Archaeology in Focus: Manuscripts as Artifacts in Iceland's Middle Ages

Join us and the Archaeological Society of Alberta to explore what medieval Icelandic manuscripts reveal about the country’s history and culture.

This talk will think about manuscripts as artifacts from a range of perspectives—as repositories of DNA, as ecosystems, as nodes in human social networks, and more—to offer insights into the history of Iceland in the second millennium CE.

About the Speaker:

After degrees at Cambridge and Glasgow, Alaric worked at the University of Helsinki, and then, from 2007 to 2025, lectured in medieval English, Old Norse, and Icelandic at the University of Leeds. Moving to Canada for family reasons, he is now training to be a schoolteacher ... But he hasn't stopped researching medieval Britain, Scandinavia, and their connections to the wider Eurasian world.