ABSTRACT
A new generation of towns emerged in Norway in the late tenth to early eleventh centuries. During the Middle Ages the towns became local, regional or even superregional and international centres of administration, religion and trade. This chapter attempts to give a broadly based overview of early medieval Norwegian urban production, procurement and consumption of domestic and exotic materials. It is mainly based on archaeological sources. It is broad in the sense that it involves several types of production, raw materials and goods and applies a comparative perspective where most of the known early medieval Norwegian urban sites are included. For Scandinavia, written sources that concern urban production, consumption and procurement of materials and goods are rare and deal almost exclusively with periods after the early Middle Ages. Wood was the main resource used in the towns' non-monumental secular settlement and the towns' infrastructures – roads, passages, wells, harbour structures, etc. – were almost exclusively built in timber.
