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00:00So far, on Blood of the Vikings, I've discovered a story of Viking attacks and
00:07invasions across Britain and Ireland.
00:12Tonight, I travel in search of the evidence for Viking settlement along the
00:17sea road from Shetland to Dublin.
00:21What brought the Vikings here?
00:26And were their dealings with the natives peaceful or not?
00:56Western Norway in winter, it's dark and it's freezing, the terrain is rugged and unforgiving.
01:19Deep fjords lie below bare, snow-capped mountains.
01:26At the edge of one fjord, on a thin strip of land sandwiched between water and rock, I
01:36discovered the traces of ancient fields.
01:43A thousand years ago, eking a living from this land must have been a constant struggle.
01:51Many of the Vikings came from this part of Western Norway.
01:58And when you come here and see just how little good land there is, then it's easy to understand
02:04why some of them may have sailed away to places like Orkney and Shetland.
02:10The first stop for seafaring Vikings heading west were the islands of Shetland and Orkney,
02:19the Northern Isles.
02:20And there's plenty of evidence that the Vikings came this way.
02:24Ruins at Jarlshof in Shetland show that Viking longhouses once stood here.
02:29This Viking treasure, a symbol of wealth and power, was discovered buried in Orkney.
02:45There's even rare evidence of Viking writing.
02:48On the walls of an ancient tomb in Orkney are the finest runic inscriptions outside Scandinavia.
02:54Graffiti of the sort you'd expect from Vikings, boasting of treasure and women.
03:02And the locals still celebrate their Viking past.
03:05On Shetland each January, they gather for the festival of Uphelyar and burn a Viking longship.
03:15We know that the Vikings came to Shetland and Orkney, but we don't know how many.
03:20Did Viking immigrants dominate these islands or did most of the natives remain?
03:25To find out just how much Viking ancestry there is in Shetland and in the rest of Britain and Ireland,
03:46the BBC have teamed up with geneticists from University College London.
03:50So far, they've identified distinctive DNA markers on the Y chromosome in the Vikings' descendants, present-day Norwegian men.
04:00The hope is that they'll find these same markers in men from Orkney and Shetland.
04:08Professor David Goldstein is the project leader.
04:11Well, I think the Scottish islands are a very good place to start because we have such good evidence, archaeological evidence and place name evidence,
04:21of Viking activities in the Scottish islands.
04:23And so, in fact, it's really a good test.
04:25If there are genetic signatures from Scandinavia in the British Isles generally, we ought to find them in the Scottish islands.
04:32Dr. Jim Wilson, part of David Goldstein's team, is in Shetland to collect DNA samples from members of the Family History Society.
04:41Based on how many of them are found to have Norwegian ancestry, it should be possible to estimate the scale of Viking settlement over a thousand years ago.
04:50Right, we have two consent forms to fill in. What's your name?
04:56George Jacobson.
04:58I think curiosity is the main thing. We're just interested to see if there is any particular link with the Vikings or not.
05:07We really don't know. We're just interested to see what you're going to come up with.
05:12I just open this swab tube and you rub the cotton bud up and down on the inside of your cheek, five times on each cheek.
05:20And in the meantime, I'll put this preservative in the tube.
05:23Okay.
05:25I think it's an excellent idea altogether because it offers really scientific proof as to genealogy
05:32and it can extend so much further back than the Newton records and that sort of thing.
05:38They're sampling a hundred men in both Shetland and Orkney.
05:45In order to lessen the distorting effects of recent population movement on ancient genetic patterns,
05:51recruits must be able to prove that their father and their father's father were born in the islands.
05:57Does your father's father come from Shetland?
06:01Yeah.
06:02And your mother's mother?
06:03Yes.
06:04How many generations can you trace your male line?
06:0717.
06:0817?
06:09Five in Shetland.
06:11Well, I'm a true Viking definitely.
06:16Any true Shetlander would be proud to find that they were of Viking blood rather than Scottish blood.
06:24Any more?
06:25For any more?
06:26Sampling's going on at over 30 locations across Britain and Ireland.
06:31It's the first time that such a large scale genetics project has been used to trace the movements of Vikings.
06:37The Northern Isles will be a crucial test case for showing how well the technique works.
06:43One question that genetics can't answer and that archaeologists argue about is what happened to the Picts,
06:53the people who were living in the Northern Isles at the time that the Vikings arrived?
07:00Did the Christian Picts stay on and live side by side with the new pagan settlers?
07:05Or did the Vikings' arrival trigger a bloodbath?
07:12Shetland archivist Brian Smith believes the evidence points to just one answer.
07:18He's looked at all the place names in Shetland and Orkney and discovered that 99% of them are of Scandinavian origin.
07:26If the Vikings had co-existed amiably with the Pictish population of Shetland,
07:37if they'd enslaved them, if they'd killed the men and married the women,
07:42there would be Pictish place names in the islands today.
07:45My only conclusion from the fact that there are no such names is that the Vikings annihilated the native population of the islands.
07:56In search of evidence to support his theory,
08:01Brian's examined the way place names have changed in countries where there's been colonisation.
08:07Sometimes names survive.
08:10The United States of America is, of course, a place where the indigenous population did leave some of its names.
08:18The conclusion that we must reach, then, is that something ominous,
08:23something awful happened in Shetland and Orkney to prevent that happening.
08:28He believes that 19th century events in a corner of the British Empire mirror the Vikings' colonisation of the Northern Isles.
08:35The parallel that I like to draw is with Tasmania in the southern hemisphere,
08:43where, over a relatively short period, the colonising white settlers got rid of the local population.
08:52Exactly the same thing happened to the place names.
08:55They virtually disappeared in a very short period.
08:59We don't have native Tasmanian place names today,
09:02in the same way we don't have native Pictish place names in Orkney and Shetland.
09:08But is this view supported by archaeology?
09:12The Picts are an elusive people who lived in Northern Scotland and the Northern Isles over a thousand years ago.
09:18They left a few clues behind them, in artefacts, carved stone and in the remains of their buildings.
09:25Most Pictish houses are divided into small cells.
09:35But around the beginning of the Viking Age, buildings like these vanish,
09:39to be replaced by open-plan rectangular longhouses of a distinctly Scandinavian type.
09:45On the face of it, more support for the idea that the Picts were wiped out by the Vikings.
09:51However, more recent discoveries in Orkney are now challenging this view.
10:0325 years ago, Olwin Owen's first archaeological excavation as a student was on the Brock of Bursae,
10:10where there had once been an important Pictish settlement.
10:13Pictish buildings were replaced by Viking longhouses,
10:17and within these, the archaeologists came across something which would change ideas about what really happened when the Vikings arrived.
10:26In the lower levels of the Norse houses, they began to find Pictish artefacts mixed with Norse artefacts.
10:34And obviously there had been a Pictish settlement here, and there was an intermingling of the cultural material from Picts and Norse.
10:43And I think perhaps some of the earlier archaeologists were a bit surprised and maybe even disappointed.
10:49They probably hoped they'd find a nice thick layer of burnt debris and maybe some blood and gore to distinguish between the Pictish levels and the North levels,
11:00but that isn't how it was at all.
11:02And that was the first time, I think, that someone had been able to say so clearly that there was no evidence of mass slaughter.
11:10So the discovery of Pictish goods within Norse houses could suggest that at least some Vikings traded with the Picts.
11:24But not everyone is convinced.
11:26The fact that we find Pictish artefacts in Viking houses needn't necessarily mean that there was peaceful coexistence between the two peoples.
11:37It can also suggest that the Vikings took the artefacts, took the material from the houses of the previous population who had by then, in my opinion, been slaughtered.
11:56It's difficult to imagine the sudden arrival of predatory Vikings, intent on grabbing land, being anything other than violent.
12:03But suppose contact developed gradually over a period of time.
12:08Some archaeologists are now suggesting that this is exactly what happened,
12:12and that consequently the first contact with Norway may have been long before the Viking Age officially began,
12:18and may not have involved massacre.
12:20A closer look at the reports of the first Viking raid on Lindisfarne in England in 793 seemed to back this up.
12:39The monk, Orquin of York, who wrote about the raid, poured scorn on his fellow Christians for what he saw as inappropriate familiarity towards the heathen Vikings.
12:48Consider the luxurious dress and behaviour of their leaders and people.
12:57See how you have wanted to copy the pagan way of cutting hair and beards.
13:03Are these the people whose terror threatens us, yet you want to copy their hair?
13:08Copy their hair!
13:13So maybe the attack was not by an unknown force, but by a people who'd been frequent visitors to Britain.
13:19You have to remember where we are.
13:23Orkney and Shetland are so close to the west coast of Norway.
13:28So the idea that the Vikings weren't travelling around in northern waters long before the Viking Age proper is supposed to have started,
13:37I think is a very strange one.
13:39It seems to me highly likely that they were known in these waters.
13:42They weren't so frightening. They weren't so alien.
13:49But will this idea ever be more than speculation?
13:53What archaeologists would really like to find in Britain is some indisputable evidence of early Viking contact.
14:00And these bone combs, which date from the 7th century, may provide the very first clue.
14:07But only if scientists can tell whether they're red deer or reindeer.
14:12This distinction is critical, because while red deer are native to Scotland, reindeer only come from Scandinavia, the Viking homelands.
14:25Dr. Luba Smirnova has analysed hundreds of bone combs from Viking Age and medieval sites in Europe,
14:32and has worked out ways of telling if they're made from red deer or reindeer.
14:36All antlers are porous in the centre, with a transition to compact solid material at the surface, the useful part.
14:45The transition is sharp in red deer antler, and the porous material is rarely used.
14:50But in reindeer antler, the transition is gradual, and this semi-porous material is often used.
14:56Reindeer combs also tend to look darker and rougher.
15:00We asked Luba to examine a group of combs from Pictish sites across Orkney.
15:07All of them were discovered in layers dated to the 600s.
15:11If any of them are from reindeer, then it's proof of early contact with the Vikings.
15:16Luba begins with an examination of the surfaces.
15:20So this is one of the typical Pictish combs.
15:29It's well polished, it's light in colour, and the surface looks almost structurless.
15:39Extremely compact, solid material, with very, very fine threads of fibres.
15:47Yeah.
15:51This would be red deer.
15:56But there are several more Pictish combs to be tested.
16:02It's a different type of Pictish comb, double-sided Pictish comb.
16:05It's also very dark, very brown, very woody in appearance.
16:11Very rough surface with little polish.
16:15Let's see if we can find any transition areas.
16:24Beneath the surface of the left edge of the comb, Luba has identified a semi-porous region.
16:29That is one of the rare examples when you are absolutely sure, or as absolutely sure as is possible to be, that you are dealing with reindeer antler.
16:45Luba's examination has found that several of the Pictish combs are made of reindeer antler.
16:54This is the first tangible evidence for early contact, perhaps peaceful trading between Picts and Vikings.
17:01Although it doesn't prove that Viking contact was always peaceful.
17:17So what was the impact of the Vikings at this time?
17:21With no historical records in Scotland, we have to rely totally on archaeological evidence.
17:25Dr James Barrett hopes to find some answers at a newly discovered site on the island of Westray in Orkney,
17:33where it appears that the Vikings took over one of the original settlements.
17:37He's been searching for clues in ancient rubbish dumps, or middens.
17:44So here we have about 50 centimetres of the Viking Age midden.
17:48It's dominated by fish bone, you see pieces sticking out all over the place.
17:51Also a marine shell.
17:52But here we have a major break into this material, which has very little fish bone in it, a lot less shell,
18:03and the majority of the bone that's there is mammal bone, often in quite large pieces.
18:09It's incredible that you can see the point in time when the Vikings arrived,
18:13by just looking at the change in refuse.
18:15And close by on the shore, waves have exposed another midden, and another side of Viking life.
18:27It contains even more fish bone. It's just incredible actually.
18:32You see a lot of shell. The shell is almost certainly bait, but in fact it's the fish that are really important.
18:36What you have are lots of skull bones, and then the vertebrae from the very front of the fish, ones like this.
18:43And this is a butchery pattern which we know from medieval depictions of dried or dried and salted fish.
18:49So, they're chucking the heads away, and drying the rest of the fish.
18:56That's certainly the likelihood, yes.
18:58Now the question is, why is there this explosion in the use of marine resources?
19:02There's no apparent increase in the consumption of fish based on the dietary evidence from the human bone.
19:08So what are they doing with all this fish?
19:09The most likely explanation to my mind is that this material is going elsewhere,
19:14and really that it's part of the commercial revolution that happens at the end of the Viking Age,
19:18the late Viking Age, and into the Middle Ages, where trade in commodities becomes important.
19:23James' unusual sight tells a story about the entire Viking period,
19:36from how their arrival influenced diet, to the establishment of big business.
19:41It seems that Orkney was an important Viking colony,
19:45but can we tell anything about what these new colonials were like?
19:53It seems to be the most likely to be found.
19:56Burials can provide vital evidence, because, as part of their pagan rituals,
20:01Vikings were often buried with treasured possessions for the afterlife.
20:09A few years ago, an unusual discovery was made on the island of Sanday in Orkney.
20:15A farmer came across human bones on the beach.
20:19He thought they might be the remains of a sailor lost at sea,
20:21and so he left them there.
20:24He also noticed a curious metal object, like the top of an old car battery,
20:30and took it home.
20:32But he died before anyone realised the significance of what he'd found.
20:36Three years later, a colleague of Orwin Owens decided to investigate the farmer's story.
20:41She'd been told there were bones coming out of the cliff at Skar, so she went along and had a look for the bones.
20:51And when she got there, she found boat rivets as well.
20:55And she knew what Viking boat rivets looked like, and she realised that maybe there was more to this grave than met the eye.
21:02Could the rivets be part of a Viking boat burial?
21:07Archaeologists would need to excavate the site.
21:10And soon, because within days, the first winter storms would hit the island.
21:14In the first few weeks of the excavation, the conditions were almost indescribable.
21:20They were dreadful. There were howling gales and winds and rain driving horizontally.
21:26We have some wonderful pictures of one of the diggers being almost overwhelmed by what looks like a tidal wave coming across the site.
21:34And it really was terrible.
21:35For weeks, the digging team battled against the worsening weather.
21:44I was in Edinburgh, and I got a telephone message to say that the outline of a boat shape in stones had appeared in the sand.
21:53And it was marvellous. My heart was pounding. I believed then it was a boat, a boat burial.
22:00On hearing that they'd found the rare remains of a Viking boat, Olwen hurried to the site to supervise excavation of what lay inside.
22:11There were three bodies, a man, a woman and a child.
22:19They also had with them a rich variety of grave goods, including some quite spectacular ones.
22:26And they're not just objects in museum cases. They're like a window into Viking life.
22:39In this incredible grave, the man was buried with a sword, two lead weights, a quiver of arrows, a bone comb and 22 carved whalebone gaming pieces.
22:49He didn't have any ordinary domestic tools or utensils, as you'd expect.
22:59They may have been lost to the sea because his part of the grave had been quite badly damaged by sea erosion.
23:06But he did have the set of gaming pieces, which were lovely.
23:09So, on the basis of the finds that survived in the grave, he was a warrior with plenty of leisure time.
23:20The woman was buried with possessions that included a round spindle whirled and a pair of shears.
23:26A needle case.
23:30A small sickle.
23:32And a bone comb.
23:35And something really special.
23:40The most exciting single find, in the ground at least, has to be the whalebone plaque.
23:46And the wonderful thing about the plaque was that it was lying face down in the sand at the bottom of the burial chamber.
23:51It took a couple of days before it could be lifted.
23:55And the back of the plaque is rather boring.
23:58And we had no idea how beautiful the front was going to be, or indeed if it was well preserved.
24:03And when it was turned over, you could hear this audible gasp of intake of breath.
24:13And it really was in superb condition.
24:16The moment it was turned over you could see what a fantastic object it was.
24:19The plaque may have been used as a sort of ironing board, but it's so beautifully decorated that it must surely have been a greatly treasured possession.
24:37And another discovery would show just how wealthy this woman was.
24:43A beautiful gilt bronze brooch.
24:45Her brooch is absolutely gorgeous.
24:49It's quite rare amongst Viking brooches.
24:52There's only about ten or twelve from anywhere.
24:55And every part of the surface of the brooch was decorated with ornament.
25:00And particularly prominent, a little, almost like cat masks, little faces.
25:05And so it was a really, really luxurious and opulent object which she must have taken care of.
25:12But in the boat, amongst these signs of wealth and status, was the evidence of what may have been a tragedy.
25:22While a woman was elderly in her seventies, the man was aged about thirty, and the child was only about ten.
25:29We'll never know what happened to these Viking settlers in their new land.
25:37And new finds keep coming up on this tiny island.
25:40A particularly surprising one was made by the landlord of the local pub, when he was repairing a neighbour's wall.
25:46I was just building the wall and picked up the stone.
25:51And I thought it was something unusual.
25:54And I'd give it to the kids then to take it up to the school, to the headmaster, to have a look at.
26:01Robbie had discovered a Viking runestone.
26:06Translated, it revealed the name of Arskatla, the man who probably carved it.
26:13Such a rare discovery aroused national interest.
26:18We kept it under our bed for a while.
26:23But then the Crown claimed that its treasure trove.
26:27So then we had to end up him to hand it over to the museum.
26:30But we got the local community council to back us, and we got it back into Sandy.
26:38A lot of people do drop in by to see it, and it's nice to have it in the island.
26:48So, having taken Orkney and Shetland so convincingly, and settled there, where would the Vikings go next?
26:54Well, mainland Scotland might seem like the obvious choice, but archaeology, our main source of information for this period of Dark Age history,
27:03has provided remarkably little evidence of the Vikings being there.
27:06But 200 miles south-west of Orkney, on south Uist in the Outer Hebrides, new evidence of Viking settlement is starting to emerge.
27:27Neil Sharples has discovered the remains of a large building, long and narrow with a central hearth, a Viking longhouse.
27:34We're actually standing on top of the main hearth, and you can see here, where Elaine's working, this orange layers that are coming up in this charcoal.
27:49This is the burning peat, and that defines the hearth area.
27:53And is that quite long and thin as well?
27:55Yeah, we've got six metres of it exposed that way.
27:57And it goes on behind us. You can see behind us, the top of it is exposed here.
27:59And again, this is a very distinctive feature of the Viking house.
28:05And it gives you some idea of the sort of communal living conditions.
28:08So people would come into houses and sit around the hearth, and they would tell the sagas,
28:12they would be formed by people talking around these long central hearths.
28:15The size of the hearth and the building that it lies in suggest that this was the most important house in the settlement.
28:25But a closer look at the way it was built shows that it was not a standard Viking longhouse.
28:30One of the interesting things about this house is you immediately notice as we came into it, was that it's subterranean.
28:38Now, originally the wall probably stood, you know, about this height.
28:43And then the roof rafters would come in here, and I suspect this about here would be the original ground level.
28:48And it's all been dug into, and the walls have been placed against it.
28:52All you'd see is the roof coming out above it.
28:54Building sunken houses was a tradition native to the Outer Hebrides.
29:00But buildings like this are also found in Iceland.
29:03So it appears that the Vikings took these traditions from the Hebrides to their colonies in the North Atlantic.
29:14There's an enormous range of artefacts from the site, including rare pieces of Viking artwork.
29:20And yet, it's this unattractive, very crude attempt at pottery that tells us more about these Viking settlers.
29:29Because Vikings traditionally didn't make pottery.
29:32Instead, they used vessels carved from soapstone.
29:35A soft stone found in Norway, and also Shetland.
29:38The discovery of pottery strongly suggests they were taking up new ideas from native Hebrideans.
29:51This shed here, this is what we would call platterware, and it's a kind of baking plate.
29:57Very distinct if you have this grass-marked surface, which is how they produce it.
30:01They lay a flat slab of pottery on some kind of vegetable matting, and then they puncture holes and press it down with the fingertips.
30:11On this surface, you can see the fingernails where they pressed it down, these little puncture marks.
30:16And then they produce some kind of baking plate.
30:19So that's the impression of a Viking fingernail there, is it?
30:21Yeah, that's it, Viking fingernails.
30:26But alongside these attempts at a new and unfamiliar technology, the Viking craftsmen were still making their traditional Scandinavian goods.
30:35And with great skill.
30:39You can see here, you've got a bit, almost complete antler.
30:42And you can see this segment here is actually a bit of the main beam of the antler.
30:47It's just sewn off.
30:48And they've chopped it off, sewn it off.
30:50And this is the sort of beginning of the process of working down a piece of antler to make their composite comb, which you see here.
30:56Very nice comb there.
30:58And they sort of chop it down to get sort of lovely, rectangular pieces like this.
31:02And these are eventually going to be worked down to these little pieces here.
31:06And this piece here is almost the very final stage of the piece that will slot in there,
31:12and it will be riveted by putting a spacer plate on there, and then they will cut the teeth after it's all been riveted together.
31:25In a nearby barn, Neil's team have been sorting fragments of fish bone sieved from the soil around the settlement.
31:31If you look at this tray here, what we've got here are the residues from the very fine sieving.
31:41And if you look at some of the stuff here, some of these vertebrae have turned out to be from herring.
31:47And it seems as though there's a very substantial herring fishing.
31:50And this kind of herring fishing requires organisation.
31:54You know, several families coming together, pulling their resources, several boats go out,
31:59and you might catch absolutely nothing for a week.
32:02And then suddenly the herring will come, and you'll have thousands, millions perhaps, of herring coming out.
32:08And so, what do you do with them? You can't eat them all yourself.
32:12There's only so many herring a man can eat.
32:13So, you've got to start trading. If you're herring fishing, I think, then you're trading.
32:24This site, protected for centuries by its very isolation,
32:28is one of the largest rural Viking settlements ever found in Britain.
32:37On the Hebrides, as in Orkney and Shetland,
32:39archaeology is showing another side to the Vikings,
32:43as settlers adapting to live in a new land.
32:48The Northern and Western Isles of Scotland provided the Vikings with good farming and good fishing.
32:54But was that all they came for?
32:57Or was there another reason why these islands were so important to them?
33:00Maybe they provided the ideal staging post on the route to a much bigger prize.
33:09The next stage on the sea road was the short sail to Ireland,
33:15a country full of wealthy monasteries that the Vikings knew very well.
33:22They had, after all, ravaged the country with their early raids.
33:26But was Ireland seen only as a source of plunder?
33:29Here, we don't have to rely on archaeology alone, as the Irish Annals provide us with the best records of Viking activity from this time.
33:39The world's leading expert on the Annals is Professor Donica O'Carain, and he believes they tell us when Viking settlement of Ireland began.
33:49There are two entries in the Annals. One is about the Vikings on Loch Nhae in 840.
34:00And the first entry in the following year is,
34:05Heathens still on Loch Nhae.
34:07And for the winter, between 841, the entry in the Annals says, Heathens still in Dublin.
34:18So we know that the Irish Annals note that they're staying over and not going home as they should in the winter.
34:28And this is the beginning of settlement.
34:30The Annals report that the Vikings in Ireland made their camps in long forts, fortified bases close to rivers.
34:40But finding any archaeological remains of these early settlements has proved difficult.
34:49Now, though, Ned Kelly believes that he's found the first good evidence for an Irish long fort.
34:54He was drawn here to Atlunkard on the River Shannon after hearing about the discovery of Viking Age artefacts.
35:03When I came here first, I didn't know what the site was.
35:08And it puzzled me because it didn't look like any typical Irish archaeological monument that I'd seen before.
35:18We have a raised area here, and that was originally surrounded by a ditch
35:22and a bank outside it.
35:25So this would be a citadel.
35:27And outside of that, we have a D-shaped enclosure,
35:31which is running from this little stream,
35:34curving round through the river again.
35:36And as you can see, you have a fairly impenetrable marsh on this side.
35:41And that's particularly interesting because the references to lung forts
35:45describe the Scandinavians building D-shaped enclosures
35:48with a back to a river and surrounded by marshy ground.
35:50So it fits in perfectly.
35:53But Ned's conviction is not shared by everyone.
35:57I think the initial reaction was quite scathing.
36:01People said, oh, you know, these things don't exist.
36:04What's a lung fort anyway?
36:06And my response to that was, well, you know,
36:09if these sites aren't lung forts, what are they?
36:12I'm convinced that's what this site is and that there are many others like it to be found still.
36:20And I agree with Ned.
36:24All of the bits of evidence that I've been shown seem to point in one direction.
36:29Its position right next to the river, defended on one side by an earthwork bank and enclosure with a marsh beyond it.
36:35The 10th century finds that were found within the enclosure.
36:39All of these things seem to come together to point to the fact that this must be a Viking long fort.
36:45The annals suggest that the most important fort is in Dublin.
36:50And it's here that we find the highest concentration of Viking dead.
37:03Between the mid-1800s and the 1930s, workmen in Dublin uncovered up to 100 Viking burials.
37:10Most of them were found before the development of modern archaeological recording.
37:18And it's taken years for Stephen Harrison at the National Museum of Ireland to sort out all the artefacts.
37:27There's a distinct contrast with Viking graves from the Northern Isles.
37:33Those from around Dublin contained many swords.
37:36The largest collection of Viking weaponry outside Scandinavia.
37:43This is the most beautiful sword, isn't it?
37:47Is this one of the most special ones in the whole collection?
37:49This is definitely right up there, I think.
37:52It's certainly one of my favourites, if nothing else.
37:55But it's not the only one. There are actually five very elaborately decorated swords.
37:59They were all found in the railway cuttings at Kilmainham in 1845.
38:02As indeed was this rather more plain sword, which is rather more typical, I'm afraid, of Viking swords in this area.
38:10This is much less highly decorated and rather more functional.
38:13But why is it bent in two?
38:15This is a ritual which in Scandinavia is normally associated with cremation.
38:19You very often find the artefacts buried have actually been subjected to an intense heat and then bent or damaged in some way.
38:25We don't know what this practice meant. It may have been the symbolic killing of the weapon or simply done to prevent it being reused by a grave robber.
38:35Do you have any sort of real favourite artefacts amongst these collections?
38:41Erm, this amber brooch here.
38:45Erm, if you look at it you can see that it has actually been cut from a larger object.
38:51You can see that the edges are quite definite here and here.
38:53But here and there the edges are actually very rough.
38:57But the whole thing is then being converted into a brooch.
39:00So we don't actually know what object it was cut from.
39:03But it was certainly being used as a brooch at the time it was placed in a Viking grave.
39:07But what about identifying the objects themselves?
39:09I mean, can you always tell exactly what they are?
39:12I mean, what for example is that rather strange looking thing?
39:14Well, we actually do know what this is. This is actually a glass linen smoother.
39:19Erm, and if you turn it round this way you can actually see the marks from the point when the glass was still fluid.
39:25It actually came from a woman's grave at Kilmainham.
39:28Er, it came from a small, it was found in a small gravel pit in the area in 1848.
39:33Taken together, these discoveries tell us that Dublin must have been a major centre of Viking power.
39:38We're made even more aware and more conscious of the wealth of Viking graves in Dublin,
39:44which are a reflection of the wealth of Dublin and its status and its importance in the 9th century.
39:51In the years that followed, the Vikings would strengthen their presence in Dublin,
39:56which takes its name from the Black Pool where they first moored their ships.
40:00Under the Vikings, the Longfort expanded to become Ireland's first town.
40:05Its streets still followed by those of today's booming city.
40:12And these Viking routes are still celebrated by Dubliners,
40:16if not always in the most authentic way.
40:19Before we go, I've got to teach you how to do the Viking roar.
40:22Vikings were great vocal men.
40:24The Viking roar comes from down here somewhere.
40:27And it goes something like this.
40:29Put your hands above your head.
40:30On the count of three.
40:33One, two, three.
40:38It was a bit half-hearted. Come on, we'll try it again.
40:40One, two, three.
40:41One, two, three.
40:42One, two, three.
40:50Have a sweet night here.
40:51One, two, three.
40:52One, two, three.
40:53One, two, three.
40:56One.
40:57One, two, three.
40:59One, two, three.
41:01One, two, three.
41:08Evidence for the wealth of the Irish Vikings is found not only in their towns,
41:13but in what they buried across the whole of Ireland.
41:17Silver.
41:18treasure that was hidden over a thousand years ago and never reclaimed
41:24archaeologist dr john sheehan has been trying to explain why the vikings buried so much silver in
41:34Ireland we have huge quantities of silver and silver hordes compared to those found in Britain
41:42and indeed compared to those found in some of the Scandinavian countries for instance we have a lot
41:48more hordes than are found in Norway in total today's there are 140 recorded silver hordes in
41:56Ireland so why is there so much more silver in Ireland then the reason really is to do with the
42:01nature of Viking settlement in Ireland if you look at Scotland or indeed England it tended to be farming
42:09settlements in Ireland the Vikings settle in towns and towns survive through economic activities
42:17trade in other words and the Irish Viking towns grow very wealthy and silver is an expression of
42:23that wealth judging from these hordes the Vikings were making fortunes but the silver also reveals
42:33the true extent of their trading networks it's coming from pretty far afield some of it certainly
42:45coming from anglo-saxon England in the form of coin which has then been melted down to produce ingots
42:49and ornaments but there's also evidence to indicate that large quantities of it are coming from the
42:55Arabic world and the silver is being imported into Scandinavia up the great Russian rivers and from there
43:01it's been redistributed across Scandinavia and to the west but what was it in Ireland that attracted so
43:09much Viking commerce the usual trade items that the Irish dealt with throughout most archaeological periods
43:19would have been animal hides and wool for instance but there's also little doubt that a very significant
43:28proportion of the trade was in the form of slaves there's a hint of the scale of this trade in the
43:38annals of Ulster from 871
43:40the chronicler writes about the Viking rulers of Dublin returning from an expedition to Scotland
43:54Imlab and Immar came back to Dublin from Scotland with 200 ships and they brought with them in captivity
44:06to Ireland a great prey of Angles Britons and Picts
44:11Now that must have been a very large haul of slaves and they were being brought back to Dublin because it must have been functioning primarily as a sort of a slave emporium within the western Viking world the Viking farmstains are characterized by their huge size and slave labor would have been needed to operate those to their maximum efficiency
44:35the likelihood is that they were shipped on perhaps to Arabic Spain but certainly over to Iceland to the Viking farmsteads in Scotland and probably back to Scandinavia itself
44:46and there are even objects that could have been used in this trade
44:52We have slave chains they are large collars which are big enough to go around a person's neck and attached to them a long chain exactly similar to the sort of slave chains which are associated with 18th century African slavery for instance
45:10So could slavery have been the main attraction for the Vikings on their route down the sea road
45:23It seems that they'd take any opportunity to make money whether it was from looting farming or trading
45:29and it didn't seem to matter whether the trade was in fish or slaves
45:34In my journey through these islands I feel like I've come closer than ever to the Vikings
45:40But did they really settle here in large numbers?
45:46The answer may lie in the genetic makeup of today's population
45:59Professor David Goldstein's team are still collecting samples from across Britain and Ireland
46:04But they're starting the analysis with the data from Orkney and Shetland
46:09When we carry out just this very simple analysis asking those chromosomal types we only find in Norway
46:16How much of them do we see in the Scottish islands?
46:18We actually see quite a lot
46:20When we look at Shetland, when we look at Orkney
46:22We see something just under 30% of the chromosomes are found in Norway
46:27But we can't find them in the indigenous population
46:29So it looks actually quite likely that those chromosomal types have a Norwegian origin
46:34So we right away see a clear indication of substantial Norwegian genetic input into those islands
46:41That's quite a hefty figure isn't it really? Is it for a first stage?
46:44It is a high figure and in fact probably in the end when we've carried out a more complete statistical analysis
46:50The figure will only go up because those are the types that look pretty clearly to be Norwegian in origin
46:56Other chromosomal types may turn out in fact to be Norwegian in origin just you can't see it clearly
47:01The preliminary results from the Northern Isles of Oakley and Shetland provide for the first time clear evidence that people in Britain share genes with the Vikings
47:14Fascinating, really good, I think it would be really interesting
47:18I would say that we definitely should be Scandinavian more than Scots
47:23I suppose we're all Vikings at heart
47:26I think these results are really exciting
47:29I'm quite surprised actually that you're getting such good results
47:33Along the sea road that the Vikings took from Scandinavia through Orkney and Shetland
47:39You're getting what seems to me a significant genetic impact on the population even at this distance in time
47:47There's still lots of sample collecting and analysis to carry out before the precise meaning of these results becomes clear
47:57But it now looks certain that some secrets of our dark age past will be revealed by the blood of the Vikings
48:04The Vikings
48:34The Vikings
48:37Oh my god
48:39I look forward to eating
48:39Mmm
48:40Oh my god
48:43Oh my god
48:44You're those folks
48:45All right
48:46Your drum
48:48Oh my god
48:52My Saiyan
48:54Your train
Recommended
48:45
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