The ‘Pagan Norse Graves of Scotland’ Research Project (PNGS) was initiated in 1995 with the award of a research grant to James Graham- Campbell (UCL) by the Leverhulme Trust. This, together with funding from the National Museums of Scotland (NMS), enabled the creation of a temporary post at NMS to catalogue and research Viking-Age gravefinds, to which Caroline Paterson (then Richardson) was duly appointed. In 1997, NMS with Historic Scotland funded a short extension for her to accession the finds from the Norwegian excavations of the Viking cemetery at Westness, Rousay, Orkney (Kaland 1993; Sellevold 1999, 2010), then newly returned from Bergen, in part intended for display in the new Museum of Scotland.

After a fallow period, PNGS was revived in 2017 thanks again to the Leverhulme Trust, with the award to Graham-Campbell of an Emeritus Fellowship, but in the meantime there were several lesser, but no less welcome, grants in support of PNGS (to be acknowledged in the final publication). The present outline, by Graham-Campbell and Paterson, includes a review of relevant recent literature on the subject by Stephen Harrison (University of Glasgow).

The point of departure for PNGS has been the catalogue of ‘Viking antiquities in Scotland’, published in 1940 by the Norwegian archaeologist Sigurd Grieg, based on a study-tour undertaken during a couple of months in 1925 (1940: 9–10). It formed the basis for general studies of the material by both Brøgger (1929, 1930) and Shetelig (1945, 1954) and is an indispensable work, but ‘the book teems with blunders’ (Thorsteinsson 1968: 164). For anyone wishing to map the distribution of pagan Norse graves in Scotland (for example, Crawford 1987, fig. 31), it is all that there has been to go on, with the result that Grieg’s inaccuracies and errors (including duplications) have inevitably been reproduced in terms of both overall numbers and individual examples of doubtful date/provenance. In the case of numbers, for example, PNGS has been able to increase Shetland’s three accepted graves to maybe thirteen (Graham-Campbell 2016, with additions), and for Orkney, including the two burial places at Pierowall, Westray and Westness, Rousay (see below), the total has reached a possible ninety-seven.