Several of these crafts demanded highly skilled practitioners and this skill and
knowledge was passed on and developed through generations. Although local variations
existed, advances in one part of Scandinavia were taken up elsewhere quite swiftly.
Sufficiently dense and well-organised networks must have existed within several crafts.
To maintain quality and pass on skills in certain crafts, for instance metal casting, well-
organised and long-lasting workshops must have existed in several of the towns. The
excavation of one such workshop at Birka supports this assumption. Nevertheless, the
products demonstrate that skills varied considerably. It is a fact that the quality of glass
beads produced in Scandinavia fell rather dramatically from the eighth to the ninth
century, never to regain its former level.
Also the character of trade was altered during the early Viking Age and the towns
undoubtedly played an important role in this development. To track down these changes
it is more illuminating to use the common term exchange for the various types of
transactions that took place in this period and before (Skre 2001 , 2007 b). Trade, in the
sense that one acquires goods with the intention of selling them for a better price,
probably also took place, but it hardly dominated the exchange of goods. Trade in this
sense was probably mostly performed by people who transported the goods from their
areas of origin to markets and towns elsewhere. These goods may have been acquired in
different types of exchange, also as gift, tribute, tax or by sheer plunder. In addition, and
this may have been the more common type of transaction in towns, craftsmen and other
kinds of producers bartered their products to acquire things they needed. Or they may
have sold them for silver for which they could buy goods, pay fees, etc.
One given item may have undergone several types of exchange on its way from the
producer to its final consumer. The fur trade, in which Birka and possibly other Viking
Age towns were heavily engaged, must have involved a variety of exchange types.
One would assume that agents for the local aristocracy obtained fur from the hunters,
possibly including Sámi, through barter or tribute close to the hunting grounds. The
furs were then brought to Birka, probably through channels controlled by the same
aristocracy. In Birka the fur was processed, including the cutting off of paws; hence the
numerous paw bones from squirrel, marten and fox, even the odd one from bear, found
there. Then most of the furs were probably sold in Birka, possibly for silver, and
transported further afar for resale or use. This kind of product may also have served as
gifts among aristocratic friends and allies.
Although all of these types of exchange existed throughout the period, their relative
importance shifted dramatically. By the end of the Viking Age paying with silver made
up a much higher proportion of transactions than at the start (Hårdh 1996 ; Gustin
2004 ). The towns seem to have been leading this development. In the late tenth century
a regular bullion economy existed in south and central Scandinavia. In the eleventh
century payment with unminted silver gradually disappeared as coins took over as the
dominating means of payment. However, in the tenth century cut-up pieces of Arab
silver coins, ingots and ornaments are commonly found in hoards, towns and market-
places. At the beginning of the century they are found most frequently in parts of
Scandinavia with towns from the same period. Cut-up pieces of silver are much rarer in
the ninth century, but excavations in the towns have yielded some, particularly from
the second half of the century. At this early stage the majority of the silver fragments
weigh less than 2 g, indicating that silver was used in everyday transactions involving
items of modest value.
–– chapter 8 : The development of urbanism in Scandinavia––