No other ancient people
have such a strong hold in our imagination as the Vikings.
But the truth about them is shrouded in the mists of Dark Age Britain.
In this series, I'll be searching for evidence
to unravel the story of the Vikings' invasion and settlement of these islands.
What really happened when Vikings attacked?
Were they only here to plunder?
Or did some stay and make Britain their home?
To find the answers I'll be investigating ancient monastic writing,
the latest discoveries in archaeology and genetics.
We've commissioned a nation-wide genetics survey
to find out where in the British Isles today
the descendants of the Vikings live on.
To start, I'm going in search of the Vikings' hit-and-run raids
and new evidence for what accompanied them -
death and destruction.
For the first time, the saga of the mighty Viking hordes
who swept across the world
breaking every commandment of heaven and earth
as they put an age to the torch.
They enjoyed war, didn't they? I mean, it was their thing.
To a Viking there was no life except life in battle.
They were very violent people who were into stabbing and raping... pillaging.
There was no death except death in battle.
- Ugly, hairy brutes. - Yes.
There were no women except women taken in battle.
Monks kneeling down and getting their hacked open with axes.
Over the centuries, our picture of the Vikings
has become a sensational mix of fact and fantasy.
For example, the horned helmet.
One of our most powerful images of the Vikings,
and yet archaeologists have never found a single Viking helmet with horns.
In fact, this is the only real Viking helmet ever discovered.
It was found in the Viking homelands of southern Norway
alongside the burnt remains of its owner in a pagan burial mound.
The Vikings have a powerful image.
Daring and ambitious, certainly, but also vicious, aggressive and barbaric.
So what is the truth and where is the evidence?
To find out I need to go back to the beginning of the story.
To the late 700's.
Britain has been revolutionized by a new religion.
But Christianity doesn't simply mean a new faith,
it's also brought literature and art.
And by acquiring land, the Church has become immensely rich and powerful.
One of its most important and sacred monasteries, Saint Cuthbert's,
lies off the coast of Northumbria.
Safe on the holy island of Lindisfarne.
The year was 793.
And here on holy island the monks of Lindisfarne lived a peaceful existence.
But all this was about to be brutally shattered.
The Vikings' raiding of British and Irish monasteries
was just beginning.
"In us is fulfilled what the prophet thus foretold:
'From the North, evil breaks forth,
'and a terrible glory will come from the Lord.
'And see, the pirate rage have penetrated the north of our island.'"
The attack was vicious
and has gone down in history as the start of the Viking Age.
The feeling of the time is encapsulated in this stone found here at Lindisfarne.
On one side, a sun, a moon and a cross.
The signs of the Day of Judgment.
And on the other, what appears to be a band of ferocious Viking warriors.
All over Britain, people now lived in fear of one of these attacks.
But we only have one report that was written at the time.
The apocalyptic words of a Northumbrian monk, Alcuin of York.
"The pagans have desecrated God's sanctuary,
"shed the blood of saints around the altar,
"laid waste the house of our hope
"and trampled on the bodies of the saints like dung in the street."
It's compelling stuff and lies at the root of how we see the Vikings.
But how reliable is it?
What's interesting is that when Alcuin wrote
his gripping and bloody account of Viking raids
he wasn't even in Britain.
He was hundreds of miles away in Aachen,
safe at the court of Christian Emperor Charlemagne,
an archenemy of the pagan Vikings.
And so when Alcuin wrote about them
he'd probably already formed his own very strong opinion
about what the Vikings were really like.
Alcuin's writings may have been highly political,
but the only other accounts from England
are in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.
Written by monks nearly a century later.
Details are often sparse.
There's only one more raid on England recorded
during the 40 years that followed the events of 793.
But again, the attack on Lindisfarne is painted in biblical terms.
It's preceded by omens from the heavens,
like whirlwinds and lightning, followed by famine,
and then... Vikings.
It's no wonder we see them in the way we do.
Behind these accounts, there surely lie real events.
But how do I reach back to them?
The best hint of a Viking raid from the archaeological record in Britain
is a discovery made in Shetland in 1958.
Underneath the floor of an ancient church
someone had buried this.
A fabulous hoard of Pictish treasure -
silver bowls and broaches dating from Viking times.
Some argue it was hidden from Viking raiders.
But no signs of pagan destruction were ever found.
No victims of murder.
No real evidence to pin this on the Vikings.
Apart from the stories,
evidence in Britain for Viking raiding is desperately thin.
Could Christian monks have deliberately exaggerated what happened,
perhaps to frighten their flocks into repentance?
So where can I look for something more convincing?
Within a few years, Vikings would be sailing
right around Britain into the Irish Sea
where from the mid-800's onwards
the Welsh Annals reported a new and deadly threat.
Here on the north Welsh coast, according to records of the time,
the locals were subjected to repeated attacks by Vikings.
But, for archaeologists, the frustration has been
finding any evidence for the Vikings being here at all.
That was until a few years ago
when a metal detectorist turned up some unusual objects in a corner of a field.
At Llanbedrgoch, on Anglesey.
In the actual field leaning on to this, we found quite a rare coin.
And there was a lot of interest generated for it from the museum
and we started finding weights, lead weights...
I didn't actually know what they were at the time,
so they were sent to the museum and I was told that it was Viking weights,
which sort of hit the jackpot.
The lead weights that Archie had found
were soon followed by other Viking objects,
including a collection of hacked silver,
fragments of silver armbands.
These were used by the Vikings not as jewelry, but as currency.
Bits were hacked off as required and spent instead of coins.
A major excavation is now under way at Llanbedrgoch.
It's run by archaeologist Mark Redknap
from the National Museums and Galleries of Wales.
For years he's been on the lookout for evidence of Viking activity.
Could this new site shed any light on he events reported in the Annals?
As Mark's team excavate they uncover the remains of an ancient wall.
It's massive, over two meters thick,
and encircles an area a hundred meters across.
The wall, together with its ditch,
would have been a formidable defensive structure.
What threat were these people defending against so close to the sea?
Who were they afraid of?
As the archaeologists continue to excavate the ditch
they make another discovery -
something totally unexpected.
The remains of five skeletons start to emerge.
The first to be discovered, that of a young woman,
is radiocarbon dated to some time between the mid 700's and the late 900's.
By this time Wales had long been Christian
but these burials don't conform to any sort of Christian pattern.
The local population would have normally been buried in an east-west orientation.
Here we've got north-south, casual burial.
No sense of laying out of the body or ritual, exactly the opposite.
And the impression you really get when you look at these
is that they were not deposited in the ground
by people who cared for them or loved them.
These are very casual burials.
In the field we're getting animal refuse, joints of meat,
suggesting that they were really just thrown out
with the kitchen waste and offal,
and then covered very unceremoniously with large lumps of limestone
which have been really crashed down on the bodies
to cover them with this rather thick layer or rubble.
So what sort of explanation can you come up with for this?
Well, there are a number of options we should consider.
One is that they died as a result of some illness or plague
and perhaps it wasn't possible to accord them a normal Christian burial.
You just want to dispose of them, basically.
Dispose of the dead in an emergency situation.
But, probably the favoured option,
is that these are the victims of some other cause of death,
perhaps violent death.
We know that the Annals record first Viking attacks on Wales in 855.
We have a recorded attack on Anglesey.
I think I can see what you're getting at here.
Do you think these are victims of Vikings, then?
Well, I hope that during the course of the exposure of these bodies,
that we can accumulate enough data
to actually come to a reasoned, rational argument as to the cause of death.
It's gonna be great to see these emerge.
I was hoping that you were offer to do that.
I'd love to.
- I brought my trowel with me so... - Excellent.
It looks like it's a male...
It soon becomes clear that there are the remains
of two men, a woman and two children.
But how did they die?
As the bones are fully uncovered,
we discover the first unsettling hints that violence might have been involved.
One thing that does show up very clearly now, though,
is the odd position that that one's lying in.
'Cause it's lying partly on the left side, isn't it?
With the head to that side...
- Shall I move this one? - Yes.
That one's like that.
What about my arms, though, where are they?
This arm is really straight back behind like that,
and this one you have to tuck under.
So that one's right under the...
Well it's incredibly uncomfortable.
But do you think that that suggest that this body
might have had its arms tied behind its back?
I don't think we can rule that out.
Both males look as though they were tied up.
So it seems unlikely that their deaths were peaceful.
Were they locals, captured, slaughtered and disposed of by pagan Vikings?
Or could anyone else have buried them in this way?
Six months later radiocarbon dates on all of the skeletons were in,
they'd narrowed down the likely date of the deaths
to the second half of the 10th century,
still a period when Viking raids were common.
So, what's Mark's best theory about what really happened?
Looking at the circumstances of burial,
the evidence there seems to suggest that they were not buried by...
the native population.
And I think the candidates that best fit the bill are, of course,
Viking raiders of this time.
And there seems little doubt that the adult males were likely to be captives,
and perhaps we have, with these five burials,
the after remains of the victims of a Viking raid.
England, Scotland and Wales
seem to have little more to offer in terms of evidence for Viking raids.
So, can I do any better on the other side of the Irish Sea?
The coast of Ireland was reputedly a hotbed of raiding.
And Irish monks recorded the activities of the Vikings at the time.
Professor Donnchadh O Corráin
is the world's leading authority on the Irish Annals.
I think people tend to overlook
the enormous amount of detail in the Irish Annals about the Viking wars.
And this detail concerns not just Ireland,
it concerns Scotland and England as well.
In comparison to the writings of English monks,
the Irish Annals tend to take a more sober view.
They don't squeal, and they don't blame their sins,
they don't say this is God's vengeance on them for their evil living.
They take it...
very deadpan, very realistically.
That's life. So what?
The first Viking attacks are reported quite simply by the Irish,
without any mention of omens.
"794. Devastation of all the islands of Britain by heathens."
And this was soon followed by...
"798. The burning of St. Patrick's Isle by the heathens.
"And they took the cattle tribute and broke the shrine of Dachonna."
In their matter-of-fact way,
the Irish Annals record a story of incredible violence.
In the 40 years following Lindisfarne,
while just one raid is reported in England,
there are more than 30 in Ireland.
Could this onslaught have happened without leaving any trace?
Archaeologist Dr John Sheehan believes that a clue may lie under ground.
Thousands of tunnels or souterrains
have been found in ancient settlements throughout Ireland.
They've always been thought to be for underground storage,
but a fragment of timber from one of them
has recently been dated to the time of the Viking attacks,
and John now believes they had a radically different purpose.
So, do you think that these were places where people hid from Vikings?
I do. Absolutely.
Because any Viking who wants to follow people down here
has to crawl head-first along a very narrow chamber
and finally, then, come up through the floor of this chamber.
And even a child sitting here with a rock or a pointed stick
could render that Viking out for the count.
So it was a very easy place to defend.
And you could fit maybe twelve to fifteen people in here.
Yes, I was quite surprised at how big this chamber is.
I cannot imagine what it would be like though,
huddled in here in the dark knowing that
there were marauding Vikings rampaging around inside your settlement.
I'd say it would be scary enough, I mean, you might hear sounds,
although we are at the very end of the souterrain,
which might probably be fairly sound-proof,
but you might hear sounds, or smell burning going on, perhaps.
But, in general, you'd probably feel reasonably safe
because you'd know, that apart from digging out the souterrain,
the only way they could take you was to come down that passage,
and you'd have them at your mercy.
In Ireland there are accounts of attacks on Britain
that aren't documented anywhere else.
For instance, the monastery on the Hebridean island of Iona
suffered a number of raids,
including a particularly vicious one in 825.
Hearing of an impending landing by Vikings,
the monks rushed to bury the sacred shrine of St Columba.
The Vikings were after it.
But the monks refused to reveal its hiding place to heathens
and were brutally martyred.
But can we ever know the full extent of the Vikings' first attacks?
If Ireland's experience was like the experience of Scotland and England,
then there are a very large number of raids
on English monasteries and churches, and Scottish monasteries and churches
that have not been recorded.
It is impossible that the Vikings could be on the rampage in Britain
and not do the same things as they did in Ireland.
Feeling that I've exhausted all my leads in Britain and Ireland
I'm turning to the homeland of the perpetrators for evidence.
The Vikings came from all over Scandinavia,
but the early attacks on Britain and Ireland
were probably launched from somewhere in Norway.
It's hard to imagine but, 1200 years ago, this little bay was full,
not of pleasure boats, but of Viking ships.
Because all the way along the edge of the water there,
stretched the Viking port of Kaupang.
Kaupang is now the site of one of the biggest
Viking-Age excavations in Scandinavia.
It grew up at the time of the early Viking raids
and developed into a major trading centre.
Perhaps the first Viking town.
Because of the site's importance,
every grain of soil is being sift for clues about life in the town.
But, is there any evidence here for the raids?
In one of the plots, they found a die for making a broach.
A crucible for melting gold.
Glass beads and offcuts.
Weights and pieces of jet.
All the signs of trade, industry and wealth.
But one piece tells a more dramatic story.
We have this book decoration.
It's in silver with gold.
And you can see, on the back side,
it's connected to something that it's very, very thin.
Right, it's sort of been riveted through, hasn't it?
Yes.
Those kind of things were attached to ecclesiastical books.
So, this one was probably ripped off the book by some Viking
raiding a monastery or a church and then brought back here.
So, it's loot.
That really is, absolute, classic loot, isn't it?
That's what you'd expect to find, at least I would, at a site like this.
Something the Vikings had simply pinched and brought back here.
The design tells us that this latest find came from the continent
from the Christian empire of Charlemagne.
But discoveries have also been made of mounts from Britain and Ireland.
Over the last century, hundreds of Viking graves have been found
scattered over the whole of Norway.
And in many of them, amongst the jewelry and weapons of a pagan people,
lay Christian treasures.
A reliquary that once contained sacred bones of a saint.
Part of an abbot's crozier.
And dozens of gilt mounts from holy books.
What would the monks have thought?
Their sacred artwork, created to adorn holy objects,
had ended up accompanying Vikings to a pagan afterlife.
These objects are the best evidence for Viking raids
that archaeology can provide.
In fact, they're the nearest we can get to catching the Vikings red-handed.
But in order to understand the raids
I need a better idea of who the Vikings really were.
My problem is that the first Vikings left no written records.
But luckily the archaeological evidence is truly spectacular.
The most dramatic find of all was made back in 1904.
At Oseberg, in southern Norway,
an entire Viking ship had been preserved
in the clay of a massive pagan burial mound.
By dating tree-rings in its planks we know it was built around 820,
making it the earliest known Viking ship.
The find tells us how these people of the sea
were able to combine the power of both oar and sail.
An innovation that gave them a huge advantage over their rivals.
To me, it's little short of a miracle
that all this wood has survived, and for so long.
If ever we needed evidence
of the skill of the Viking ship-builders, then it's here.
But there's more. The ship itself isn't all that survived.
It was full of wonderful objects that show us life in the Viking world
and at the very highest level.
Much more than just a ship,
it's the Viking equivalent of the tombs of the pharaohs,
the treasure trove of a Viking queen.
Clearly she had a taste for the finer things.
And there's something really rare -
images of Vikings as they saw themselves.
Also discovered in the burial was a richly decorated wall hanging.
The fragile material has now faded
but a painting made during conservation shows the scene -
a grand procession, possibly of a religious nature.
It's an image of an ordered society,
of a people who were also technologically advanced.
But the ship from Oseberg was just the beginning.
Another was discovered nearby
in a burial mound at Gokstad.
Built several years later, it's less ornate than the Oseberg,
but highly streamlined.
A warship, better designed for crossing oceans and landing on beaches.
The most advanced ship of its day, the Viking secret weapon.
I know how I'd feel if I stood on the shore
and saw a whole fleet of these approaching,
fully rigged, hung with shields and crewed by Vikings.
I'd be absolutely terrified.
But even though they had the technology,
crossing the unpredictable North Sea to Britain was a very risky undertaking.
What drove the Vikings to do it?
Were they simply reckless thugs?
Or was there a deeper reason?
It's easy to imagine how they became such good sailors,
because the first raiders probably came from the fjords of western Norway,
where traveling by water is the only way to get around.
But building just one ocean-going Viking ship
would have taken huge amounts of oak, wool for the sails and labour,
resources only available to the wealthiest chieftains.
So, maybe the raids were driven by the powerful.
Could there have been a political motivation behind them?
One theory suggest that the reasons for the raids on Britain
lay not with Vikings but with Christians.
The Christian Emperor Charlemagne
was busy expanding his mighty empire at this time,
and was engaged in a bitter struggle with his pagan neighbours to the north.
One of the things he did was to actually harass and massacre a lot of the pagans
that lived just the south of Denmark.
And at one point he killed something like 4,500 people in one go.
Honestly, I think that this put the fear of God,
literally speaking, into the Nordic countries.
People understood that, either we organise or we get swallowed or killed.
I think, with a threat from the outside, they started to unite,
and that is the kind of response.
And they need cash, they need something
to get this political process going, so to speak.
And I think that's what the earlier Viking raids are about.
I find this idea fascinating.
Could Viking raids really have been triggered
by military pressure from the Christian south?
All we can be sure about is that the Vikings
had the technology to launch these audacious attacks.
But, are there other ways of finding out
where they went once they got to Britain?
A new branch of genetics may offer us an alternative way of tracing the Vikings.
Professor David Goldstein, a geneticist at University College London,
has pioneered the use of DNA
to trace the movements of ancient peoples across the world.
This branch of genetics is only a few years old,
made possible by the findings from the Human Genome project.
So what are Goldstein's feelings about making a test case of the Vikings?
The Vikings are an extremely interesting group to look at in this way,
and there's a couple of reasons for that.
One is that the questions are relatively well defined.
We have a relatively well defined geographic area
for where the Vikings came from,
and a relatively well defined period of time
during which they came into the British Isles.
Now, what we don't know is, when they went to those places,
did they establish large populations,
or was there just some fighting and they went back?
And that's actually what we're trying to get at -
what was the genetic contribution of the Vikings to the British Isles.
So, when you roll it all together
it's actually an extremely interesting problem for us to work on.
The key to Goldstein's success
is that part of human DNA responsible for maleness.
It's known as the Y chromosome and it's passed down from father to son.
Only this chromosome contains the precise information that David Goldstein needs
for tracking population through time.
In my family, the Y chromosome has come down from my grandfather Charles,
through my father Albert, who passed it on to me
and I, in turn, passed it on to my son Barnaby.
And this has been going on for countless generations,
and will continue to do so as long as this male line remains unbroken,
as long as there are male Richards.
Now, this particular chromosome
alters very little from generation to generation,
so as I trace this line back through my male relatives
the Y chromosome in my family will hardly have altered at all.
And this is what makes the Y chromosome
such a powerful tool in tracing populations.
For the study Goldstein will recruit males who live in small towns
and who's own male line
can be traced back several generations in the same place.
This way, he hopes to reduce the effect of modern population movement.
The small towns are chosen to be evenly spread across Britain.
But there are also a few places of particular interest,
such as those with a historical Viking link.
What you're saying is that the country is not wide enough for us to...
Goldstein hopes to estimate the ethnic mix of these islands
more than a millennium ago.
But to do this he'll need thousands of samples,
not only from Britain and Ireland,
but also from the Viking homelands in Scandinavia.
I think it is ambitious, but I think that we really
now have the ingredients that we need to take on a project of this scale.
The genetic technology is there,
and genetics is, in fact, opening up a new window on history.
So, if we could just review
the ethical implications of the project as it develops.
Before he can go ahead, serious ethical questions have to be addressed.
Amongst them, is the sensitive issue of handling the DNA of volunteers.
...family members in case of a paternity and non-paternity?
That's right. So we'll try not to include any relatives in the study.
There is one strange piece of evidence
hinting that genetic clues to a Viking presence might be found.
It's a rare genetic disease called Dupuytren's contracture,
in which a tightening of the tendons in the hand give it a claw-like appearance.
There's a suggestion that this disease
may have come from a Viking genetic inheritance.
I don't know how scientific this is,
but there does certainly seem to be a lot of this disease in Northern Europe
and as you move down towards the Mediterranean it gets less common,
and as you get to the Equator it's virtually never seen.
And among its sufferers, I'm amazed to discover
a two modern-day warriors of the North Atlantic.
According to the president surgeon at Georgetown University Medical Centre,
the president was delighted to know
that he was among such good company as the Vikings.
And tonight, Mrs Thatcher has gone into hospital for an operation on her hand.
She's suffering from a condition called Dupuytren's contracture
which could cause the loss of movement in her little finger if untreated.
Could Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan really be the descendants of Vikings?
Today the disease is treated surgically
by cutting tendons to free the hand.
There's good reason to believe that Vikings suffered from this disease.
Several mentions of such a condition are found in the Sagas,
stories written by the Vikings' descendants.
One story in the Sagas tells of Guğmundur the Good, an Icelandic priest.
He has a servant woman brought to him to massage his feet.
But the massage isn't very good
because three fingers of he woman's hand are clenched into her palm.
Guğmundur's frustration finally boils over.
By kicking out, he ruptures the tendons in the woman's hand.
But as a result she's cured.
The story of Dupuytren's contracture is encouraging
in the search for a Viking genetic legacy.
But now, David Goldstein must begin the task
of recruiting volunteers to donate their DNA.
One of the places where samples will be collected
is Orkney.
So, what you do, is just break up the swab, pull it out and rub it...
on the inside of your cheek.
Goldstein's colleague, Jim Wilson, a native Orcadian,
has returned home to look for volunteers.
Cells taken from the inside of their cheeks should provide enough DNA.
The reason I'm so fascinated by the Orkneys is because I grew up here
and everyone here is really interested
in where they come from in their heritage.
I think, of anywhere in Britain,
here has the strongest evidence for Viking settlement,
both archaeologically and linguistically.
I mean, all the place names of Orkney are Scandinavian in origin.
And with such a strong cultural heritage
I wondered if I'd be able to find a genetic heritage to go along with it.
And at last we have the tools to really look into this question and answer it.
In the coming months, the team will travel
across Britain and Ireland collecting samples.
So, I'll keep this cool in the fridge.
But will they find traces of Viking ancestry?
There's no guarantee of success.
But the Vikings didn't ask people signed consent forms, did they?
Back on the hunt for evidence of Viking attacks
something extraordinary has come up on the mainland.
I'd almost given up hope of finding archaeological evidence in Britain
for a Viking raid on a monastery.
But new finds in the north of Scotland
could be just what I'm looking for.
On this site, at Tarbat, about 30 miles north of Inverness,
archaeologists have discovered traces of a monastery
that dates from the 8th century
that carries on in use throughout the time that Viking raids are starting up.
And it certainly lies in a very vulnerable position
because it's right next to the coast.
But up till now, this monastery,
along with all the others we know from this period,
have shown no archaeological evidence of a Viking raid.
Professor Martin Carver, who has been working at the site for six years,
began to uncover clues that this monastery
might have suffered a violent attack.
The first sign was large fragments of broken Christian sculpture.
When we found the pieces of sculpture
we noticed two things about them straight away.
First, they are astonishingly beautiful and very, very fresh.
Everybody working on the site was, you can imagine, hugely excited
at digging up works of art. That's something that doesn't happen very often
on one's archaeological career, if ever, in fact.
The carving just seems like it was made yesterday.
We also noticed that, in many cases they'd been sort of smashed and cracked.
And in many cases we could fit them together again, you see.
Clearly some one or more great monuments had been broken up
forcibly and quickly and violently with a sledge hammer.
Right, we are going down to visit the revetment wall now.
I'll just lead the way...
At the site, Martin shows me the spot where he'd uncovered the sculpture.
It's this layer here. You see the black one that goes across?
That's the one that produced all the broken pieces of sculpture.
There are some big bits of charcoal in there.
There are. This is burnt wood.
And there's nails as well in the same layer.
So, what do you thing is actually going on here?
Well, somebody has burnt down buildings.
But, I think not here, this isn't burning in situ.
They burnt down the building probably near the top of the hill
where the church now stands, broke up sculpture and tipped it down here.
So the heart has been torn out of this monastery.
Given that there's lots of documentary evidence for Viking attacks
on monasteries, but no archaeological evidence up to now,
do you think you've got the first evidence of one of these attacks?
I we may have.
This burning layer may well be a clue.
And if we can confirm this as the violent end of a monastery
and we can date it to the 9th century and ascribe it to the Vikings, and why not,
I think that will be down to opening a really big area.
But that's not all.
There's other evidence at this site that points to a Viking raid.
The bodies of murdered monks.
Most of the monks' burials probably lie underneath the present churchyard,
but some of them were discovered
when the present church was investigated and its floors were dug up.
They're really what you'd expect of a group of monks.
They're mostly middle-aged males
but several of them showed signs of sword wounds.
They may have been a group of peaceful monks
but some of them seemed to have had a very violent death.
Could this have happened during the period of Viking attacks?
Martin has sent bones from three of the skeletons for carbon dating.
Two of the skeletons are from what looks like part of the monastic burial ground,
a third is from a different part of the cemetery and carbondating reveals that
he died after 1100, once the monastery had been destroyed.
But the two skeletons thought to be monks tell a different story.
They died some time between the years 700 and 1,000,
a large range, but it fits perfectly with the period of Viking attacks.
If look at the injuries, you'll see that the kind of injuries they sustained
are the kind of injuries that come from sword cuts.
Yes. So what sort of injury did this person sustain, Martin?
Is it these?
Yes. Two grooves here made by a heavy blade,
but then healed up.
Now, this one here was less lucky.
- That is a very, very... - That's a massive...
That's a massive cut and a very heavy blade that's cut that through.
And theres another little...
Do you see that little one there?
- So that's two slicing blows... - Yes. To the back of the head.
And then that one, coup de grace, so to speak,
that's the cut across here. And then this fracture
has spread as a result of that massive blow.
Do you really think that these are the victims of Vikings?
Well, I think they could be.
These two people have both suffered blade injuries.
This one certainly died from the attack.
And at the same time, our monastic establishment
seems to be coming to an end.
As a result of this evidence, I at least, find it easier to believe
in tales of Viking attacks on monasteries than I did before.
These new discoveries are surely
the best archaeological evidence from the British Isles for Viking raids.
But they're exciting for another reason.
No raid at Tarbat was ever documented.
Indeed, not even the existence of the monastery
was known until the recent excavations.
So, how many other raids went unreported?
But this isn't the end of the story.
The Vikings didn't only hit and run.
In Anglesey, where I've seen evidence for attacks,
there are also hints that the Vikings later settled.
Viking silver, weights and other objects suggest a trading post.
And nearby, at the Church of St Seiriol
I met someone who believes that the Vikings eventually returned
and left their mark in sculpture.
So, what is it? Is it somebody holding something in the hand?
Well, that's right, you see. It's holding what appears to be a hammer
or an axe in its hand.
And there is nothing like it in Wales.
Now, it could be a sheer coincidence,
but the only example that I know of occurs in a church at Gotland, in Sweden.
Now, as you can see, it's a similar bearded figure
and he is holding in his hand a hammer.
But more interestingly, in his other hand,
and sadly this one has lost his other arm and hand,
he is holding smith's tools.
And we know exactly who this little gentleman is,
he is the dwarf god of smiths. Pure Norse.
There may be a connection.
But there certainly is clear-cut evidence for a more permanent Viking presence
elsewhere across the British Isles.
Found in pagan grave goods, place names and sculpture.
But what does it all mean?
Did Vikings stay a while before heading back to Scandinavia?
Or did some never leave these Islands?
We hope to find some answers in the genes of the Vikings' descendants.
David Goldstein has come to Bergen, in Western Norway,
because before he can identify Viking roots in the British Isles,
he needs to know how to recognise Viking genetic signatures.
To find this, he'll collect blood from a number of locations across Scandinavia
starting close to where the first Vikings may have set sail.
Some men here, ought to share DNA with those first raiders.
I'm wondering how you view your own ancestry.
Do you view yourself as having Viking ancestors?
Yes, I do. It's a sort of mixed feeling
because you're sort of proud of your history
and at the same time you know that these people were barbarians.
I've heard that the Vikings settled in Dublin, or made Dublin,
so if we Norwegians can claim Dublin back to us that would be great.
What Pr Goldstein finds in the DNA of these samples
will be critical for the success of the project.
He must be able to distinguish the Norwegian samples
from those of an important sample area, Castlerea in central Ireland.
Because in contrast, this is a region unlikely
to have been invaded by the Vikings, or anyone else over the last 2,000 years.
So it should give Goldstein the signature of the ancient indigenous Britons.
The people who occupied these Islands before the Vikings arrived.
These first results will indicate if it's going to be possible
to distinguish the DNA of Norwegian Vikings
from that of the indigenous Britons.
Fortunately, the first signs are good.
What we're showing is the results
of looking at Y chromosomes from both samples.
In doing that we can identify particular types of Y chromosomes
and we just represent those types with colours here.
So if you look at the Irish sample here,
what you can see is, in fact, just two types of Y chromosomes.
The type that we've designated in yellow, and that's very dominant,
and then you see a second type represented in blue.
When you look at the Norwegian sample
immediately you see that it's quite different.
And in fact you see a set of types that aren't found in the Irish sample at all.
So this is a pretty good start of the project, isn't it?
Yes, that's right. Fortunately, the differences are so great which,
I should say, it's not something that happens all that often
in this kind of work, but here the differences are sufficiently great
that we can see some things immediately
in terms of identifying Scandinavian signatures in the British Isles.
So this is really extremely encouraging
that the project that we have set out to do, can be done.
The vital first step, finding the key for tracing Norwegian Vikings
has been successful.
What will it tell us about where they settled?
We'll be following the project as it unfolds
in 'Blood of the Vikings'.