This is a huge digression away from Ragnar Lodbrok, but please bear with me - I was spurred on by the mention of the Jomsvikings :)
When I studied archaeology close to 20 years ago I remember we had a little book called "Wolin - Jomsborg : en vikingetids-handelsby i Polen" by Władysław Filipowiak (Roskilde 1991) on our curriculum. And a colleague of mine wrote about the (later) danish crusades in Pomerania (Poland). King Olaf Tryggvasson also did some expeditions down there as you may well be aware of. So I had to dig up that book recently.
There is a great deal of interesting books regarding archaology and the vikings, perhaps particularly in the UK. The following books I have found quite interesting (from the time of my studies):
Graham-Campbell, James (ed.): Cultural Atlas of the Viking World (Oxford 1994)
Graham-Campbell, James (ed.): Vikings in Scotland - an archaelogical survey (Edinburgh 1998)
Iversen, Tore: Trelldommen - Norsk slaveri i middelalderen (Bergen 1997)
Sawyer, Peter (ed.): The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings (Oxford 1997).
In The Cultural Atlas of the Viking World there is an interesting passage about the slavic trading towns:
"The pagan Slavic tribes who lived around the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic were becoming consolidated at this time into larger national groupings in a way that resembled broadly what was happening in Scandinavia. The tribes of the western Slavs - including the Obrotites, Wiltzi and Rufieris in the territory of eastern Germany today, and the Wolins and Pomeranians in western Poland - maintained a number of coastal settlements that were of great importance in the Baltic trading sphere. They would have been well-known to merchants from eastern Scandinavia and farther afield, including the Arabs who sometimes sent embassies and trading missions far to the north. Archaology has uncovered many of these settlements, and particularly important discoveries have been made at Arkona and Ralswiek on the island of Rügen in the southern Baltic, the capital of the Rugieris, where the remains of a great trading center, a fortress and one of the largest pagan temples in the Slav lands have been found.
Other coastal market centers at Menzlin, Rostock, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg (Germany), and Wolin, Truso and Kołobrzeg (Poland) are of similar character to those of eastern Scandinavia and Gotland. For example, at Wolin, an island at the mouth of the Oder, archaologistss have uncovered the well-preserved remains of a waterside town; the wooden houses and streets surrounded by a rampart with palisade defences closely resembling those of the contemporary Viking towns at Hedeby and Birka. The buildings contained debris from a wide range of craft-working activities, with particularly fine objects carved in Baltic amber. Wolin was also a center of Slavic cult worship, and an elaborate temple has been excavated, placed by tree-rings to around 966. The Scandinavians knew Wolin as Jómsborg, and during the 10th century it may have been the base of the semilegendary Viking warrior fraternity known from sagas as the Jomsvikings. It seems likely that Scandinavian merchants were permanently settled in some of these Baltic market centers. A large number of Viking graves have been excavated outside the town at Menzlin, on the Peene river in eastern Germany, and it is possible that an élite group of Scandinavian warriorss were permanently settled on one bank of the river from where they may have controlled access to the town.
For the Vikings, the significance of these western Slavic trading centers was that they stood close to the mouths of the Oder and Vistula rivers, the great arteries of trade that gave access, via the Danube, to the Black Sea, and Byzantium (medieval Constantinople and modern Istanbul), and thus to the wealth of the Byzantine empire. The portages along this route were quite difficult to traverse, and many Swedish Vikings, chose to travel to Byzantium by the more easterly route that went through the Gulf of Finland. Along the Way they encountered - and perhaps helped to establish - small coastal trading centers controlled by the eastern Slavs at sites such as Druzno in eastern Poland, Kaup on the Kaliningrad coast, Grobin in Latvia, and Tallinn in Estonia. THey then sailed their merchant ships up the Neva river to Lake Ladoga and the mouth of the Volkhov river. From here they turned southwards to Novgorod on Lake Ilmen, and thence entered the Lovat-Dnieper river road that led to the Black Sea and Byzantium."
Anyways, just wanted to share.. :)
