Dark Age Obscured (History)

[Mick Harper]

Plus they forgot to write an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in time so have to rely on Adam of Bremen, Icelandic sagas and other ... er... things made up by other people. As you say, always make your own stuff up!

[Mick Harper]

Back to Viking Graveyards. After the obligatory men-mucking-about-in-reconstructed-boats and women-are-tough-hombres interludes, there was some important news for our own Where Are All The Anglo-Saxons? obsession. They, or I think a metal detectorist, stumbled across a Viking encampment that was

[Mick Harper]

One of our pet beefs is ‘academic chat’, the way that academics speculate to accumulate. There was a good example of it from a talking head archaeologist, a Professor Howard Williams. They had just discovered the two bodies in the churchyard were father-and-son and there was a need to link them directly with the 264 disarticulated skeletons in the mass grave burial mound a little way off. This was how the link was forged

1. Inspection of the Annals of Ulster revealed a Viking father-and-son
2. They died, a year apart, in Scotland at the right time
3. After a year, the theory went, the father was dug up and transported with the son to Repton, at that time an Anglo-Saxon combination of “Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s cathedral”
4. This converted an Anglo-Saxon top drawer burial ground to a Viking top drawer burial ground
5. Accordingly top drawer Vikings were disinterred from their burial places elsewhere and transported to the mass grave at Repton.

He said this with a perfectly straight face.

[Mick Harper]

So, to sum up Britain’s Viking Graveyard we can do the usual twenty-point fact check

1. It wasn't Viking, it was Danish
2. It wasn’t a graveyard, it was an ossuary
3. It wasn’t Britain, it was England
4. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not a contemporaneous document so shouldn’t be relied on as a historical source
5. The Annals of Ulster is not a contemporaneous document so shouldn’t be relied on as a historical source
6. There is no evidence, historical or archaeological, that Repton church is Anglo-Saxon in origin
7. No archaeology of a ‘great Mercian monastery’ on the site has ever been found even though it must have been bigger than the present parish church, the grounds of which have been excavated for the last forty years
8. There is no evidence of any Anglo-Saxon 'Buckingham Palace/St Pauls' in Repton, near Repton, in Mercia, in the British Isles
9. The father-and-son ‘Viking chieftains’ are buried adjacent to the church wall so must be later than the church walls, which are Norman
10. There is not a single example anywhere in the world of a Viking Age father and son burial.
11. There is no archaeological evidence of the Great Heathen Army anywhere (else)
12. There is a defensive fortified embankment at Repton which is too small to contain the GHA and which goes straight through the present parish church which is supposed to be a rebuilt version of the Anglo-Saxon monastery which has just had a defensive fortified embankment run through it.
13. There is a large enough site for the GHA upriver at Torksey but that lacks a defensive fortified embankment so is probably not the winter camp of the GHA. Gaming pieces found
14. There are ‘fields of Viking finds’ at Foremark in between Torksey and Repton though the bloke who found them quietly corrected this to ‘field’ so probably not the winter camp of the GHA either
15. The search is widened at Foremark, still nothing. Then, a gaming piece is found – "it’s the smoking gun" (because of Torksey).
16. Some burnt stuff is found at Foremark “directly showing evidence of those attacks and what that must have been like for the people living here at the time.”
17. The mass grave cannot be from The Great Heathen Army because the age of the bodies is spread over several hundred years
18. The mass grave cannot be from The Great Heathen Army because the bodies are of the wrong age (mainly seventh not ninth century)
19. The mass grave cannot be from The Great Heathen Army because there are too few cut marks present
20. The mass grave cannot be from The Great Heathen Army because the bones are disarticulated. War dead are buried whole not flayed down to their bones and then the bones buried higgledy-piggledy.

At least one would hope not.

[Mick Harper]

The rationale for altering (and then harmonising) the carbon dates of the 264 people buried in the Great Heathen Army war grave was because fish-eaters eat older carbon than meat-eaters and this is enough to skew the overall figures even though fish is itself a relatively small part of any diet. Maybe these dudes ate sea-birds with a side order of lava cake. But anyway we’d best run the rule over the principle itself.

[Wile E. Coyote]

"Viking gaming piece?"

"Er. Yes"

"Wow"

"Yes"

"So what was the game?"

"Tafl"

"Cripes"

"Yes, Tafl means table"

"So it was a table game?"

"Yes it was a Viking table game"

"So what were the rules?"

"Err, it was a bit like chess, backgammon, fox and hounds"

"Wow." "What are the rules?"

"Err, nobody knows"

"Eh?" "What were the pieces like?"

"Err, a bit like counters"

"So it's a bit like the Roman Game, Ludus latrunculorum, played all over the empire?"

"Yes, I mean no, Tafl was played by the Vikings and Celts"

"You are not as smart as you think!"

"Err, OK, what are the rules of the counter game Ludus latrunculorum?"

"Idiot"

"Idiot"

[Mick Harper]

I am assured by a less scientifically-challenged member of my family that the Marine Reservoir Effect is real both in terms of theory and evidence. He or she (it could have been my sister) claims that the carbon in the ocean is older than the carbon in the atmosphere. I find this concept troubling but I'm accepting it faute de mieux until I have completed my studies into submolecular delay rates in particle physics as applied to organic chemistry, beginning with what a molecule is.

[aurelius]

[Mick Harper]

No, I don't think it's got anything to do with that kind of timescale. I'll just post up what I got from the family oracle since it made a disappointingly large amount of sense.

---------------------------

The MRE is not something I knew anything about, but (thanks) I went and read a few papers. It's one of those things that 'stands to reason' and that you might expect, since atmospheric CO2 dissolves in sea water and (on average) spends a long time there. The ocean carbon sink is very large. By the time the marine organisms get to absorb it, it is likely to be older than the current stuff in the atmosphere, but this varies a lot from ocean to ocean and with different local circumstances. Nevertheless it's been calibrated and measured a lot and there appear to be standard correction tables for different oceans. I think this is a real effect. It would be weird if it weren't so.

Much more uncertainty I suppose from the effects on bones of eating seafood. The C14 in bones derives largely from the protein collagen, and this, I understand, is supposed to be influenced by the C14 content of the protein consumed, which might well have come largely from fish. This sounds reasonable: even Vikings would probably get most of their food energy from terrestrial sources such as oats and barley, but this would not affect their proteins, which would be built up from amino acids in consumed protein. If they really did eat loads of fish, as opposed to beef pork and lamb, then it's entirely possible. Of course if you don't have any standard carbohydrates you can live entirely on livestock products (like eskimos do) and break them down for energy too. That would perhaps give an even stronger effect. It seems to be widely invoked in discussing the pre-history of arctic peoples.

The problem I see in the papers I have read is that there is no independent measure of the actual diet. It is just assumed that the discrepancies between C14 dating and archaeological dating are explicable by the seafood effects. There are some 'controls' in the form of sheep, pig and juvenile bones, assumed to have had only terrestrial food. These show the more recent dates unambiguously. So I'd say good circumstantial evidence, but no smoking gun.

[Mick Harper]

It will be fascinating if they ever get round to carbon dating the whalebone Franks Casket. The nineteenth century reading they will get will require those Life Science johnnies to come up with a whole new set of calibration tables.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Viking Apocalypse (Channel 5)

Another week, another Viking pile of bones, this one in Dorset. The routine was the same as in Repton
1. Establish bones are Viking
2. Send them off for carbon dating
3. Look in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for when Vikings (or similar) were in Dorset
4. Look for best match -- carbon date and ASC date
5. Apply fish-eating re-calibration to match up carbon date and ASC date
6. Go into hyperdrive with bloodthirsty tales

But the odd thing was that the Dorset Vikings had eaten no fish. The carbon dates came back 950-1030, cue tales of Harold Bluetooth, and Step 5 was not required. Now we had been assured last week that all Vikings ate fish because all the bones in the Repton pit had required re-calibration, but it seemed the Dorset archaeologists hadn't got the memo. They didn't even seem aware that Viking bones require re-calibration. No wonder they call them Da-a-arset archaeologists.

[Hatty]

A bioarchaeologist called Dr Cat Jarman posted a tweet on the Viking Graveyard programme

[Mick Harper]

You are vastly underestimating their ability to bamboozle themselves and the Twitter public. There is indeed 'a very good match'. The DNA of one is a very good match of the other's. They are both ninth century, either directly from carbon dating or via the fish-eating get-into-jail clause. Whichever method is used, one year apart cannot be excluded (a hundred years apart cannot be excluded by conventional methods, several hundred years apart by fishier methods). So far, so scientific. But now comes the neat bit. You only have to find a ninth century father and son dying anywhere in the reported western world and, as it were, put them in the hole. The circle is now closed. An elegant combination of archaeology, history and science.

In case you were worrying about that 'close links' reference, don't be. When we are talking about the 'reported western world of the ninth century' everybody and everything is closely linked. Never mind six degrees of separation, in them there desperate times you'd be lucky to be twice removed, though in this case it requires about three or four steps, involving Ulster, Dublin, Scotland and England in order to get this particular father-and-son into this particular grave. In case you were worrying about there being not a single recorded example of a father and son Viking burial, don't be. There is now!