Description

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The Vikings continue to fascinate us because their compelling stories connect with universal human desires for exploration and adventure. In Age of Wolf and Wind: Voyages through the Viking World, author Davide Zori argues that recent advances in excavation and archaeological science, coupled with a re-evaluation of oral traditions and written sources, inspire the telling of new and engaging stories that further our understanding of the Viking Age. Drawing upon his fieldwork experience across the Viking world, he proposes that the best method for weaving together these narratives is a balanced, interdisciplinary approach that integrates history, archaeology, and new scientific techniques.

The book delves into key questions of the Viking Age, such as the motivations of Scandinavians to board open wooden ships to raid England or cross the North Atlantic in search of new worlds beyond Europe. Each chapter offers new conclusions about the Vikings--their views on death, their raiding tactics, their lavish feasts, their forging of powerful medieval states, and many others. In each case, Zori brings together written sources, archaeology, and the natural sciences. The dialogues he creates between these three separate data sets result in an entanglement of confirmation (texts, archaeology, and science affirming the same story), contradiction (texts, archaeology, and science telling incompatible stories) and complementarity (texts, archaeology, and science contributing mutually enriching stories). This optimistic yet critical treatment of the sources allows for a holistic picture of the Viking Age to emerge, one that is accessible to a general audience but simultaneously offers new insights into current key issues of scholarly debate.

About the Author

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Davide Zori is Associate Professor of History and Archaeology in the Honors College at Baylor University. His research focuses on the Viking world, particularly the Scandinavian diaspora in the North Atlantic, political economics, and the methodological challenges of combining written sources, archaeology, and new scientific data. He has authored over 30 articles and book chapters on aspects of the Viking Age and co-edited the book Viking Archaeology in Iceland: The Mosfell Archaeological Project. An active field archaeologist, he has conducted over two decades of archaeological fieldwork in Iceland, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Chile, the United States, and Canada, with the support of grants from the National Science Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Icelandic Centre for Research, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Explorers Club. His research has been covered by NPR, BBC, the Discovery Channel, New York Times, and National Geographic.