Archaeologists Explain Life In Viking Britain | Digging For Britain

we might be a small island but we've got a big history everywhere you stand there are worlds beneath your feet and so every year hundreds of archaeologists across Britain go looking for more clues into our story who lived here when and how so there a bling here here so he's being attached from all angles Archaeology is a complex jigsaw puzzle drawing everything together from skeletons to swords temples to treasure he's biting his shield biting his shield [Music] yeah from Arney to Devon we're joining this year's Quest on sea land and air we share all of the questions and find some of the answers As We join the teams in the field digging for Britain [Music] throughout its history Britain has been divided and enriched by Invaders from overseas and none have gripped our imaginations quite as much as the Vikings but how much of what we think we know about the Vikings is just lost a stereotype do they really live up to their Savage reputation and how much did they influence and shape British culture this year's Archaeology is enriching and challenging our vision of the Vikings with digs artifacts and messages they left behind wow that is a beautiful object like the Fortress of a Norwegian Viking Chief in orne this cup is absolutely extraordinary isn't it the Magnificent horde of silver buried in a time of Bloodshed and the victims of a vicious Nationwide Massacre but you're suddenly kind of connecting with this awful moment which which is his death on the aisle of Harris in the outer herdes archaeologists are just starting to bring evidence of the earliest Vikings to light [Music] a team from the University of Birmingham is digging at a site called host the name itself has a Norse origin a strong hint that the Vikings were [Music] here just over these jeans is one of this season's targets now archaeologists have been digging here before and they discovered an iron settlement but there is some archaeological evidence that the Vikings were here too a couple of burials threatened by erosion seem to have been Norse and small Norse finds have been discovered as well but the archaeologists are really hoping that they're going to find evidence of a settlement and if they do that it will be the first of its kind on [Music] Harris okay then Alice what we have here is a very interesting Iron Age site with a bit of a mysterious end to it which we're sort of trying to come to terms with at the moment um if you step this way some very striking layers in the ground there absolutely the team is being led by Kevin Kohl's and I joined them right at the start of the digging season the site May hold the key to the first contacts between incoming Vikings and the GAC people already living here will it be a story of Destruction what's slightly more mysterious and slightly more interesting for for me is this deposit here that's sealing everything else what is that me it's completely different color as well completely different color it's almost a demolition debris full of very late Iron Age Pottery right and lots of charcoal lots of sort of waste material sometimes archaeology works this way they're finding subtle glimpses within the soil of a time of Abandonment the important thing is we need to find out when this occurred and that's why we taking samples for carbon dating and see if hopefully see if it can be um because of the Norse the Norse Invasion or when the Vikings came to the island and whether it sort of clashes with this site being abandoned close by a building is emerging that seems to be rectangular in shape a style that is Scandinavian and unlike the roundhouses favored by Iron Age people so could this be evidence of Vikings displacing the original inhabitants man there's a nice corner here absolutely yeah and there's lots of stones in this vicinity which suggests that the the feature is running under the Junes oh I can see some here yeah so they carry on going backwards possibly in this direction more here yeah are you going to extend the trench back we will extend the trench back and see if we can get the full plan and see if it is a a rectangular house which will be in line with a 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 across the site history hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans enjoy our Rich library of documentaries covering key events and locations of the medieval period history hits medieval offering features leading historians such as Dan Jones Elena yanega and Cat jman not only that but we have a rich library of audio documentaries covering every period of History through our network of podcasts sign up now for a free trial and Chronicle fans get 50% off their first 3 months just be sure to use the code Chronicle at checkout so we have the things on this side are late IR Ag and date so you've got a a storage jar or a big cooking pot there made from uh ceramic we've also got this very strange looks like a a rock if you feel the coarseness of the outside edge when compared to the flat Edge it's been used and used constantly yeah so what's that being used we suspect it's used for working animal hides and that fits so nicely in your hand doesn't it it's very tactile yeah so these finds are intriguing because they could be later Iron Age they could be NOS you can't really distinguish between them no you can't but from their early investigations comes the first conclusive proof of contact with the Vikings a tiny scrap of steatite or soap stone a material often imported from Scandinavia and found in great quantities on North sites right across Britain but what you can say from this fragment of soapstone bowl is that this is typically Viking either somebody who was already here learned how to make such a thing from a viking or they got it from a viking or it belonged to a viking exactly so the Vikings were here yeah you can see why the Vikings might have felt at home here this is a landscape that's perfectly suited to their seafaring way of life you can just imagine their long Ships coming in and being pulled up on these flat wide beaches ready to start a new life in a land that's completely surrounded by sea and the arrival of the Vikings would Mark the beginning of a new phase in this Island's history and one that would leave a lasting impression it's a history that is still frustratingly just below the surface on Harris but I don't have to look far to find more substantial evidence of Norse culture just up the road on the adjoining aisle of Lewis is perhaps the most famous and iconic Scandinavian treasure ever discovered in Scotland it was found in the 1800s but dates from the 12th Century a time when Lewis was controlled by the kings of Norway still shrouded in mystery it's a compendium of 93 ivory chess and gaming pieces known to us as the Lewis Chessman a selection of the Chessmen has come back to Lewis and 180 years after they were first thought to have been found they are such charismatic little figures and I've been fascinated by them since I was a child my grandparents had a replica chest set well now they're on tour following a new piece of research looking at their Origins and their story and it's so lovely to come here to stor away to 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 North gallic State controlled by the kings of Norway the project has been led by Dr David Coldwell from the national museum of Scotland so we've got all the characters you would expect we've got kings and queens and Bishops and knights and who's this character here right this is a a a warrior or Warder and nowadays he's normally represented by a tower he's a rook in other words yeah although he this particular one as you can just see there he's biting his shield biting his Shi yeah this in fact I think is is one of the key bits of evidence that these pieces were made in the Scandinavian world because that's a reference to a cult in the Scandinavian World The Cult of the Berserkers the Berserkers were warriors who got so high before get into battle that they they had to bite their their Shields to hold themselves back really and uh I don't think this this this Chessman is really a Berserker but I think it's the the Carver in a way um just showing his cultural roots or perhaps gently poking fun at some of his contemporaries by by showing [Music] that the finding of the Chessmen is shrouded in mystery tradition has it they were lost by a passing Merchant but David thinks it's possible they were owned by an important person living on Lewis Lewis was the center or one of the centers of a Scandinavian Kingdom the kingdom of the Isles which people have now forgotten about but it's a very important Kingdom on a European model which was here until 1266 this was the year in which the Vikings handed the herdes over to Scotland for the sum of 4,000 marks ending four centuries of Norwegian sovereignty on the islands but who made these beautiful figures detailed study of their faces has revealed that they fall into five different types which suggests they were made by five different Craftsmen I mean this face this face is beautiful yeah that's uh one of my favorites um the Craftsman who made this um was uh was was exceptionally good and ivory is an amazingly tough material to carve must have taken days to do this but just the the subtlety of of the expression there just the the look and even when you move away from the face and and you look at the knuckles the detail there you can almost sense that that the that the hand is actually gripping that sword those little hands are absolutely beautiful and and the face the Contours of the face there's even a a change in Contour when we go from the cheek down to the upper lip that that crease between the nose and the mouth is shown these figures may be stylized but there's every reason to believe they're based on living Scandinavians the people who carved them were paying attention to authentic details so the Clays aren't just figments of the imagination of the Carver this is real attire that is being represented yes they clearly have a have a very good understanding of what they're representing they understand the different layers of vestments a bishop is wearing the chassa albs and and everything else um and they represent that that very carefully indeed 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 [Music] patrons the Vikings came to The Western Isles and created a Scandinavian state to rival the kingdoms of England and Scotland one that we've all but forgotten about and we have potent Viking legacies in the form of amazing craft workk that reminds us of our shared Scandinavian genes but what lured the Vikings here in the first [Music] place back on Harris is another site where the Archaeology is reminding us that they first came here to plunder it's a possible medieval Monastery the ultimate Temptation for a seafaring pirate history tells us that the riches of these Christian monasteries are What drew the Vikings to our Shores this site houses a ruined chapel and there are traces dating all the way back to an Iron Age Brock or Tower professor John Hunter is overseeing the excavations here anyway if we get we stand here we just look around here this is the outer face of the Brock huge huge fantastic yeah and you can see the collapse is fall massive massively thick wall four 4 M thick roughly if there was an early Monastery here you're directly on the the great sea roots that bring Norwegian Vikings all the way down to Ireland and they would have seen this it would have been sweet for the taking really well just outside the boundary of the possible Monastery are some Graves that might be nor and the team has discovered the first fragments of whoever was buried here but is it a long Dead Viking oh okay so as well as these bits of bone tooth a tooth right tell us about that then where's it from uh well it looks like a lower inzer I think and it's very worn so all of the enamel on the top has has been worn down it's I mean it's somebody who's he's an adult and he's been wearing that tooth St for many years yeah even if these are all the remains of a Viking does it necessarily prove that he or she lived here or might this be the grave of a passing seaf farer whose remains were brought to shore before the ship continued on its way it's very exciting being here with archaeologists who are trying to work out what Harris was to the Vikings as part of the hdes it's 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 off point where the Vikings here only transiently or did they actually settle here and put down Roots as the place name seem to suggest well they're finding what look like Norse buildings and we have that piece of steer Tite as well which suggests that the archaeologists are just on the brink of finding the first hard evidence Ence a viking settlement here on Harris in England there's one city that boasts more evidence of Viking occupation than anywhere else in [Music] Britain York or yorvik the first Viking to take the city was Ivar the Boneless a Danish Viking leader and reputed Berserker yorvik became the capital of his new Danish territory in 866 ad for the next 20 years the Danes continued with their aggressive expansion until the English king Alfred the Great Drew up a treaty with the Viking king Guam the country was sliced in two and the Danes were given their own territory in the north and east the Dan Law with York at its heart even though they only ruled him for 100 years York is very much still 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 of that Archaeology is sealed beneath these shops and cafes but there's a current excavation going on in another part of the city not far from here and again we're starting to see the buried history of this city so I'm going to to visit the dig to find out what more we can learn about the Vikings of [Music] yuvik archaeologists have been working in an area called hungate in the center of the city for 4 and a half years it's a huge multi-layered excavation but right now the archaeologists are almost 3 M below today's ground level and digging what I'm interested in the Viking lay and they reveal feeling that they were not just about looting and fighting the Vikings were Traders and Builders of cities too once the Vikings had taken York they stayed here bringing up families and blending with the city's previous inhabitants creating a unique culture known as Anglo Scandinavian and they remained even after the last Viking king had been expelled expanding their town and putting up huge permanent buildings so are you into the Final Phase really yeah this is the very final part Peter Connelly is running excavations here for the York archaeological trust um it's landscape archaeology just happens to be um in in an urban environment yeah most of the buildings here sit on an organized grid layout unexpected evidence that the Vikings had a talent for urban planning the land here slopes gently down into the river making it an ideal loading and unloading spot 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 stuff that I'm digging through at the moment is effectively human waste it's poo um because what I'm satting at the moment it's the uh remains of a Viking toilet or cess pit all the bits of animal bone that we're finding in here as well it's it's being used as a general rubbish pit as well although the majority of it is human waste um you are getting other bits and pieces in here as well but fortunately it's not just rubbish that's come out of the ground at hungate over the four and a half years that the archaeologists have been working here they've turned up thousands of artifacts from the Viking period most of them are pottery and Bone and represent household waste but there is a handful of intriguing small finds which provide us with additional CLE as to 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 that are all from that excavation at hungate they are they're really a fraction of what we've found over the uh 5 years that we've been Excavating there we've had over 12,000 individual artifacts what's this here well actually this is a jet pendant uh it's quite sweet I think because the whole has well it's a bit off center I like the shape of it I mean that's quite a modern looking it is but that's a very typical shape from that period in fact so where would that have come from the Jets for that do you think probably from Whitby right from the yes from the North Coast yeah what about these beads are these Amber no this is all Amber here so where would that have come from that Amber that's going to have come from the Baltic area so the Vikings living in hungate imported high quality material their trade routs stretched hundreds of miles away across the Scandinavian world but they also used less exotic material to turn out huge numbers of an item that's a little more surprising well these are actually skates really yes they're effectively um very easy to make because the bone is already you know that that size that shap shape very little has to be done to it to turn so so what is the B this is a metapodial isn't it something it's probably they they're usually horse or cattle metapodial right okay all that's been done to this one if you look at it is well on the bottom it's been flattened and smooth so that's a very smooth flat surface and that's been deliberately done that has been deliberately done your foot would have sat on here yeah your heel there your toe there you weren't able to take your foot off the eye so you pulling yourself along with pul so they're not ice dancing they're not pting around they're keeping their feet on the ground and they and they're using them rather like Cross Country Skis that's it these simple bone objects connect us to customs imported from the Frozen Norse [Music] homelands the archaeology of hungate the buried evidence of people who lived here in yv a thousand years ago is not about Monumental remains we're not looking at the elite of society but we're getting an Insight instead into the lives of ordinary people as they started to plan their town and we see how they adapted their buildings to suit the land and the specific purpose they wanted them for these people lived in York but they kept a connection with their Scandinavian Homeland through the objects that they bought used and War and in a very real way a thousand years ago they were laying the foundations of the York that we see today while in York the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons learned to get along throughout the rest of England their relationship remained uneasy although pockets of Danes lived and traded here they hadn't gained a permanent foothold and fullscale danish raids continued along the coast the English king Ethel read the unready was repeatedly forced to pay them off with huge sums of money known as danels and the growing tension between these clashing Nations led to a horrific act the St Bryce's Day [Music] Massacre but the perpetrators of this Slaughter were not Vikings they were Anglo-Saxon and what's more the murder was sanctioned by King e R he decreed that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island sprouting like cockle Amongst the Wheat were to be destroyed by a most just [Music] extermination some of the victims of this extermination may now have been discovered by archaeologists in a pit in Oxford the skeletons of at least 35 people lay in a M grave where they'v been dumped a thousand years before it is very rare that archaeologists get the chance to examine evidence from a particular historical event and one that the scholars agree did actually happen but I'm interested in the analysis of these bones do the bones show evidence of violence could they indeed represent the victims of this massacre osteologist krie phis has been examining their remains for signs of trauma this was actually the first skeleton that we found but it wasn't until we placed his skull back together because it was in hundreds of fragments that we actually saw the trauma there's at least 10 10 blade wounds so there's a blade doing here here there so it's three there's a glancing wound here and what about these little triangular holes they're puncture wounds made by maybe a spear or something like that it is awful Isn't it I mean you hold these bones and these are the bones of somebody who died a very long time ago but you're suddenly kind of connecting with this awful moment which which is his death radiocarbon dating has shown that these people died between 998 and 1019 ad which means it's possible they were killed on St Bryce's day 10:02 the day the Anglo-Saxons turned on the Danes and he also has two puncture wounds to his back there's one there and one a bit farther down so these are quite tiny pun WS into the spine what do you think they could have been caused by possibly by a spear something being thrust rather than thrown yeah so just the tip of the sping pushed in yeah again a young man hacked to death horrendous most of these men were between 16 and 25 years old when they died incredibly the next skeleton I'm shown is that of a man whose murder was even more vicious than the last his ear just behind his ear has been shared off oh yeah yeah so straight through that mastoid process that chunk of vein behind the air the side of his mandible has been sheared off so there's evidence of Blade injury here as well two definite blade wounds on that side of the jaw he's got four wounds to his upper neck so that's been chopped through yeah and the dens itself so chopping through just underneath the air taking off the angle of the mandible and then the blade carrying on through and cutting into the the vertebrae of the neck yeah other parts of this man's skeleton show further signs of the frenzied nature of the attack he has three punctures to his pelvis there's two small wounds there but they've actually come in from the back you can see these very Square shaped puncture wounds which have gone all the way through the bone so these are the tips of a weapon of some kind mhm which are pushing all the way through to here yeah so he was attacked from the back there so on the left side somebody stabbed him just above the hip on the back and then he's also been speared or stabbed through from the front as well from about here MH going in and then hitting his his pelvis as it passes backwards so he's being attached from all angles all angles and if the multiple stab wounds weren't enough to finish this man off for good measure he was set on fire his forehead has been burnt yeah which accounts for the missing bone in the middle and also his hand oh yeah has been charred is this the only skeleton who has signs of burning no quite a few of them about charring yeah it's mostly to their heads um their pelvises and their hands car were you shocked when you got these veins cleaned up and into the laboratory how much violence there was represented on them very shocked I've never seen anything like this before yeah it's and just to have so many different weapons used on one individual these skeletons bore none of the wounds you'd expect to find on people who tried to defend themselves so it's likely that they were murdered whilst running away but were they Vikings isotope analysis was not conclusive but did show that their diet was rich in Seafood suggesting they did at least live a viking way of life and then they may have been hunted down and killed for [Music] it so what can we say for certain we have over 30 skeletons all of them men all showing signs of extreme violence whilst we can't be sure that they were the victims of the subis Day Massacre the types of injury and the date of the skeletons makes it at least possible these young men were cut down were hacked to death in a frenzy of violence and a thousand years on this mass murder is still shocking through trauma analysis archaeology has allowed us to explore the awful possibility of the Vikings as victims but a different kind of archaeological Discovery has opened a window onto life for a viking whose luck had run [Music] out every now and then metal detectorists turn up interesting objects which have been lost or abandoned or even deliberately buried by their owners and then they've laid hidden in the ground for hundreds of years but it's extreme unusual to find a collection as diverse and which illustrates as many different aspects of a past society as The Horde I'm about to see now it's one of the most important Viking finds of the last 150 years and it's so rich in content that experts are still writing up their findings it's currently on display at the Yorkshire Museum so this is it this is the veil of York horde it was found four years ago by a father and son metal detecting team and it really is an astonishing collection of silver objects with one piece of gold but what's really amazing is that most of those objects were found inside that cup it really is spectacular and beautiful but what I want to know is can we learn anything of any real archaeological significance from these objects and given what we know about this period of history in this area might we be able to get an idea of the person who had this sort of wealth in their possession The Horde comprises 617 coins and 67 pieces of silver including items of jewelry all objects which have a great deal to tell us about the scandin Ian world at the time of their burial this cup is absolutely extraordinary isn't it yeah it's um I think probably the finest thing in The Horde all on its own it's um it's guilt silver cup so it's silver and it's been gilded with gold it was also um decorated with nello which is a kind of alloy that's black so when this was first made it would have been if you think of a wasp but kind of quite gy yellow and black contrast so the detail would have showed up amazingly well would you like to hold it I'd love to hold it if you sit it in your hands it kind of gives you a real good impression of what this might have been used for when it was um originally made it feels like a cup which wants to be passed on to somebody else what do you think it was useful given the kind of the way that you hold it in both hands the fact that it's been gilded and it may have had a lid we think that it could be in ecclesiastical vessel something that was used in a monastery so it's possible that this cup which experts believe came from the Frankish empire fell into Viking hands as loot or imp payment of tribute it was made in the mid 9th century predating the rest of the objects in this collection but it presumably had a lot of special significance and meaning because it lasted another hundred years so I presume it was passed down through the family and then came to you know hold the contents of this hord this object gives us a rare insight into the mindset of a Viking has an heirloom it connects him back to his adventuring ancestors and their ill gotten gains but not all of the items in this hold had sentimental value so what about these objects that were inside it then are the are these pieces of jewelry typically Viking in nature they are yes this is by far the most spectacular that's the gold that's the only gold piece isn't it this is the only gold piece in the horde um and if you'd like like to hold it um gosh that's heavy it is it's quite a chunky thing this single piece is a marker of extreme wealth finding gold in Viking hordes is exceptionally rare only someone of the highest social standing would have had access to it and there are some complete items of jewelry but then there seem to be a lot of pieces this bit in particular I mean that just looks like a brooch or something that's been cut in half and this is very typical of the way the Vikings did things they they had a lot of what we call hack silver the Viking economy was based on the bar and exchange of silver it was highly prized by the Vikings and valued by its weight and Purity before being chopped up and used as currency silver could be worn and transported as jewelry this is what we call a penan br if you think of this as the terminal at one end it would um thin out come in a big spiral and then fatten out again at the other end right and you would have a huge pin through the middle and that would sit on your on your cloak to keep your cloak together and this is a particularly beautiful example I think it's got these lovely little roundles and kind of this really delicate interlace pattern yeah and actually it's made of little looks like little beasts which are kind of chasing their tails around very popular in kind of Viking iconography these little beasties the Vikings traveled thousands of miles across vast sweeping trade rats to get their silver and some pieces within this horde connect the Vikings here in Britain with trading centers as far away as the Islamic World well that looks like Arabic script on there it does this is called a Durham and it's Islamic coin it really is it is and it comes from Afghanistan wow so this is evidence of of Vikings trading all the way over to the Middle East absolutely yeah one other coin here sheds light on the moment this horde was buried it's a coin of the English king athlan minted in 927 ad just after he captured 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'll be able to see um that this coin actually has the words Rex to Bri so RX t o b r i e oh yeah yeah I can see that that basically means king of all Britain so this coin proclaims athlan as the king of all Britain so he used this coin to say that he'd got rid of the Vikings and he' unified the country and and made it into one Kingdom but although the English king stamped his identity on his coins the name of the person who owned these riches is lost to us all we have are the clues passed down by his cherished possessions this horde of beautiful objects raises the tantalizing possibility that what we're looking at is the treasure the life savings of a the man his days amongst the ruling classes in northern England are numbered and The Horde dates from precisely the time when there's this change over of power between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons so are we looking at a viking running away and burying his wealth for safety all that we can be sure about is that he never returned to dig it up [Music] govern in Glasgow might seem like an unlikely place to come looking for Viking archaeology but I'm here to see what is perhaps the most extensive collection of Norse artifacts from any Viking site anywhere in rural Britain now these objects are not treasure they are domestic items things that Viking men and women would have used every day of their lives and they ALS so at the beginning of their story because they've been excavated but the examination the interpretation of them is very much still a work in progress so what I want to find out is the potential of this collection for helping us understand Viking everyday life the actual material is fine but as you see from the package Beverly Balin Smith has a huge archaeological task ahead of her the processing and recording of all the small finds from a site called the udle in North eist the largest Norse settlement ever to have been excavated in The Western Isles it was a Monumental project which involved a dedicated group of volunteers who returned to dig again and again over a 30-year period starting in 1963 but the significance of the site is still only partially understood [Music] I don't think I have ever seen so many bone needles and I imagine we're just starting so you wanted to have a look at that little poppy one can we take it out to oh look at that that's really lovely what what are these made of I think that's a a bird bone it's pretty isn't it it's really lovely yeah 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 in place or to fasten his cloak that's fantastic in a sense all these are lost objects yes things have just dropped off people dropped off people and not where did that go and they've tro it into the mud and then archaeologists find it centuries later wow it's not unusual to find combs in a viking settlement they're commonplace personal objects what's surprising about this collection though is the sheer number of them found on one site oh that's fantastic it's got a little animal on it a little horse's head I think and I love these roundles which obviously kind of drilled into the the bone I think you look at things like this and you have this immediate contact with somebody who lived centuries ago and this was their comb and you also know that you have the same kind of sensibilities that you know I quite like to have things that are that are nice I like to have objects which aren't just functional but actually which attractive as well yes the massive 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 with his task due to ill health it's now fall into Beverly but he ended up amassing a huge collection of fins that you're still looking through now so he obviously he obviously be what happened did he become overwhelmed with the amount he was Finding I been there myself when you you you were work on a massive site with complicated stratagraph so he he carried on digging he produced interim reports uh for every year that he dug but then there's the next stage of actually writing up and getting the information out to the public and I think he was simply overwhelmed even since my visit fresh research has suggested the volume of beautiful Combs may be proof of a Viking com making industry here it reinforces just how important the research into the uel will be in years to come it's great to see just a small part of this massive collection of everyday objects they see mundane in some ways but they also show that just like us the Vikings like to have nice things and it's fantastic that this collection is being Revisited archaeologically speaking there's still an enormous amount to be learned about this site and all the artifacts it contained and there must be people on North eist who remember digging at that site in the dunes and I imagine it's important to them to know that the last chapters in the story of udle are finally being [Music] written off the northeastern shore of Scotland lie the islands of orne colonized by the Vikings in the 9th century sailing from their Norwegian homelands it would have taken the north longships about a day to get here and when they settled for good the islands became the center of North power in Scotland right up until 1469 the last Bastion of Scandinavian Authority in Britain today these islands are home to a classic Norse archaeological find and also to new excavations that are offering tantalizing glimpses of the Vikings in Scotland my first destination is the Dig currently taking place in the east of ory's Mainland near its ancient Capital kirkwall it sits on top of a 30 m High stack of sheer Rock the Brock of DNS which even today is challenging to access this is such a wild place there's nothing here but Cliffs sea and birds and I'm walking up this path that I can't imagine was here a thousand years ago so I do wonder how people got across from the land there to the bro this is such an exposed place it's a lovely day today but imagine this on a rainy wind swept day the Brock is totally exposed to the legendary orcadian winds what an extreme place to choose as your home whether coming from the mainland or from ships secured in a nearby Bay getting here can't have been straightforward the old path up the Brock has disappeared into the sea so we're now coming up through the original entrance to the site exactly can we go and have a look at of course we can some of the archaeology that you're exploring there was once a settlement of around 30 Viking houses up here and Dr James Barrett and his team are Excavating one of them this season so would this have been the original doorway this is the original doorway of the phase that we're Excavating right now so there was a settlement here before the Vikings came and the ground level at that point was was at the top of that layer and then the Viking age houses were literally dug into the ground right and lined with stone walls what you see here and then above that at ground level the rest of the house would have been built in Turf and Timber it's likely that the Vikings dug their homes so deep into the ground to withstand the extreme winds that often blow here and evidence of Life inside one of those homes came to light during my visit oh wow oh my goodness right so we're just going to come in here and beautiful it's moments like these that make archaeology so rewarding discovering an unexpected find a forgotten part of somebody's life if you start cleaning off most of this loose around it that's fantastic this is just brilliant this is a viking gaming board that was thrown away that was thrown into this rubbish pit this miden that we've just found in the corner of the trench and it's wonderful to hold something that was obviously a very personal object to somebody something that they would have enjoyed using a thousand years ago it looks like a board for playing the popular Viking game a nefle it's something that might have kept people occupied in place of looking after crops or farming animals a task that would have been impossible up here so their food must have been brought in from other Farms or settlements nearby and only someone of the highest status could have demanded this of their neighbors perhaps a viking Chief and his retinue but it does beg the question why live in such a difficult spot the way it works is what you see it's a site that all about seeing and being seen and when people ask me why were they here when I want to give a glib answer it's to make a point it gives you extraordinary control of the maritime Vantage and in addition to that you will be seen so if you imagine a large Hall here then if you're coming into the archipelago you immediately know who you have to go and talk to you you you know who's boss I am quite taken by this ancient clifftop settlement it seems such an extraordinary place to live so wild and windy with these crashing waves all around the men and women who lived up here must have been very isolated in some ways but on the other hand they can't have survived here on their own they depended on support from people living on Mainland Arney but who were they one one of the reasons the Vikings seem so mysterious is that they left few written records in Britain but it's wrong to think they didn't right they used runes and last year James found a tiny bronze strip with a mysterious message etched into its surface professor John Hines examined it to see if he could make some sense of it takes quite a while getting used to it but once you get your eye in to these things things you start seeing certain letters that we're familiar with so if you look on it um here we've got see that letter like that that's fairly clear then there's a very clearly what we'd call an i i and another C and we've got an U at the end of that some letters in the Scandinavian runic alphabet resemble our own 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 going across all of the bits that I can read I just cannot put enough together to form a coherent words and coherent strings of words interestingly practically every Mark that we've got on that we can identify as being the sort of things they were using as runes they've abbreviated what writing rather like people who are younger than me do when they send text messages and I try and work out what they're act what they're actually say there it's frustrating to be so close and yet so far away from knowing what's been written down by this Viking living on the brook of DNS a message from Scandinavian orne that we'll probably never decipher the Norse archaeology I've seen in 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 year's research has Unearthed unexpected evidence of this Viking lifestyle of how they settled and shaped our landscape as well as raiding here evidence like the ivory chestman carved in a Norwegian Workshop tangible proof of a wealthy forgotten Kingdom the buried life savings of a powerful Viking whose wealth connects us to vast trading Empires and the horrific St Bryce's Day Massacre when men may have been killed just for being Scandinavian [Music] through its Invaders Britain became firmly connected with the continent and Beyond and archaeology helps us understand how these Outsiders came and enriched our culture and ended up becoming British and so the digging continues [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 116,371

Keywords: Anglo-Saxons, British heritage, Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries, Dan Snow, History Hit Network, Iron Age pottery, Scandinavian states, St. Brice's Day Massacre, Viking artifacts, Viking burials, Viking invaders, ancient manuscripts study, ancient ruins, chronological exploration, historical evidence, medieval culture, medieval history podcasts, medieval technology, medieval warfare, medieval weaponry, rune stones interpretation

Id: N5Neqrgfcwc

Length: 52min 35sec (3155 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024