Paper short abstract:

Deliberately constructed coastal settlement mounds developed as a crucial component in the cultural landscape of Viking-Norse Orkney: structuring local systems of economic and social authority, while becoming central to – and symbolic of – the exercise of power in those areas by the Orkney Earls.

Paper long abstract:

Viking-Norse settlers in Orkney first stamped their authority on coastal landscapes by building over existing settlement. In so doing they deliberately constructed settlement mounds which dominated the landscape physically and legitimised their authority by appropriating mound symbolism potent in both the Norwegian homelands and Orkney.

These mounds were then enhanced over the Viking-Norse period in a purposeful process of superimposing buildings, yards and middens. Mounds symbolised control of the local landscape and people: monumentalising the power to command labour and to create the midden and detritus crucial to repeated re-building on mounds of coastal wind-blown sand. A large mound represented local social and economic success: considerable labour, generous feasts and more productive farming, fishing and gathering were needed to generate their conspicuous contours. Local people navigated by mounds socially and well as geographically.

Coastal mound settlements are also linked to Skaill (ON skáli) place-names, indicating a role in the overarching power structures of the Orkney Earldom. Authority was exercised through a retinue of powerful men and reciprocal arrangements of support and tribute based on personal loyalty. Feasting and formalised hospitality were central to this system. The Skaill sites were among those which hosted peripatetic powerful men, and brought local power structures in contact with political requirements to pay tribute and provide food and lodgings. Settlement mounds thus symbolised the developing power structures of the Earldom. Later, as the administrative system of Latinate Christian kingship permeated the Earldom, mounds lost their symbolic power and the settlement of authority moved elsewhere