A Different Kettle of Fish: Vikings changed their cooking habits when they settled in England

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Posted on Monday 16 February 2026

Departmental team demonstrates that pottery from Viking-Age England was very rarely used to cook fish

A Torksey Ware Jar from Coppergate York — A Torksey Ware Jar from Coppergate, York (Image: Yorkl Archaeology, CC-BY-NC 4.0)

New research just published in Antiquity uses biomolecular analysis to find important culinary differences between Viking-Age England and Denmark. The study was produced by a research team including the department's Steve Ashby, Gareth Perry, Alexandre Lucquin and Oliver Craig, together with former member of staff Anita Radini (now of University College Dublin).

The expression of identity in Viking-Age England has long been a subject of discussion, but it is often looked at through things like language, landscape, architecture and artefacts. We know that food is an important medium in making identity, particularly in communities influenced by migration. So might it be possible to see that in the archaeology? Animal bones tell us a lot about what people ate, but looking at pots and the residues preserved within them can tell us different things about how foods were prepared, cooked, and eaten.

This project set out to explore this, by looking at what we believe is the most extensive programme of organic residue analysis yet undertaken on early-medieval pottery, looking at material from a range of sites in eastern England, including York, Lincoln, London and Newark, as well as Ribe and Aarhus in Denmark.

The team were particularly interested in fish, as something often associated with 'Viking' identity. They found that while almost a quarter of the pots from sites in Denmark were used to cook fish, evidence of this practice was only identified in 13/298 from sites in England. The appearance in England of new forms of pottery (which must suggest different ways of cooking) does not affect this pattern. Ashby et al suggest that this all represents the re-making of identities, as Scandinavians settled into new communities in eastern England, and apparently pragmatically fit into existing ways of cooking and eating.

The research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘Melting pot: food and identity in the age of the Vikings’ (AH/M008568/1), with support from the Department of Archaeology Research Fund.

The paper is published in Antiquity, and available on Open Access:

Ashby, S.P., A. Radini, G.J. Perry, A. Lucquin & O.E. Craig. 2026. Cuisine and culture-contact: lipid residue analysis reveals lack of aquatic products in pottery from Viking Age England. Antiquity: Published online 2026:1-17. doi:10.15184/aqy.2026.10288