Archaeologists Explain Life In Viking Britain | Digging For Britain | Chronicle

We may be a small island, but we have a big history. Wherever you are, there are worlds beneath your feet, which is why every year hundreds of

archaeologists

across Britain search for more clues to our history. Who lived here, when and how? here here so they're putting it together from all angles Archeology is a complex puzzle linking everything from skeletons to swords to temples to treasure it's biting into your shield biting into your shield yeah from Arney to Devon we'll join the This year's search on sea, land and air. share all the questions and find some of the answers as we join the teams in the field

digging

for Britain throughout its history.

Britain has been divided and enriched by foreign invaders and none have captured our imagination as much as the Vikings, but how much? What we think we know about the Vikings is simply a lost stereotype: did they really live up to their reputation as savages and to what extent did they influence and shape British culture? This year's archeology enriches and challenges our view of the Vikings with artifacts and messages from excavations. They left behind wow, that is a beautiful object like a Norwegian Viking Chief's Fortress inside. This cup is absolutely extraordinary, is it not the magnificent silver horde buried in a time of bloodshed and the victims of a cruel national massacre, but you?

Suddenly we connect with this horrible moment that is his death in Harris' hallway in the outer packs. Archaeologists are beginning to bring evidence of the early Vikings to light. A team from the University of Birmingham is excavating a site called host. The name itself has a Norse origin, a strong hint that the Vikings were here just above these jeans is one of the goals of this season. Now

archaeologists

have been

digging

here before and discovered an iron settlement, but there is some archaeological evidence that the Vikings were here too. A couple of burials threatened by erosion appear to have been Norse and small Norse finds have also been discovered, but archaeologists really hope to find evidence of a settlement and, if they do, it will be the first of their kind Harris, okay, then Alice, what we have here is a very interesting Iron Age site with a bit of a mysterious ending that we're trying to come to terms with at the moment, if you happen to pass by, very surprising. layers in the ground there absolutely the team is being led by Kevin Kohl and I joined them right at the beginning of the excavation season the site may hold the key to the first contacts between the incoming Vikings and the GAC people already living here Is it going to be a story of Destruction, what's a little more mysterious and a little more interesting to me is this deposit here that's sealing off everything else, what am I?

It's a completely different color and a completely different color, it's almost a demolition rubble full of very late Iron Age pottery, right? of charcoal a large amount of waste material sometimes archeology works this way they are finding subtle glimpses into the soil of a time of Abandonment the important thing is that we need to discover when this occurred and that is why we take samples for carbon dating and see If I wait to see if it could be due to the Norse invasion or when the Vikings arrived on the island and if it somehow clashes with the abandonment of this site nearby, a building is emerging that appears to have a rectangular shape, a style that is Scandinavian and , unlike the roundhouses favored by Iron Age people, could this be evidence that the Vikings displaced the original inhabitants?

There's a nice corner here, absolutely yes, and there are a lot of stones in this vicinity, suggesting that the feature runs under the June ones, oh. I can see some here, yes, so they continue to go backwards, possibly in this direction, more here, yes, are you going to extend the ditch backwards? We'll extend the trench back and see if we can get the full plan and see if it's a rectangular house. which will be in line with a North Long house, but so far perhaps the strongest evidence of the meeting of these cultures comes from a scattering of objects found throughout the site.

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We also have this very strange looking thing that looks like a rock if you feel how rough the outside edge is compared to the flat edge. It has been used and used constantly. Yeah, so what is it? We suspect that it is used for working animal skins and that it fits very well in your hand, right? It's very tactile, yes, so these finds are intriguing because they could be post-Iron Age, they could be NOS, you can't really distinguish between them. No, you can't, but from their early research comes the first conclusive evidence of contact with the Vikings: a small piece of steatite or steatite, a material often imported from Scandinavia and found in large quantities at northern sites throughout Great Britain, but what you can.

What can be said about this soapstone bowl fragment is that this is typically Viking, or someone who was already here learned how to make such a thing from a Viking or got it from a Viking or it belonged to a Viking exactly, so the Vikings were here, yes. You can see why the Vikings felt at home here. This is a landscape that perfectly suits your seafaring

life

style. You can imagine their long ships arriving and being moored on these wide flat beaches, ready to start a new

life

in a land that is completely surrounded by sea and the arrival of the Vikings would mark the beginning of a new phase in the history of this island and one that would leave a lasting impression;

It's a story that's still frustratingly just below the surface in Harris, but I don't know. You have to look hard to find more substantial evidence of Norse culture just down the street, in the next hallway from Lewis. It is perhaps the most famous and iconic Scandinavian treasure ever discovered in Scotland. It was found in the 19th century, but dates back to the 12th century, a time when Lewis was controlled by the kings of Norway, still shrouded in mystery. It is a compendium of 93 ivory chess and game pieces that we know as Lewis Chessman. A selection of the chess pieces have returned to Lewis and 180 years after they were first thought to have been I discovered that they are very charismatic little figures and have fascinated me since I was a child.

My grandparents had a replica of the chest. Well, now they're on tour following new research looking at their origins and history, and it's so lovely to come here to save things and see them close to where they were discovered. The new research places the Chessman firmly at the heart of the once powerful but now forgotten Kingdom of the Isles, a hybrid state in northern Gaul controlled by the kings of Norway. It's been directed by Dr David Coldwell from the National Museum of Scotland, so we've got all the characters you'd expect, we've got kings, queens, bishops and knights, and who is this character?

This is a warrior or guardian and today it is normally represented by a tower, it is a tower, in other words, yes, although it is one in particular, as you can see there, it is biting his shield, biting his Shi, yes, in fact, I think it's one of the key pieces of evidence that these pieces were made. in the Scandinavian world because it is a reference to a cult in the Scandinavian world. The cult of the Berserkers. Berserkers were warriors who rose so high before entering battle that they had to bite down on their shields to contain themselves.

Not really. I don't think this Chessman is actually a Berserker, but I think he is the Carver in some way, simply showing his cultural roots or perhaps gently mocking some of his contemporaries by showing that the finding of the Chessmen is shrouded in mystery. Tradition says that a passing merchant lost them, but David believes it is possible that they were owned by an important person who lived in Lewis Lewis was the center or one of the centers of a Scandinavian kingdom, the kingdom of the islands, of which people have now forgotten, but it is a very important kingdom of the European model that was here until 1266 this was the year in which the Vikings gave the herds to Scotland for the sum of 4,000 marks ending four centuries of Norwegian sovereignty in the islands but who made these beautiful detailed figures Studying their faces has revealed that they are divided into five different types, suggesting that they were made by five different craftsmen.

I mean, this face, this face is beautiful, yeah, that's one of my favorites. The craftsman who made this was exceptionally good. and ivory is an incredibly difficult material to carve, it must have taken days to do this, but just the subtlety of the expression there, just the look and even when you step away from the face and look at the knuckles, the detail there I can almost feel that the hand is really gripping that sword, those little hands are absolutely beautiful and the face, the contours of the face, there's even a change in the contour when we go from the cheek to the upper lip, that crease between the nose and the mouth are shown.

These figures may be stylized, but there is every reason to believe that they are based on living Scandinavians. The people who carved them paid attention to authentic details, so the clays are not just a product of the carver's imagination. This is the actual vestment that is being depicted, yes, they clearly have a very good understanding of what they are depicting, they understand the different layers of vestments that a bishop wears, the chassa albs and everything else, and they depict it very carefully . in fact, these craftsmen probably worked in a major center in Norway where they could closely observe high-status Scandinavians, where they may even have had bishops or kings as their patrons.

The Vikings arrived in the Western Isles and created a Scandinavian state to rival the kingdoms of England and Scotland is one we have almost forgotten and we have powerful Viking legacies in the form of incredible craftsmanship that remind us of our shared Scandinavian genes, but we that attracted the Vikings here in the first place in Harris is another site where Archeology reminds us that they first came here to plunder, it is a possible medieval monastery, the ultimate temptation for a seafaring pirate. History tells us that the riches of these Christian monasteries are what attracted the Vikings to our shores.

This site is home to a ruined chapel and there are traces. which dates back to an Iron Age Brock or Tower, Professor John Hunter is supervising the excavations here anyway, if we get it, we stay here, just look around, this is the outside face of the Brock, huge, fantastic, yes, and you can see the collapse. It's a huge drop, a huge thick wall about four meters thick, if there was an early monastery here, you're right on the great sea roots that bring the Norwegian Vikings all the way to Ireland and they would have seen this, it would have been sweet for What Alright just outside the boundary of the possible monastery are some graves that could be nor and the team has discovered the first fragments of whoever was buried here, but is it a long dead Viking?

Ah, he's fine, apart from these bits of bone teeth. a tooth, sure, tell us about that, so where is it from? Well, it looks like a bottom tooth, I think, and it's very worn down, so all the enamel on the top has worn away. I mean, it's someone who is an adult and has been wearing that tooth St for many years, yes, even if these are all the remains of a Viking, does that necessarily prove that he or she lived here or could this be the grave of a sea traveler whose remains were washed ashore before the ship continued?

It's very exciting to be here with archaeologists who are trying to find out what Harris was to the Vikings as part of the HDES. He is on that sea route between Shetland and Orne in the north and Ireland, places that were all firmly part of the Viking world. but what about Harris? Was it just a stopping point where the Vikings were here only transiently or did they actually settle here and settle Roots as the name of the place seems to suggest? Well, they are finding what look like Norse buildings and we have that piece of It also addresses Tite, suggesting that archaeologists are about to find the first hard evidence.

Ence, a settlementHere in Harris, England, there is a town that has more evidence of Viking occupation than anywhere else in Britain. York or Yorkvik, the first Viking. The one who took the city was Ivar the Boneless, a Danish Viking leader and reputed Yorkvik berserker who became the capital of his new Danish territory in 866 AD. For the next 20 years the Danes continued their aggressive expansion until the English king Alfred the Great drew up a treaty. Under the Viking king Guam, the country was divided in two and the Danes received their own territory in the north and east.

The Dan Law with York at its center, although they only ruled it for 100 years. York is still very much associated with the Vikings. and an excavation in the 70s here at Coppergate dragged York's Viking past into the present in a very vivid way. Now all that archeology is sealed under these shops and cafes, but an excavation is currently taking place in another part of the city, not far away. From here and again we begin to see the buried history of this city, so i will visit the excavation to find out what else we can learn about the

viking

s from yuvik archaeologists who have been working in an area called hungate in the center of the city for 4 and a half years it is a huge multi-layered excavation, but at the moment the archaeologists they are almost 3M below the current ground level and they are excavating what interests me about the Vikings and reveal the feeling that they were not only about plundering and fighting, the Vikings were also traders and city builders, once the Vikings They took York, they stayed here raising families and mixing with the previous inhabitants of the city, creating a unique culture known as Anglo-Scandinavian and they remained even after the last Viking king had been expelled expanding their city and raising huge permanent buildings, So, are you in the final phase?

Really yes, this is the final part. Peter Connelly is carrying out excavations here for the York Archaeological Trust. um, your landscape archeology happens to be in an urban area. Surroundings Yes, most of the buildings here are located in an organized grid layout, unexpected evidence that the Vikings had a talent for urban planning, the terrain here slopes gently towards the river, making it an ideal place for loading and unloading. discharge, these buildings were probably storage warehouses and right in the middle of these structures the Vikings built something that would have been totally indispensable. The things I'm digging up right now are indeed human waste.

It's poo um because what I'm sitting on right now is the remains of a Viking bath. or cesspool, all the pieces of animal bones we found here are also used as a general garbage pit, although most of them are human waste. They're getting other pieces here too, but Fortunately, it's not just rubbish that's come out of the ground at Hungate. During the four and a half years that archaeologists have been working here, they've found thousands of artifacts from the Viking period, most of them are pottery and bone and represent domestic waste. but there are a handful of intriguing little finds that give us additional information about what the Vikings were doing in this part of the city.

The finds researcher at York archaeological trust is Nikki roggers so Nikki this is a collection of fines which are all from that dig at hungate they are actually a fraction of what we have found over the 5 years we have been digging there, we have had over 12,000 individual artifacts, what is this here? Well, actually, this is a jet pendant, uh, it's I think it's pretty sweet because the whole thing is a little off center. I like its shape. I mean, it's quite modern looking, but it's actually a very typical shape of that period. So where would that Jets thing have come from?

Do you think he's probably from Whitby? Yes, from the north coast. Yeah, what's up with these accounts? These are amber. No, this is all amber here, so where would that amber have come from that will come from the Baltic area, so the Vikings? Living in Hungary, they imported high quality material, their trade routes extended hundreds of miles across the Scandinavian world, but they also used less exotic material to produce large quantities of an item that is a little more surprising, well, these They are actually skates, really yes, they are effective. um, very easy to do because the bone you know, that size, that shape, you have to do very little to make it rotate, so what's B?

This is a metapodial, isn't it something? It's probably them, usually. metapodial of horse or cattle, well, everything that has been done to this if you look at it is well on the underside, it has been flattened and smooth, so it is a very smooth flat surface and that has been done deliberately to be has deliberately done your foot would have sat here, yes, your heel, there, your toe, there, you couldn't get your foot out of your eye, so you pull yourself with pul so that they don't dance on the ice, don't move, They keep their feet on the ground. and they use them as if they were cross-country skis.

That's all. These simple bone objects connect us with the imported customs of the frozen Nordic lands. Hungate archaeology, the buried evidence of people who lived here in yv a thousand years ago, is not discussed. In monumental remains, we are not looking at the elite of society, but rather we are getting a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people when they began planning their city and we see how they adapted their buildings to suit the terrain and the specific purpose they They had. I wanted them because these people lived in York but maintained a connection to their Scandinavian homeland through the objects they bought used and the war and in a very real way a thousand years ago they were laying the foundations of the York we see today while they were At York, the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons learned to get along in the rest of England, their relationship remained uneasy, although groups of Danes lived and traded here, they had not gained a permanent foothold and large-scale Danish raids continued to Along the coast, the English king Ethel read the Unready was repeatedly forced to pay them with huge sums of money known as danels and the growing tension between these warring nations led to a horrible act, the St Bryce's Day massacre, but the perpetrators of this massacre were not Vikings, they were Anglo-Saxons and whatever.

Furthermore, the murder was sanctioned by the king and R. decreed that all the Danes who had arisen on this island, who sprang up like cockles among the wheat, would be destroyed by a more just extermination. Some of the victims of this extermination may now have been discovered by Archaeologists in a well in Oxford the skeletons of at least 35 people lay in a grave M where they were dumped a thousand years earlier. It is very rare that archaeologists have the opportunity to examine evidence of a particular historical event and one that scholars Okay, actually happened, but I am interested in the analysis of these bones.

Do the bones show evidence of violence? Could they represent the victims of this massacre? Osteologist Krie Phis has been examining his remains for signs of trauma. This was actually the first skeleton we found, but it wasn't until we put his skull back together because it was in hundreds of fragments that we really saw the trauma. There's at least 10 10 blade wounds, so there's a blade doing here here there, so that's three. There is an indirect wound here. And what's up with these little triangular holes? They're puncture wounds made maybe by a spear or something. It's horrible, isn't it?

I mean you hold these bones and these are the bones of someone who died a long time ago, but suddenly we connect with this horrible moment that is his death. Radiocarbon dating has shown that these people died between 998 and 1019 AD, meaning they may have been killed on St Bryce's Day at 10:02, the day the Anglo-Saxons attacked. the Danes and he also has two puncture wounds in his back, there's one there and one a little further down, so they're a pretty small pun on the spine. Do you think they could have possibly been caused by a spear, something that was pushed instead? thrown, yes, so only the tip of the spring pushed in, yes, again, a young man hacked to death.

Horrifyingly, most of these men were between 16 and 25 years old when they incredibly died. The next skeleton they show me is that of a man whose murder was even more cruel than the last, his ear just behind his ear has been split, oh yes, yes, so directly through the mastoid process that a piece of vein behind out of the air, the side of his jaw has been cut off, so there is evidence of Blade's injury here as well. two definite blade wounds on that side of the jaw, he has four wounds on the top of the neck, so it has been cut, yes, and the dens themselves, cutting just below the air, removing the angle of the jaw and then the blade continues and severs the neck vertebrae, yes, other parts of this man's skeleton show more signs of the frantic nature of the attack.

He has three puncture wounds in his pelvis, there are two small wounds there, but they actually come from the back, you can see. These very square shaped puncture wounds that have gone all the way through the bone, so these are the tips of a weapon of some kind mhm that they are pushing up here, yes, so he was attacked from behind, from the left side. Someone stabbed him right above the hip in the back and then he was also stabbed or stabbed from the front as well as from here MH comes in and then hits his pelvis as he passes to the back so he's pinned from all angles all the angles and If the multiple stab wounds were not enough to finish this man off, just in case, they set him on fire.

His forehead was burned, yes, which

explain

s the missing bone in the middle and also his hand, oh yes, it was burned. Is this the only one? skeleton that has signs of burning not many of them about charring yes, it's mainly on their heads um their pelvises and their hands auto Were you surprised when you cleaned these veins and entered the laboratory how much violence had been represented in them very Surprised, I had never seen anything like this before, yes it is, and just to use so many different weapons on a single individual, these skeletons didn't have any of the wounds you'd expect to find on people trying to defend themselves, so it's likely they were.

Killed while fleeing, but if they were Vikings, isotope analysis was inconclusive but showed their diet was rich in shellfish, suggesting they at least lived a Viking way of life and then may have been hunted and killed by So what can we do? Let's say with certainty that we have more than 30 skeletons, all of them men showing signs of extreme violence, although we cannot be sure that they were victims of the Subis Day massacre. The types of injuries and the date of the skeletons make this at least possible. These young men were hacked to death in a frenzy of violence and a thousand years later, this mass murder remains shocking through trauma analysis.

Archeology has allowed us to explore the terrible possibility that the Vikings were victims, but a different kind of archaeological discovery. has opened a window into life for a Viking whose luck had run out. From time to time, metal detectorists discover interesting objects that have been lost, abandoned or even deliberately buried by their owners and then remained hidden in the ground for hundreds of years. years, but it is extremely unusual to find a collection as diverse and illustrating so many different aspects of a past society as The Horde that I am about to see now. It is one of the most important Viking finds of the last 150 years and is so rich in content that experts are still writing down their findings it is currently on display at the Yorkshire Museum so this is it this is the veil of the horde of York was found four years ago by a father and son metal detecting team and it really is an amazing collection of silver objects with one gold piece, but what is really surprising is that most of those objects were found inside that cup.

It is truly spectacular and beautiful, but what I want to know is whether we can learn anything of real archaeological importance from these objects and, given what we know about this period of history in this area, can we get an idea of ​​the person who had this type of wealth in your possession? The Horde is made up of 617 coins and 67 pieces of silver, including pieces of jewellery, all objects that have a great deal to tell us about Ian's Scandinavian world at the time of his burial. This cup is absolutely extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah, it's um, I think probably the best thing in The Horde on its own, it's um, it's the silver cup of guilt, so it's silver and it's been gilded with gold and it was also decorated with nello, which is a type alloy that is black, so when it was first made, it would have been if you think of a wasp, but with aPretty yellow and black contrast, so the detail would have appeared surprisingly well.

Would you like to hold it? I would love to hold it if you put it in your hands, it gives you a very good impression of what this could have been used for when it was originally made what does it feel like to have a mug that wants to be passed on to someone else what do you think was useful given the way it that you hold it with both hands the fact that it is golden brown and may have had a lid we think that could be? in an ecclesiastical vessel something that was used in a monastery so it is possible that this cup that experts believe came from the Frankish Empire fell into Viking hands as loot or payment of tribute as an imp was made in the mid-9th century before the rest of the objects in this collection, but presumably it had special meaning because it lasted another hundred years, so I assume it was passed down from generation to generation and then came to you.

Keep the content of this hord. This object gives us a rare insight into the mentality of a Viking. He has a relic that connects him to his adventuring ancestors and their ill-gotten gains, but not all of the items in this hold had sentimental value, so what about the objects? What were inside it? So are these pieces of jewelry typically? They are Vikings by nature, yes, this is by far the most spectacular, it's the gold, it's the only piece of gold, right, this is the only piece of gold in the horde, um, and if you want to hold it, um, god, that's heavy.

Is it something quite thick? This unique piece is a marker of extreme wealth. Finding gold in the Viking hordes is exceptionally rare, only someone of the highest social position would have had access to it and there are some complete pieces of jewelery but there seems to be a lot of pieces, this part in particular I mean it looks like a brooch or something cut in half and this is very typical of the way the Vikings did things. They had a lot of what we call cut silver on which the Viking economy was based. Silver bar and barter were highly prized by the Vikings and valued for their weight and purity before being cut and used as currency.

Silver could be worn and transported as jewelry. This is what we call penan br if you think about it as the terminal on one end would thin out, form a big spiral and then fatten up again on the other right end and you would have a huge pin in the middle and that would go on your cape to keep it together and This is a particularly beautiful example. I think it has these lovely little circles and a really delicate sort of interlocking pattern, yeah, and it's actually made up of little appearances like little beasts that are kind of chasing their tails, very popular in a kind of Viking iconography. beasts, the Vikings traveled thousands of miles across vast and extensive trade rats to obtain their silver and some pieces within this horde connect the Vikings here in Britain to trading centers as far away as the Islamic world, well that seems like a Arabic writing there, does this.

It is called Durham and it is an Islamic currency, it really is and it comes from Afghanistan. Wow, this is evidence that the Vikings traded all the way to the Middle East, absolutely yes, another coin here sheds light on when this horde was buried. a coin of the English king Athlan minted in 927 AD. just after capturing York from the Viking kings and judging by the lack of wear on its surface, it was placed in the ground almost immediately and if you look very closely you can see I see that this coin actually has the words Rex a Bri , so RX to b r i e oh yeah, yeah, I can see that that basically means king of all of Britain, so this coin proclaims Athlan as the king of all of Britain, so he used this coin to say that he.

He got rid of the Vikings and unified the country and made it into a single kingdom, but although the English king stamped his identity on his coins, the name of the person who owned these riches has been lost to us. All we have are the transmitted clues. For their prized possessions, this horde of beautiful objects raises the tantalizing possibility that what we are seeing is the treasure: a man's life savings, his days among the ruling classes in the north of England numbered, and The Horde It dates precisely from the time. When there is this change of power between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, are we looking at a Viking who flees and buries his wealth for safety?

The only thing we can be sure of is that he never returned to unearth it and rule in Glasgow. It seems an unlikely place to come in search of Viking archaeology, but I'm here to see perhaps the most extensive collection of Norse artefacts anywhere. Viking anywhere in rural Britain. Now these objects are not treasures, they are household items, things that Viking men and women would have used every day of their lives and they have ALS at the beginning of their history because they have been excavated, but the examination and interpretation of them is still a work in progress, so what I want to discover is the potential of this collection to help us understand Viking everyday life, the actual material is fine, but as you can see from the packaging, Beverly Balin Smith has a huge archaeological task to do. ahead: process and record all the small finds from a site called udle in North eist is the largest Norse settlement ever excavated in the Western Isles.

It was a monumental project involving a dedicated group of volunteers who returned to excavate again and again over a 30-year period starting in 1963, but the importance of the site is still only partially understood. I don't think I've ever seen so many bone needles and I imagine we're just getting started so you wanted to take a look at that little poppy. Can we take her out to, oh, look at that, that's really lovely? What are they made of? I think it's a bird bone. It's nice, isn't it? It's really charming. Yes, there are hundreds of decorated bone pins here, perhaps a reflection of their value in everyday life as something to fix a Viking's hair. button up his cape, that's fantastic in a way, these are all lost and found, yeah, things just fell, people left people and no, where did that go? and they threw it in the mud and then archaeologists find it centuries later.

Wow, it's not unusual to find combs in a Viking settlement they are common personal items, the surprising thing about this collection is the sheer amount of them found in one place oh that's fantastic, it has a little animal on it, a horse head I think, and I love these circles that obviously kind of drilled into the bone. I think when you look at things like this you have this immediate contact with someone who lived centuries ago and this was his comb and you also know that you have the same kind of sensitivity that you know. I like to have things that are pretty.

I like to have objects that are not only functional but also attractive. Yes, the enormous task of excavating this site and all the finds buried there was effectively the life's work of historian and archaeologist Ian. Crawford, but unable to continue his task due to health problems, now falls into Beverly, but he ended up amassing quite a collection of fins that you're still looking at, so that's obviously what happened. Did he feel overwhelmed by the amount? he was finding out that I was there when you were working on a huge site with a complicated stratographer, so he continued digging, producing interim reports for each year he excavated, but then there's the next stage of writing up and getting the information. information to the public and I think they just felt overwhelmed even since my visit.

New research has suggested that the volume of beautiful combs may be evidence of a Viking corn-producing industry here, reinforcing how important uel research will be in the coming years. See, it's great to see just a small part of this huge collection of everyday objects that they consider mundane in some ways, but it also shows that just like us, the Vikings like to have nice things and it's great that this collection is being reviewed archaeologically speaking, there is still a lot to learn about this site and all the artifacts it contained and there must be people in North Eist who remember digging at that site in the dunes and I imagine it is important for them to know that the last chapters of the history of Udle are finally being canceled off the northeast coast of Scotland are the Orne Islands colonized by the Vikings in the 9th century sailing from their Norwegian homelands, ships from the north would have taken around a day to reach Here and when they were finally settled the islands became the center of Northern power in Scotland until 1469 the last bastion of Scandinavian authority in Britain today these islands are home to a classic Norse archaeological find and also new excavations that offer tantalizing views of the Vikings in Scotland.

My first destination is The excavation is currently taking place in the east of the continent of Ory, near its ancient capital Kirkwall. It stands atop a 30m high stack of sheer rock, the DNS Brock, which is difficult to access even today. It is such a wild place that there is nothing here but cliffs. sea ​​and birds and I'm walking down this path that I can't imagine was here a thousand years ago, so I wonder how people crossed the land to brother, this is such an exposed place, today is a beautiful day, but Picture this On a windswept rainy day, Brock is fully exposed to the legendary Orcadian winds.

What an extreme place to choose as your home, whether coming from the mainland or from boats secured in a nearby bay, getting here can't have been easy. The path to Brock has disappeared into the sea, so we are now heading up the original entrance to the site. Can we go and take a look? Of course we can, some of the archeology you're exploring. There was once a settlement. There are around 30 Viking houses here and Dr James Barrett and his team are excavating one of them this season, so this would have been the original entrance. This is the original entrance to the phase we're excavating right now, so there was a settlement here. before the Vikings arrived and the ground level at that point was at the top of that layer and then the Viking Age houses were literally dug into the ground and lined with stone walls, which you see here and then above, at ground level, the rest.

Of the house would have been built of grass and wood, it is likely that the Vikings dug their houses so deep into the ground to withstand the extreme winds that often blow here and evidence of life inside one of those houses came to light during my visit oh wow Oh my goodness, so let's go in here and, beautiful, it's moments like these that make archeology so rewarding, discovering an unexpected find, a forgotten part of someone's life, if you start to cleaning up most of the loose stuff around it, that's great. just brilliant, this is a

viking

game board that was thrown into this rubbish pit, this midden that we just found in the corner of the trench and it's wonderful to hold something that was obviously a very personal item to someone, something they would have enjoyed using it a thousand years ago it looks like a board to play the popular Viking game a nefle is something that could have kept people busy instead of tending crops or raising animals a task that would have been impossible up here so their food must have been brought from other nearby farms or settlements and only someone of the highest status could have demanded this from their neighbors, perhaps a Viking chieftain and his retinue, but it begs the question of why live in such a difficult place the way it works.

It is what you see, it is a site that is about seeing and being seen and when people ask me why they were here when I want to give a simplistic answer it is to make it clear that it gives you extraordinary control of the maritime Vantage and on top of that. They will see you, so if you imagine a big hall here, if you enter the archipelago you will immediately know who you have to go to and talk to you, you know who the boss is. I'm quite enthralled by this ancient clifftop settlement, it looks like it.

An extraordinary place to live so wild and windy with these waves crashing around you. The men and women who lived here must have been very isolated in some ways, but on the other hand they could not have survived here alone, they depended on support. of people living on mainland Arney, but who were they? One of the reasons the Vikings seem so mysterious is that they left few written records in Britain, but it's a mistake to think they didn't do it properly. They used runes and last year James found a small bronze. strip with a mysterious message etched into its surface, Professor John Hines examined it to see if he could make any sense of it.

It takes quite a while to get used to it, but once you look at these things, you start to see certain letters that We're familiar with that, if you look at it, here we have that letter so it's pretty clear, so there's very clearly what we would call i i and another C and we have a U at the end of thatSome letters of the Scandinavian runic alphabet look like ours and others are more cryptic to make it even more difficult, they changed over time and experts continue to discover new letters and symbols, unfortunately, in all the bits I can read, I just can't put them in. enough together to form coherent words and coherent chains of words, interestingly, virtually all the Marks we have that we can identify as the kind of things they were using as runes, have abbreviated what they write, rather like people who are younger than Lo What I do when they text me and I try to figure out what they do, what they really say.

It is frustrating to be so close and at the same time so far from knowing what this Viking who lives in the creek of DNS has written, a message from the Scandinavian orne that we will probably never decipher the Norse archeology that I have seen on nney has shown me some of the purest evidence of that culture because when the Vikings came here, they transplanted their entire way of life from Norway and this This year's research has unearthed unexpected evidence of this Viking lifestyle of how they settled and shaped our landscape, as well as evidence of raids here, such as the ivory chest carved in a Norwegian workshop, tangible proof of a rich and forgotten kingdom, the buried life savings of a powerful Viking whose wealth connects us to vast trading empires, and the horrific massacre of the St Bryce's Day, when men could have been killed just for being Scandinavians by their invaders.

Britain became firmly connected to the continent and beyond, and archeology helps us understand how these outsiders came and enriched our culture and ended. becoming British and so the excavation continues