With the support of a grant from the Ministry of Culture’s Research Funds, head of research centre Mads Runge and museum curator Mogens Bo Henriksen completed in the period mid 2015– 2018 the research project “The origins of Odense – new aspects of urbanisation in Southern Scandinavia”.
Using Odense as a case study, the project highlighted three important factors for understanding a specific urbanisation process:
The results were put into perspective for other sites on Funen as well as in a broader southern Scandinavian context.
The background for the project was the sudden influx of archaeological material from the Late Iron Age and the Middle Ages in recent years from the centre of Odense and the nearby catchment area. The material – together with new theoretical approaches to centre formation and centre structure – provided a unique opportunity for a new interpretation of the three main questions. Central to this is that a number of new factors indicate that Odense was built as early as the 8th or 9th century and not, as previously assumed, in the second half of the 10th century.
The process leading up to the formation of the Danish state must be seen in a long-term perspective and an important element in the process was the emergence of regular cities, including and not least the early episcopal cities. Seen in a European context, the development of urban communities in southern Scandinavia is relatively late, and as one of Denmark’s early episcopal cities, Odense occupies a key position in relation to understanding the background to the urbanisation process in southern Scandinavia in general as well as to the emergence of episcopal cities specifically.
A Viking-era mould for a circular, ornamented piece of jewellery from excavations at Vestergade 70-74.
