects project was a trial digitisation initiative between the University of Sydney Department of Archaeology, Arts eLearning and Sydney University Museums that aimed to both increase student access to the collection and support its use in practical assessment tasks. Selected objects from the West Asian and ancient Mediterranean collections were digitised using a low-cost photogrammetric method. Students were initially given access to the physical objects in class and then were able to access their models online afterwards, before incorporation into object-based assessments. This paper will present the architecture of the NEOO project, staff and student reception, and the lessons we learned in its implementation. Digital accessibility, in particular, remains a challenge for projects of this sort. We argue that through the use of this relatively simple tool, archaeology departments can leverage their collections in increasingly adaptive and progressive ways.
The case study for this paper will be the initial urban development which took place in the Baltic region during the early medieval period. New and unusual settlements of very similar form, albeit with varying emphases on elements such as ritual, royal power, politics and trade, appear across the landscape between the 7th and 9th centuries CE. This development comes ostensibly in response to the changes happening in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the establishment of new trade routes from the north is seen as a significant contributor both here and in the North Sea region. These Baltic settlements - for which terminology has proven notoriously difficult - mostly exist in their initial form for no more than a quarter of a millennium, before transforming into a more recognisable, high medieval town-like form. This process, however, is variable in its execution. The settlements, among other outcomes, experience destruction, abandonment, conquest, and re-use in conjunction with a younger settlement close by, revealing this particular space-time context as incredibly valuable in exploring the social-material-outcome triad.
While these sites all have their own distinct, regional characteristics, their contemporaneity, analogous circumstances, and rapid development links them in a significant way, suggesting the additional value of a cross-regional comparative study. This paper will present the background research and preliminary observations of a PhD thesis which aims to analyse the relationship between regionally unique trajectories and broader inter-regional patterns in this remarkable community of settlements.
In order to explore temporal differentiation in the rune-stones, a way was sought to investigate just how to rectify the large number of undated stones in the corpus. Using Gräslund’s stylistic dating, a distribution pattern of four separate ‘phases’ (Early, M1, M2, Late) was established, and a Naīve Bayes Classifier was built. Bayes Classifiers are seeing more and more use in archaeological analysis, often in situations where a date-range for an assemblage has been established, but dating an entire corpus of artefacts is either impossible, or prohibitively expensive. Data assembled from the database was input into a test-learner, and the classifier attempted to assign values to the undated rune-stones based on the information obtained from those already assigned to a phase. Ultimately very low levels of differentiation were detected by the classifier, making it difficult to assign dates, but this homogeneity is in itself significant, as it can be interpreted as being symptomatic of high levels of cultural similarity across the various Scandinavian communities of the Viking Age. The implications of the use of the Bayes Classifier, among other forms of analysis, will be discussed, and possibilities for future use explored.""
Public outreach papers by Alix Thoeming
Teaching Documents by Alix Thoeming
Thesis by Alix Thoeming
The development of urbanism in the Viking Age is undoubtedly one of the best-studied fields in the archaeology of the period. The Viking towns of Birka, Kaupang, Hedeby and Ribe have captured the imagination of archaeologists and the public alike, presenting the lives of their enigmatic inhabitants. Discussed in the literature but only occasionally discussed comparatively are a significant number of other settlements founded across the Baltic coast in the Early Medieval Period, from northern Germany to the tributary rivers of north-western Russia. These settlements appear across the Mare Barbarum at a very similar time, in similar forms, in response to ostensibly similar circumstances. Some survive through to today, most meet a variety of different ends, but all transformed in some way into the world of the later, more easily recognisable High Medieval town.
This thesis presents a model of Early Medieval settlement in the Baltic region, acknowledging the modern day historical and political reasons for the lack of representation of the southern and eastern Baltic countries and emphasizing a comparative approach to remove these barriers of recent history. Thirteen settlements have been chosen for analysis, selected for the availability of information for the development of a quantitative model of settlement trajectory. Despite their similar beginnings, the settlements all met very different ends, and a triadic framework of settlement analysis is applied to this problem, emphasizing interconnection between material form, social operation, and settlement outcome. Regardless of just what these settlements were, as indeed discussions around the terminology of urbanism have predominated in recent years, they undoubtedly were something, strangers in an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural landscape, situated outside contemporary political and social systems. As the Viking-centric focus on archaeology of the Early Medieval period in Northern Europe begins to change, this thesis illustrates the role of comparative analysis in revealing the importance of sites less well-studied.
The New Eyes on Old Objects project was a trial digitisation initiative between the University of Sydney Department of Archaeology, Arts eLearning and Sydney University Museums that aimed to both increase student access to the collection and support its use in practical assessment tasks. Selected objects from the West Asian and ancient Mediterranean collections were digitised using a low-cost photogrammetric method. Students were initially given access to the physical objects in class and then were able to access their models online afterwards, before incorporation into object-based assessments. This paper will present the architecture of the NEOO project, staff and student reception, and the lessons we learned in its implementation. Digital accessibility, in particular, remains a challenge for projects of this sort. We argue that through the use of this relatively simple tool, archaeology departments can leverage their collections in increasingly adaptive and progressive ways.
The case study for this paper will be the initial urban development which took place in the Baltic region during the early medieval period. New and unusual settlements of very similar form, albeit with varying emphases on elements such as ritual, royal power, politics and trade, appear across the landscape between the 7th and 9th centuries CE. This development comes ostensibly in response to the changes happening in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the establishment of new trade routes from the north is seen as a significant contributor both here and in the North Sea region. These Baltic settlements - for which terminology has proven notoriously difficult - mostly exist in their initial form for no more than a quarter of a millennium, before transforming into a more recognisable, high medieval town-like form. This process, however, is variable in its execution. The settlements, among other outcomes, experience destruction, abandonment, conquest, and re-use in conjunction with a younger settlement close by, revealing this particular space-time context as incredibly valuable in exploring the social-material-outcome triad.
While these sites all have their own distinct, regional characteristics, their contemporaneity, analogous circumstances, and rapid development links them in a significant way, suggesting the additional value of a cross-regional comparative study. This paper will present the background research and preliminary observations of a PhD thesis which aims to analyse the relationship between regionally unique trajectories and broader inter-regional patterns in this remarkable community of settlements.
In order to explore temporal differentiation in the rune-stones, a way was sought to investigate just how to rectify the large number of undated stones in the corpus. Using Gräslund’s stylistic dating, a distribution pattern of four separate ‘phases’ (Early, M1, M2, Late) was established, and a Naīve Bayes Classifier was built. Bayes Classifiers are seeing more and more use in archaeological analysis, often in situations where a date-range for an assemblage has been established, but dating an entire corpus of artefacts is either impossible, or prohibitively expensive. Data assembled from the database was input into a test-learner, and the classifier attempted to assign values to the undated rune-stones based on the information obtained from those already assigned to a phase. Ultimately very low levels of differentiation were detected by the classifier, making it difficult to assign dates, but this homogeneity is in itself significant, as it can be interpreted as being symptomatic of high levels of cultural similarity across the various Scandinavian communities of the Viking Age. The implications of the use of the Bayes Classifier, among other forms of analysis, will be discussed, and possibilities for future use explored.""
The development of urbanism in the Viking Age is undoubtedly one of the best-studied fields in the archaeology of the period. The Viking towns of Birka, Kaupang, Hedeby and Ribe have captured the imagination of archaeologists and the public alike, presenting the lives of their enigmatic inhabitants. Discussed in the literature but only occasionally discussed comparatively are a significant number of other settlements founded across the Baltic coast in the Early Medieval Period, from northern Germany to the tributary rivers of north-western Russia. These settlements appear across the Mare Barbarum at a very similar time, in similar forms, in response to ostensibly similar circumstances. Some survive through to today, most meet a variety of different ends, but all transformed in some way into the world of the later, more easily recognisable High Medieval town.
This thesis presents a model of Early Medieval settlement in the Baltic region, acknowledging the modern day historical and political reasons for the lack of representation of the southern and eastern Baltic countries and emphasizing a comparative approach to remove these barriers of recent history. Thirteen settlements have been chosen for analysis, selected for the availability of information for the development of a quantitative model of settlement trajectory. Despite their similar beginnings, the settlements all met very different ends, and a triadic framework of settlement analysis is applied to this problem, emphasizing interconnection between material form, social operation, and settlement outcome. Regardless of just what these settlements were, as indeed discussions around the terminology of urbanism have predominated in recent years, they undoubtedly were something, strangers in an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural landscape, situated outside contemporary political and social systems. As the Viking-centric focus on archaeology of the Early Medieval period in Northern Europe begins to change, this thesis illustrates the role of comparative analysis in revealing the importance of sites less well-studied.