Stone is the pre-eminent archaeological material, its durability providing us with evidence from the earliest hominid tool use to post-medieval gun-flint manufacture. Yet complaints that quarries and quarrying are still the poor relation in archaeological studies of extractive industries, which have been dominated over the years by a bias towards coal and metalliferous mining (Stanier, Reference Stainer2000), are arguably valid. This edited volume collecting sixteen papers and an introductory chapter is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on non-flint stone use and quarrying: not least by being available online as an Open Access publication (http://hdl.handle.net/1956/16580).
As explained in the preface (p. 5), Soapstone in the North is the result of the research programme ‘Forskning i Felleskap’ (‘Research in Community’) led from 2010 to 2015 by the five Norwegian University Museums, providing a forum for the discussion of pre-modern soapstone quarrying and use in the region (encompassing Norway, Shetland, and Greenland). This programme's innovative approach, bringing together not only academic researchers from disciplines including archaeology and geology, but also stoneworkers, is to be encouraged. The book's papers draw on fieldwork and research since c. 2000, some of which is published here for the first time, including contributions from doctoral and early career researchers. The overwhelming impression is one of a vibrant interest in the subject with great potential, and it is rewarding to read work by a range of contributors from established academics to new researchers.
The editors Gitte Hansen and Per Storemyr usefully begin with an introduction to soapstone (pp. 9–28), including geology and archaeology and a literature review. This is a very helpful beginning, not merely summarising the following papers but establishing their context, and resulting in an extensive bibliography. Papers are ordered approximately chronologically, beginning with three more general or multi-period papers before moving from the Mesolithic to medieval churches. They tend to fall into two categories: papers focused on the quarry, and papers providing syntheses of regional artefact assemblages. Of course, there is cross-over between these two themes, especially in the papers considering building stone. Nevertheless, the general contrast between object-centred studies and field archaeology at the quarry is noticeable.
Despite the ‘Forskning i Felleskap’ programme's involvement of stone-working practioners, the only paper to draw on the actions of quarrying stone is the first, by Eva Stavsøien (pp. 29–40). This represents one of the drawbacks of the book, providing as it does a venue for academic publishing without finding a way to accommodate lived and embodied experiences of working stone that would undoubtedly inform interpretations of the archaeological record. Stavsøien's paper is therefore a welcome addition, although in concluding that geological features determine conservatism in quarrying it displays limited engagement with the anthropology or theory of technology. This is common to almost all the papers, which tend to take a ‘common-sense’ approach to quarrying and stone use that even now pervades historical archaeology, and to which I will return below.
The notable exception is the paper by Laura Bunse (pp. 59–72). Slightly limited by virtue of sharing preliminary data, with expanded analysis reserved for her PhD thesis, her fieldwork at quarry sites in three northern Norwegian counties draws on Richard Bradley's (Reference Bradley2000) work to interpret toponyms and soapstone landscape forms. This cultural contextualisation of stone resources is very welcome, moving beyond functional or economic considerations to place stone and its use into a richer social realm. In contrast, the paper by Wickler, Lindahl and Nilsson (pp. 41–57), which is a thorough multi-period overview and synthesis of soapstone geology and archaeology for the same three counties, proposes a future research agenda focused, understandably, on technological solutions to archaeological questions. Nevertheless, a sensitivity to landscape context and ethnohistory is required for a fuller picture, as Bunse suggests.
For example, the interesting and on the whole well-illustrated paper on the important Iron Age Sandbekkdalen quarry by Grenne, Østerås and Stenvik (pp. 93–106) suffers from a technological determinism that could be alleviated with greater sensitivity to quarrying practices beyond the immediately functional. The appearance and location of the rocky knoll in the landscape and the remarkable preservation of timbers and wooden implements beg more questions than are answered. Were four wooden spades carefully left standing upright in a pit merely abandoned (p. 99), or are they evidence for a closing deposit at the quarry? Other sources could be drawn on to explore quarrying practices, such as recent use of ethnographic analogy to explain structured deposits and associations of material in southern British Neolithic flint mines (Topping, Reference Topping, Cotton and Field2004; Reference Topping2017).
This is the case not only for prehistory. The paper on medieval exploitation of Bakkaunet quarry for Nidaros Cathedral (Trondheim) by Storemyr and Heldal (pp. 107–31) is also technologically deterministic, yet mentions a dualism between traditions and established stone working practices in England (p. 128), and prospection, invention, and adaptation at the quarry face (p. 129). Bodil Østerås (pp. 153–64) considers medieval soapstone vessel production at Slipsteinberget quarry, concluding it to have been a specialist and commercial yet part-time or peripatetic activity. These hints at the creative and skilled practioners, enmeshed in craft traditions and more complex lifeways that included farming and trading, indicate that a more culturally-informed understanding of the social context of quarrying is required. Soapstone's affordance for the production of both intricate Gothic carved ornament (p. 109) and hollow forms (pp. 158–61) described in these two papers is surely implicated, potentially providing interesting case studies which would benefit from a more theoretically nuanced approach (e.g. Dobres, Reference Dobres2010).
Knut Bergsvik (pp. 73–92) provides the first artefact-focused paper, an overview of Mesolithic fishing-line sinkers from western Norway. This touches on problems such as the need for archaeology experiments to explore soapstone taphonomy, and highlights numerous interesting questions around Mesolithic practices that could be explored through the lens of this object type. This contrasts the next object-centred paper, by Torbjøn Schou (pp. 133–52). This explores soapstone vessel production ad 800–1030 in the, then rural, Agder area of south Norway through structuration theory and provides a welcome example of stone use contextualised spatially and with other material culture. It would have been even more satisfactory if the interpretative process was more closely worked through the theoretical framework, which I felt left too many unspoken assumptions about just how power and economic relations arise.
Hilde Vangstad (pp. 185–206) addresses the typology and chronology of a medieval soapstone vessel assemblage from Bergen. In addition to the detailed seriation and excellent artefact photographs, a strength of this paper is how Vangstad relates this urban assemblage to changes in cooking, eating, and food presentation practices (pp. 202–03). To some extent this is complimented by Irene Baug's paper (pp. 165–84) on medieval bakestones, although the focus here is on quarry sites in Ølve and Hartlestrand where the bakestones, or their pre-forms, were produced. Baug concludes from the scale of production and extent of bakestone distribution that this craft was specialised and semi-professional, perhaps seasonal (p. 180). Referring to Vangstad's findings, it would be interesting to see the incorporation of the consumers’ use of bakestones, and how this impacts our understanding of users’ relationship to the producers.
The final artefact-focussed papers are complementary. Mogens Høegsberg (pp. 207–24) concludes from a study of 1,168 Norse Greenland soapstone artefacts that their makers were using them to maintain their Norse identity. Using soapstone objects as a proxy for North Atlantic Viking migration and movement, Forster and Jones (pp. 225–48) ask if it will be possible to identify launch points for pioneers leaving Norway, by combining artefact typology with geochemical analysis. The preliminary results presented here suggest that this exciting idea has potential, if a combination of techniques is applied. This is precisely the message of the four remaining papers.
Stone provenancing is well-established in prehistory studies (e.g. Clough & Cummins, Reference Clough and Cummins1979; Reference Clough and Cummins1988; Parker Pearson et al., Reference Parker Pearson, Benvins, Ixer, Pollard, Richards and Welham2015) and it is exciting to see greater application of geochemical techniques to historical periods. In this volume, Hansen, Jansen and Heldal (pp. 249–328) conclude that an assemblage of Viking Age and medieval soapstone vessels can be placed into broad provenance groups, tentatively identifying geographic ranges served by quarries and through these suggesting both subsistence and commercial production modes. Berglund, Heldal and Grenne (pp. 329–58) provenance church building material in Helgeland, concluding that ecclesiastical authorities used stone from their own quarries whilst private benefactors had to find material from elsewhere. This is largely substantiated by Jansen and Heldal (pp. 359–90), matching some of the stone from Onarheim church in Hordaland County to nearby quarries. Finally, Alf Hommedal (pp. 391–404) reports on geochemical matches between medieval buildings in Bergen and the quarry owned by the Cistercian Abbey at Lyse.
Each of these papers emphasises the importance of combining macroscopic analysis with a variety of geochemical analyses in order to make confident matches between objects, building materials, and quarries (this is not unique to soapstone, see, for example, Nash et al., Reference Nash, Coulson, Staurset, Ullyot, Babutsi, Hopkinson and Smith2013). But there is also an assumption throughout that simplistic modes of supply must have applied in the past, whereby the nearest quarry will have supplied stone for a building or market. This assumption leads Jansen and Heldal (p. 375), for example, to propose that stone unexpectedly provenanced to Arnafjord quarry, some 240 km distant by boat, represents nineteenth century construction activity at Onarheim church.
Derived in part from Salzman (Reference Salzman1967) and others writing about the expense of transporting stone in the Middle Ages, this ‘common-sense’ view is not, however, always supported; the use of freestone from Dundry (Somerset, UK) in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Ireland) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Moss, Reference Moss2000) is one example of distant supply in this period. It should be noted that at Onarheim church the surviving stone blocks have not been associated with specific building phases, urging caution in the interpretation of distant material as modern building activity. This makes Hommedal's (p. 402) proposal of a close study of Lyse Abbey's quarry all the more welcome, to understand how the quarry articulated with and beyond the abbey community.
All of the volume's papers share some deficiencies in production. Most problematically, scale bars are missing from the majority of photographs. There are some inconsistencies in mapping and table layout, and most of the radiocarbon determinations lack reference numbers, sample materials, and confidence values. Finally, the large volume of geochemical data tabulated in appendices would perhaps best be shared via accessible institutional data repositories; this would have the additional benefit of allowing more pages to be used for larger scatter graph charts to be reproduced, making these easier to read.
This volume is nevertheless a welcome and wide-ranging review of the current state of knowledge of the soapstone rock family, incorporating fieldwork at quarries, regional artefact syntheses, and inter-disciplinary studies. The papers highlight the role of and need for further provenance studies, ultimately showing the rich potential for future work.
