why soapstone?

I have signed up for a short course next month, which has an on-line component, and the course has a forum discussion section, with an "introduce yourself and your research section".  I posted a short intro of myself, which said:

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I doing a second PhD, half-time, and long distance, in Archaeology this time. My research is a provanancing study of Viking Age Swedish Steatite (soapstone).

 

I am a life-long non-traditional student.  I loves school so much, that when graduated high school (in 1984 in Alaska) I enrolled in the local "college" (as they call it in the states) with the goal of "being a student forever", and started taking a random assortment of classes because they sounded fun, and not aimed at any particular degree. Six years later a friend of mine was trying to decide which graduate school offering him money he was going to accept.  This was my first introduction to the fact that it was possible to get paid to be a student (I was the first person in my family to get a university education), and my goal suddenly changed from being a student forever, to being paid to be a student. The only problem was how to choose only one "major" field of study so that  could get the bachelor's degree needed to go on to be a graduate student?  There are so many interesting subjects...

 

I wound up choosing geology as my major because I enjoyed rock-climbing and loved mountains and wanted to know more about both.  This path led me to Oregon for the Bachelor's degree, back to Alaska for my Master's, and to Tasmania for my PhD. Years later I settled in Luleå Sweden, where I first did a post-doc in geology, and then, when that funding ran out became the laboratory for a Laser-ablation ICP-MS lab here.  Since that was a half-time position, and I have also always been interested in archaeology, when I saw the ad for a "geoarchaeology" half-time PhD position in Durham I applied, suggesting that I could use my laser lab for doing the analyses.  I was delighted to find out that once one has that first PhD it is possible to enrol in another without having really taken undergraduate classes in the new subject, at least if there is some overlap in the skill sets needed. 
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Which got a reply that said:

"Your research sounds super interesting! May I ask what caused you to decide to study soapstone? Did you have any particular encounters with it during your rockclimbing expeditions? Or did you perhaps encounter it in a museum, or was it a particular use the type of stone was used for that fascinated you? When you mentioned Viking Age, my mind immediately connected the era and stones to runestones. Was soapstone used for rune inscriptions?"

Having taken the time to answer her there, I thought I may as well share here, too, as someone else might be interested in the answers:

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Thanks, I am enjoying the research so far.  As to how I finally settled on soapstone, it wasn't easy. When I first saw the ad for the half-time PhD position I sent an email explaining that I was interested in aarchaeology, had a degree in geology, and a half-time job managing a LA-ICP-MS lab. I mentioned that I had read some papers that used Raman to measure composition in garnets in Merovingian jewelery to determine where the stones came from, and thus say something about trade routes, and that I would enjoy doing a similar project with my lab. This led to a number of different emails being exchanged back and forth, during which the list of potential projects just kept growing. However, it isn't feasible to do multiple projects on lots of different materials (the list included garnet, glass beads, spindle whorls, and many more), so we needed to narrow it down to just one. Therefore we switched to a skype conversation, and two hours later finally settled on soapstone, for a number of reasons:

• While garnets are very near and dear to my heart (there is SO MUCH information recorded in garnet about the changes in temperature and pressure at which the mineral was growing, and garnet analysis was a big component of my first PhD research), and they appear often in lots of pretty objects from a variety of cultures, usually said objects are so nice I wasn't certain we could convince a museum to let us do laser-ablation on them, since it does leave a mark (unlike the Raman used in the articles I had mentioned)
• Another mineral that featured in my PhD research, and in my first post doc, is talc, which is the main component of soapstone, and I am nearly as fond of it as garnet
• Soapstone in the Viking Age was used for every-day household objects, including cooking pots, spindle whorls, and more. Being less fancy than jewelery, the odds of being permitted to actually analyze it goes up. It is also so soft that it is possible to leave a scratch mark on it with a finger nail, which means that the very minor damage left by a laser wouldn't really be noticeable in addition to all of the other wear and tear the object has received over the years.
• In the course of the conversations and background reading I was doing I found out that the Vikings used soapstone, but not ceramics, for their cooking, with the result that in some places they settled where there had been a tradition of ceramics, the pottery shards completelydisappear from the archaeological record, only to re-appear after the Viking occupation of the area. Furthermore, it was so important to their lifestyle, they took it with them to their settlements which have no available soapstone quarries (like Iceland--it simply isn't possible, geologically speaking, to find soapstone on that island, other than what the people brought with them, and they did).
• Finding out that it was so common to cook with made me realize that in all of my years of historical re-enactment camping events I had never once seen anyone cooking with a soapstone pot, and I wondered why not? (Though I did once see a flat piece of soapstone being used as a bakestone for flatbread cooked over an open fire. yum!)

I don't happen to know of any examples of soapstone being used as runestones off the top of my head. However, I do know of an example here in northern Sweden of a soapstone cliff face which has rock art dating back to the the stone age, and continuing off an on over time, including Viking age drawings of ships, right up to modern graffiti. (To be fair I didn't know about that one till I stumbled upon the paper about it, after I started this project.) However, I do know of a runic inscription on a spindle-world that is in the collection of the Swedish Historical Museum.
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