Recent chemical analysis of ancient cooking pots indicates that Scandinavian settlers in Viking Age England largely abandoned their traditional practice of cooking fish in ceramic vessels. Evidence suggests these migrants adopted local Anglo-Saxon culinary habits, reserving their new pottery almost entirely for terrestrial meats and dairy. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity.
During the early medieval period, spanning roughly AD 793 to 1066, Scandinavian groups migrated across the North Sea to settle in regions of present-day England. These populations originated in coastal and fjord environments where marine resources like cod and herring formed a central part of their diet. In their new environment, they encountered communities living in the Danelaw, an area covering northern and eastern England, along with established Anglo-Saxon settlements to the south.
At the time of this migration, the region experienced a major shift in local material culture, notably the widespread adoption of wheel-turned, high-fired ceramic pottery. Prior to the late ninth century, English food preparation technologies in many regions were mostly aceramic. People relied on different types of containers or direct heat over fires to process their daily meals.
Historical records and animal bones from archaeological digs show that populations within Scandinavia consumed high amounts of fish. A historical shift known as the Fish Event Horizon occurred around AD 1000, marking a rapid intensification of deep-sea fishing and a booming trade in marine foods across northern Europe. Historians and archaeologists have sought to understand exactly how these arriving populations integrated their heavy reliance on marine foods with the completely new ceramic technologies they encountered in England.
Identifying whether incoming groups adapted to local customs or maintained their own traditions provides a window into the cultural assimilation of the time. Private domestic habits like cooking often reveal how communities blend together in the aftermath of migration. The way these early medieval people prepared their meals offers clues about their daily lives that are not visible in grand architectural ruins or battlefield artifacts.
Steven P. Ashby, an archaeologist at the University of York, led a team to investigate the culinary habits of these early medieval communities. The research group included scholars from the BioArCh laboratory at the University of York and the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin. Together, they sought to track dietary changes through the remnants of everyday cooking supplies.
The team collected physical evidence from unglazed cooking jars and bowls excavated from a wide range of archaeological sites. Their sample included 298 early medieval vessels from England, spanning urban centers like York, Lincoln, and London, as well as several smaller rural settlements. For comparison, they analyzed 57 ceramic vessels from the Danish urban centers of Aarhus and Ribe, which represent the homeland of many Scandinavian settlers.
To determine what foods were cooked inside these containers, the scientists utilized organic lipid residue analysis. When food is heated in unglazed pottery, fats and oils melt and seep into the microscopic pores of the clay. These trapped fatty molecules can survive intact for more than a millennium.
The team extracted these ancient fats and analyzed their chemical makeup using mass spectrometry, a laboratory technique that identifies specific molecules based on their weight and structure. They focused on specific fatty acids and their distinct carbon isotopes. Isotopes are variations of chemical elements that have slightly different weights, and they leave specific signatures depending on whether an animal lived in a marine or terrestrial environment.
In addition to isotopes, the researchers searched for chemical markers that form only when the highly unsaturated fats found in fish oils are subjected to prolonged heating. The presence of these specific heating markers provides clear proof of fish processing within a vessel. By comparing the levels of specific carbon isotopes and these unique heating markers, the team could differentiate between pots used for land animals and those used to cook aquatic foods.
The physical evidence extracted from the pottery revealed a distinct difference between the use of ceramics in Denmark compared to England. Almost a quarter of the analyzed Danish pots contained distinct biomarkers for heated aquatic oils, indicating that fish stews or similar boiled dishes were common in their homeland. In the English pots, diagnostic aquatic markers were firmly identified in only 13 out of the 298 vessels, representing roughly four percent of the sample.
Instead of fish, the English vessels contained residues overwhelmingly associated with terrestrial animals and animal products. The chemical signatures point to a diet heavily reliant on the meat of grazing animals like cattle and sheep, non-ruminant animals like pigs, and significant amounts of dairy fats. This specific pattern of using pots for meat and dairy persisted across different vessel shapes, diverse geographic locations, and multiple centuries of occupation in England.
The absence of fish residues in the English pots suggests that the Scandinavian settlers pragmatically conformed to local Anglo-Saxon culinary traditions for basic meals. Cooking pots were primarily used to slowly stew land animals and dairy products. The people arriving from Scandinavia appear to have completely adopted this native way of using domestic ceramics.
Even after the end of the tenth century, when the deep-sea fishing trade rapidly expanded across Europe, the use of ceramics in England did not change. Only two of the 27 pots from the sample dating strictly after AD 1000 contained aquatic biomarkers. This continuity provides evidence that the massive increase in fish consumption during this period involved foods prepared entirely outside of ceramic pots.
This data indicates that aquatic foods were processed in completely different ways, likely using techniques that left fewer traces behind. Marine resources may have been baked, smoked, salted, or roasted on iron spits rather than boiled in clay containers. An eleventh-century artwork, the Bayeux Tapestry, illustrates fish being served whole at a banquet table, aligning with the theory that fish were prepared using direct heat rather than chopped up and stewed.
Animal bones and historical illustrations hint that fish might have carried a higher social status during this era. Fish consumption may have been restricted to the tables of the wealthy and prepared using specialized metal pans. A division likely existed between terrestrial meats that were commonly available for daily stews and aquatic foods that were prepared for specific dietary or social occasions.
While the chemical analysis reveals clear patterns regarding ceramic use, the study faces specific challenges regarding complete dietary reconstruction. Identifying non-ceramic cooking methods is difficult because iron cooking pans and roasting spits tend to rust and degrade completely over a thousand years in the soil. Additionally, soapstone cooking vessels brought from Norway do not absorb or preserve lipid residues as effectively as unglazed clay, leaving a blind spot in the analysis of the earliest migrant food practices.
The exact role of plant materials in the Viking Age diet also requires further investigation from the scientific community. The team detected degraded plant waxes and oils in several samples across the surveyed sites. Additional high-temperature testing is necessary to determine exactly which vegetables and grains were stewed alongside the meats and dairy in these settlements.
Questions remain regarding the exact social division of food during this period and how it evolved over time. Future research will likely focus on whether the distinct separation between stewed terrestrial meats and independently prepared aquatic foods was driven purely by practical culinary choices or by deeper class divisions. Addressing these unknowns will help archaeologists continue to map the subtle ways that migrating populations adapt to unfamiliar landscapes.
The paper, “Cuisine and culture-contact: lipid residue analysis reveals lack of aquatic products in pottery from Viking Age England,” was authored by Steven P. Ashby, Anita Radini, Gareth J. Perry, Alexandre Lucquin, and Oliver E. Craig.