References

Discussion of all of the burials and sites, including maps, can be found at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland website ‘Canmore’, http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/search/ and http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/advanced/. Although excellent it should be noted that in one or two instances the map location is incorrect, to my knowledge.

The chief source for Viking burials in Scotland, with particularly good coverage of the cemeteries, is J. Graham-Campbell & C.E. Batey, 1998, Vikings in Scotland: an archaeological survey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press;

augmented by A.Z. Redmond, 2007, Viking Burial in the North of England: A Study of Contact, Interaction and Reaction between Scandinavian Migrants with Resident Groups, and the effect of Immigration on Aspects of Cultural Continuity. BAR British Series 429. Oxford: B.A.R., which includes a table of burials where some landscape features are identified. Details of the find circumstances and artefacts can be found in these publications.

Redmond and the ‘Canmore’ website also provide details of earlier references to each find, many of which can be found for free online.

For an overview of all of the burials, including context and a discussion of isotope and aDNA results, see S. McLeod, C. Paterson and A. Johnson, ‘Diverse Origins, Diverse Burials: Viking Burial in Scotland and the Isle of Man’, in The Routledge Handbook of Death and Burial in the Viking Age, edited by Alison Klevnäs & Cecilia Ljung, in-press for 2024. ​

The earlier overviews are also useful: J. Anderson, 1874, ‘Notes on the relics of the Viking period of the Northmen in Scotland, illustrated by specimens in the museum’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 10 (1872-74): 536-94; and S. Grieg, 1940, Viking antiquities in Scotland, in H. Shetelig (ed), Viking antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland part II. Oslo: H Aschehoug & Co.

The best consideration of the landscape setting of the burials is S.H. Harrison, 2007, ‘Separated from the Foaming Maelstrom: Landscapes of Insular ‘Viking’ Burial’, in S. Semple (ed), Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 14: Early Medieval Mortuary Practices, Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology: 173-182.

For regional overviews see: Northern Mainland – C.E. Batey, 1993, ‘The Viking and late Norse graves of Caithness and Sutherland’, in C.E. Batey, J. Jesch and C.D. Morris, The Viking Age in Caithness, Orkney and the North Atlantic Edinburgh: 148-64; Southern Mainland – S. McLeod, 2015, ‘The dubh gall in southern Scotland: the politics of Northumbria, Dublin, and the Community of St Cuthbert in the Viking Age, c. 870-950 CE’, Limina, Special Edition: Festschrift in Honour of Philippa Maddern, available at http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/special-2015/mcleod.

Also useful is a small section of E. Thäte, 2007, Monuments and Minds. Monument Re-use in Scandinavia in the Second Half of the First Millennium AD. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia series in 4° No 27. Lund: Dept. of Archaeology, where she specifically looks at the occurrence of re-use in Orkney. For more on this see S. McLeod, 2015, ‘Legitimation through Association? Scandinavian Accompanied Burials and Pre-Historic Monuments in Orkney’, Journal of the North Atlantic 28: 1-15.