At the time of Vikings in Scotland’s publication, the study of combs – like many artefacts – was seen by many as a peripheral pursuit: specialist, but fundamentally empiricist, and perhaps rather old-fashioned. Vikings in Scotland was important in running counter to this trend, putting material culture rather than landscape at the centre of discussion.

The two decades since have seen a transformation in the study of artefacts, including Viking-Age combs. Building on experimental reconstruction (e.g. Galloway and Newcomer 1981), typological study (e.g. Ambrosiani 1981) and analysis as indicators of urbanism (Ulbricht 1978; Christophersen 1980), the application of social theory and scientific method have allowed combs to play a more central role in writing the Viking Age.

New excavations, new combs

Updates could be made to Vikings in Scotland’s survey. Settlement excavations in both the Northern and Western Isles have expanded our corpus, though there is little evidence of manufacture to augment the Whithorn workshop (Nicholson 1997; Graham-Campbell and Batey 1998: 222). A waste assemblage has been identified in a Late Norse phase at Bornais (Sharples 2019: 421–7) but the only new Viking-Age material is one or two fragments from the Bay of Skaill (Ashby 2019: 244–5). Graham-Campbell and Batey were correct in their assertion that the combs of Viking-Age Scotland were carried in or imported from Scandinavia (1998: 222–3).

The distinctiveness of ‘Viking’ and ‘Insular’ combs has allowed both to be used as diagnostic cultural indicators (Figure 23.1). In the Northern Isles, the domination of ‘Norse’ forms in later Viking-Age and medieval contexts has been taken to indicate cultural domination (see, for example, Barrett 2013), while the apparent intermixing of earlier material has been the subject of debate: might this indicate native–settler coexistence or co-operation (see Ritchie 1977; cf. Crawford 1981)?