Sheep have been exploited, developed, and moved across vast areas since the Bronze Age. Milk led to domestication but changes to the coat of early sheep increased the amount of wool fibre and altered the quality of fleece each animal produced. Wool became a valuable economic product and breeding responded to market forces. Some breeds were raised primarily for wool, others for milk or meat, a process that continually led to changes in sheep breeds.

Product specialisation in sheep breeds was not desirable everywhere. In the far northwest fringe of Europe, characteristics found in wild sheep such as horns, a moulting fleece and hairy wool that were being eradicated elsewhere were kept. These traits were beneficial for sheep in this environment and useful to their owners. People in northern latitudes required sheep that could be relied on to produce a range of quality products and remain viable to reproduce a healthy new generation. This was particularly important for adventurers, explorers and settlers who set off from their Scandinavian homeland to establish a new life in the North Atlantic. Subsistence agropastoralism relied on versatility, not specialisation, and influenced sheep husbandry strategies and breeding.

The regular presence of caprine remains at Viking and medieval farm sites in the North Atlantic region indicates the importance of sheep and goat rearing. Archaeological investigations into farm and livestock management have regularly focused on caprines primarily as producers of milk and secondarily for meat and hides. Recent attention has begun to focus on wool, not only milk and meat, as a necessary and valuable raw material for living in the northern marine environment. The majority of cloth for clothing, bedding and other textiles needed by the household, farm and community, including cloth for shipbuilding and haulage, came primarily from sheep. Wool became increasingly important by the medieval period, when it also was used to pay tithes, taxes, rents and wages.

The present analysis considers sheep as a living source of wool for textile making in the areas settled by Scandinavians, beginning with the Viking diaspora in the eighth century (Fig. 1.1).