The Vikings in Asia: Diversity and Distance in the Norse Diaspora

‘The Vikings in Asia’ (VIA) activates an international team of scholars in archaeology, history, religions, and economics in the first serious engagement with Norse connections to the far south and east. The Viking Age (c.750-1050 CE) saw the creation of a Scandinavian diaspora that spanned a vast multicultural and multi-ethnic arena of encounter. However, this has often been Eurocentrically divided into separate western and eastern silos. There is a bias towards the former, while research on the Rus’ and Varangians (the names by which the Norse were known in the east) is geographically limited and tends not to look further than the Caspian or south of Constantinople. Abundant archaeological and textual evidence paints a very different picture, of Norse networks intersecting with those of western, central, and eastern Asia. This is vividly described in contemporary Arabic sources, and supported by archaeological finds in Scandinavia of Steppe clothing and weapons; Islamic bronzes, glass, jewellery, silks, and over 100,000 dirham coins; Afghan metalwork; Tang Chinese textiles; Red Sea and Indian Ocean products, and more. Baltic amber is also found in elite burials from Inner Mongolia, Korea, and beyond. Through five packages of collaborative, data-driven research that has never previously been attempted, VIA will fundamentally transform our understanding of Norse activity across the across the overland and maritime Silk Roads, and the Asian frontiers of the Viking diaspora.