Stave-built wooden vessels from the Medieval Norse Greenlandic settlements

The craft of cooperage has been well established throughout Europe, at least since the Iron Age. During the medieval period, specialized coopers supplied a wide range of open-topped and sealed containers of various shapes and dimensions, used for numerous everyday domestic activities and more specialized and commercial purposes. In the Norse Greenlandic settlements, stave-built containers were even more important as other materials like ceramic, glass, or metal constituted luxury goods. This paper succinctly presents the archaeological evidence for the craft of coopering in medieval Norse Greenland and attempts to place it in a wider social and economic context. In all, some 631 items were examined, representing a large proportion of the available physical evidence. The finds were recovered from a diverse range of contexts, from domestic areas to storage buildings and midden deposits, and from elite manor sites to smaller farmsteads. Their chronology spans the entire Norse occupation of Greenland, from the late 10th to the mid-15th century. The methods of analysis allow the reconstitution of the stave-built vessels' morphological spectrum and the estimation of their original volumetric capacities. Several types of containers were identified, which could have been used in a wide range of domestic activities and more specialized crafts, such as tableware, dairy production, wool processing, or for storing large quantities of foodstuff

Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Human settlement · Old Norse · Sociology · Anthropology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History