The nature of human-animal relationships in the past, like in the present, is intrinsically unbalanced, with humans ultimately holding power over the life and death of many other animal species. This is also true for Viking Age burial customs, where different types of animals were commonly killed to be placed in human graves. Acknowledging this asymmetry, however, does not imply that animals were - and should be considered - passive and inanimate props unilaterally used by humans based on modern anthropocentric ideas of hierarchical interspecies relations projected onto past societies. Animals were not simply deposited in Viking Age graves like objects; they were mixed with human remains, buried in close contact with human bodies, and sometimes buried without humans at all. Animals were also not simply ‘animals’, as shown by the multiple modalities in which different species - and individual members within them - could be involved in funerary practices. Some people, on the other hand, were not buried with animals at all. Humans, as well, were not simply ‘humans’.

Moving away from traditional approaches seeing animals as either food or symbols, the main aim of this work is to balance out archaeological interpretations of human-animal relationships in Viking Age burials by focussing on the animals themselves as living agents rather than mere dead bones. This requires first and foremost the development of a theoretical framework based on posthumanist approaches and focussed on relationality, integrating notions from other disciplines like animal studies, ethology, anthropology, and feminist theory into (zoo)archaeological theory. Building on this theoretical background, this research adopts a contextual and interdisciplinary methodological approach aimed at incorporating traditional zooarchaeological methods into the broader field of archaeology as well as combining the material record with additional evidence derived from Viking Age iconography and Old Norse studies.

The core of the project is formed by two main strands of investigation: a quantitative statistical database analysis and a qualitative osteological case study. The former centres on a database of more than 2000 burials from multiple parts of the Viking Age world, from the Scandinavian homeland to the Norse settlements in the west (British Isles and Iceland) and the trade routes in the east (the Rus’). The case study, on the other hand, focuses on the osteological investigation of a relatively small number of graves with unburnt animal remains from central Norway. While the database analysis is primarily aimed at detecting possible shared characteristics and regional trends in the deposition of animals in burials to be used as a starting point for future, more in-depth investigations, the main purpose of the case study is to delve deeper into the lives and deaths of specific humans and specific animals. This is done through building animal osteobiographies when possible, and integrating contextual information into the analysis, spanning not only the buried humans, grave goods, and the grave itself, but also data from other archaeological contexts and external sources like written records.

Both strands of analysis show the complexity of human-animal relationships in the Viking Age, where a shared cultural background manifested in a variety of regional customs and interacted with other cultures and traditions, being adapted and reinvented in different ways depending on context. The preliminary results of the database analysis show that although present in certain contexts, associations between specific animals and specific human genders in the Viking Age were not universal, but held true only for specific groups of individuals, highlighting the importance of actively considering ‘gender neutral’ graves in the analysis. The results further support previous research on the relatively higher proportion of multiple burials with animals compared to single ones, and the widespread popularity of dogs and horses across space and cultures. Furthermore, the inclusion of cats, birds of prey, and perhaps brown bear in graves emerges as a Norse Scandinavian custom, as is the broad variety of animal species involved in funerary practices, while domestic chicken may represent a link between Sweden and the Rus’. Finally, both differences and analogies were detected between Scandinavia and the Rus’, prompting reflections on culture contact and suggesting caution when assessing the presence of Scandinavians in the Rus’ exclusively from the burial records as far as animals are concerned.

The case study further highlights how bringing animals to the fore and approaching them as individuals capable of acting and reacting, as well as influencing human thought and behaviour in life as well as in death, represents a fundamental pre-requisite to start moving away from generalised, one-size-fits-all interpretations towards more nuanced and multifaceted case-by-case understandings of human-animal relationships in the past. First and foremost, the case study supports previous research advocating that animals were not considered a cosmological or eschatological necessity in Viking Age burials, pushing the argument one step forward to propose that physical animal bodies were not essential, while also raising the possibility that animals could participate in funerals in alternative, archaeologically invisible, ways. The study of central Norwegian graves with unburnt animal remains suggests that the inclusion of sea and shore birds may represent a possible Sámi element in hybrid Norse-Sámi burials. The results of the investigation further underline the centrality of decapitation in funerary rituals, the existence of ‘standardised’ placements of animal bodies based on species and/or grave form, and the importance of considering the physicality of human and animal bodies as well as environmental and biological factors when discussing burial practices.

In the end this work might have raised more questions than provide definitive answers, a reflection of how the complex spectrum of human-animal relations in the past becomes hard to disentangle once generalised interpretations are abandoned. However, it is argued that more balanced and contextual approaches can nevertheless allow us to develop an interpretive framework to better address the possible reasons why certain humans were buried with certain animals. Ultimately, to really understand the interactions between different humans and different animals in Viking Age burial customs, it is fundamental to investigate in detail both the human and the animal, moving away from homogenising and monolithic views of both. At the same time, the ‘negative evidence’ represented by those people who were not buried with animals, and by the animals that were left alive, must necessarily be involved in the discussion if we want to really glimpse at the full picture of human-animal relationships in the past.