Roads to complexity: Hawaiians and Vikings compared

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to analyse roads to complexity and societal development. By comparing the processes leading to complexity in Late Iron Age and early Viking society in South Scandinavia with the pre-contact Hawaiian state, I set the framework for a comparative archaeology and suggest that society in the Viking Age was not a state. I reach this conclusion within a comparative framework, by looking at comparable but also different processes in both places over time between the subject and source, in Scandinavia and Hawaii. I estimate how important geographic, cultural, technological, ideological, and ecological factors were for the development and change in both places in general and for the advent of the complexity in particular. I suggest that the analogical approach gives us a less biased perspective in both places, because we avoid partial metanarratives, such as for example teleological, nationalist narratives. Using this approach, we will discover new aspects that cannot be identified in isolation.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative archaeology
• analogies
• Vikings
• Hawaiian states
• complex societies

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Kon-Tiki Museum and Vejle Museums. I am grateful to Assistant Professor Mette Løvschal and Professor Matthew Spriggs and Dr Sean Denham for commenting on earlier versions of this paper. Finally, I thank two anonymous peer reviewers.