So far on 'Blood of the Vikings'
I've discovered a story of Viking attacks and invasions across Britain and Ireland.
Tonight I travel in search of the evidence for Viking settlement
along the sea road from Shetland to Dublin.
What brought the Vikings here?
And were their dealings with the natives peaceful?
Or not?
Western Norway in winter.
It's dark and it's freezing.
The terrain is rugged and unforgiving.
Deep fjords lie below bare snow-capped mountains.
At the edge of one fjord,
on a thin strip of land sandwiched between water and rock,
I discovered the traces of ancient fields.
A thousand years ago
making a living from this land must have been a constant struggle.
Many of the Vikings came from this part of Western Norway.
And when you come here, and see just how little good land there is,
then it's easy to understand why some of them may have sailed away
to places like Orkney and Shetland.
The first stop for seafaring Vikings heading west
were the islands of Shetland and Orkney.
The Northern Isles.
And there's plenty of evidence that the Vikings came this way.
Ruins at Jarlshof, in Shetland,
show that Viking 'longhouses' once stood here.
This Viking treasure, a symbol of wealth and power,
was discovered buried in Orkney.
There's even rare evidence of Viking writing.
On the walls of an ancient tomb in Orkney
are the finest Runic inscriptions outside Scandinavia.
Graffiti of the sort you'd expect from Vikings,
boasting of treasure and women.
And the locals still celebrate their Viking past.
On Shetland, each January, they gather for the festival of Up Helly Aa
and burn a Viking long ship.
We know that the Vikings came to Shetland and Orkney,
but we don't know how many.
Did Viking immigrants dominate these islands?
Or did most of the natives remain?
To find out just how much Viking ancestry there is in Shetland
and in the rest of Britain and Ireland
the BBC have teemed up with geneticists from the University College London.
So far they've identified distinctive DNA markers
on the Y chromosome in the Viking descendants -
present-day Norwegian men.
The hope is that they'll find these same markers in men from Orkney and Shetland.
Professor David Goldstein is the project leader.
I think the Scottish Islands are a very good place to start
because we have such good evidence,
archaeological evidence and place name evidence,
of Viking activities in the Scottish Islands.
So, in fact, it's really a good test.
If there are genetic signatures from Scandinavia
in the British Isles generally,
we ought to find them in the Scottish Islands.
Dr Jim Wilson, part of David Goldstein's team, is in Shetland
to collect DNA samples from members of the Family History Society.
Based 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.
Right. We have two consent forms to fill in.
-What's your name? - George Jacobson.
I think curiosity is the main thing.
We're just interested to see
if there is any particular link with the Vikings or not.
We really don't know.
We're just interested to see what you're going to come up with.
I'll just open this swab tube
and you rub the cotton bud up and down in the inside of your cheek,
five times in each cheek.
And in the meantime I'll put this preservative in the tube.
I think it's an excellent idea altogether
because it offers scientific proof as to genealogy,
and it can extend so much further back
than written records and that sort of thing.
They're sampling 100 men in both Shetland and Orkney.
In order to lessen the distorting effects of recent population movement
on ancient genetic patterns,
recruits must be able to prove that their father and their father's father
were born in the islands.
-Does your father's father come from Shetland? - Yes.
- And your mother's mother? - Yes.
How many generations can you trace your male line?
-Seventeen. - Seventeen?
Five in Shetland.
Well, I'm a true Viking, definitely.
Any true Shetlander would be proud to find that they were
of Viking blood rather than Scottish blood.
Sampling's going on at over 30 locations across Britain and Ireland.
It's the first time that such a large scale genetics project
has been used to trace the movements of Vikings.
The Northern Isles will be a crucial test-case
for showing how well the technique works.
One question that genetics can't answer and that archaeologists argue about
is what happened to the Picts?
The people that were living in the Northern Isles
at the time that the Vikings arrived.
Did the Christian Picts stay on
and live side by side with the new pagan settlers?
Or did the Vikings' arrival trigger a bloodbath?
Shetland archivist, Brian Smith,
believes the evidence points to just one answer.
He's looked at all the place names at Shetland and Orkney
and discovered that 99% of them are of Scandinavian origin.
If the Vikings had coexisted amiably with the Pictish population of Shetland,
if they'd enslaved them, if they'd killed the men and married the women,
there would be Pictish place names in the islands today.
My only conclusion from the fact that there are no such names
is that the Vikings annihilated the native population of the islands.
In search of evidence to support his theory,
Brian has examined the way place names have changed
in countries where there has been colonisation.
Some times names survive.
The USA is, of course, a place where
the indigenous population did leave some of its names.
The conclusion that we must reach then, is that something ominous,
something awful happened in Shetland and Orkney
to prevent that happening.
He believes that 19th century events in the corner of the British Empire
mirror the Vikings' colonisation of the Northern Isles.
The parallel that I like to draw
is with Tasmania, in the southern hemisphere,
where over a relatively short period, the colonising white settlers
got rid of the local population.
Exactly the same thing happened to the place names,
they virtually disappeared in a very short period.
We don't have native Tasmanian place names today
in the same way we don't have native Pictish place names
in Orkney and Shetland.
But is this view supported by archaeology?
The Picts are an elusive people who lived in Northern Scotland
and the Northern Isles over 1,000 years ago.
They left a few clues behind them,
in artifacts, carved stone, and in the remains of their buildings.
Most Pictish houses are divided into small cells.
But around the beginning of the Viking age
buildings like these vanish
to be replaced by open-plan rectangular longhouses
of a distinctly Scandinavian type.
On the face of it, more support for the idea that the Picts
were wiped out by the Vikings.
However, more recent discoveries in Orkney
are now challenging this view.
25 years ago, Olwyn Owen's first archaeological excavation as a student,
was on the Brough of Birsay
where there'd once been an important Pictish settlement.
Pictish buildings were replaced by Viking longhouses
and within these, the archaeologists came across something
which would change ideas about what really happened when the Vikings arrived.
In the lower levels of the Norse houses
they began to find Pictish artifacts mixed with Norse artifacts.
And, obviously there had been a Pictish settlement here
and there was an intermingling of the cultural material from Picts and Norse.
And I think perhaps some of the earlier archaeologists were a bit surprised,
and maybe even disappointed. They 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 Norse levels.
But that isn't how it was at all.
And that was the first time, I think,
that someone had been able to say so clearly
that there was no evidence of mass slaughter.
So the discovery of Pictish goods within Norse houses
could suggest that at least some Vikings traded with the Picts.
But not everyone is convinced.
The fact that we find Pictish artifacts in Viking houses
needn't necessarily mean that there was peaceful coexistence
between the two peoples.
It can also suggest that the Vikings took the artifacts, took the material,
from the houses of the previous population who had by then,
in my opinion, been slaughtered.
It's difficult to imagine the sudden arrival of predatory Vikings
intent on grabbing land being anything other than violent.
But suppose contact developed gradually over a period of time.
Some archaeologists are now suggesting that this is exactly what happened.
And that, consequently, the first contact with Norway,
may have been long before the Viking age officially began.
And may not have involved massacre.
A closer look at the reports of the first Viking raid
on Lindisfarne, in England, in 793, seemed to back this up.
The monk, Alcuin of York, who wrote about the raid
put scorn on his fellow-Christians
for what he saw as 'inappropriate familiarity' towards the heathen Vikings.
"Consider the luxurious dress and behaviour of their leaders and people.
"See how they had wanted to copy the pagan way of cutting hair and beards.
"Are these the people whose terror threatens us?
"Yet you want to copy their hair?"
So maybe the attack was not by an unknown force
but by a people who'd been frequent visitors to Britain.
You have to remember where we are.
Orkney and Shetland are so close to the west coast of Norway.
So the idea that the Vikings weren't traveling around in Northern waters
long before the Viking age proper is supposed to have started,
I think it's a very strange one.
It seems to me highly likely that they were known in these waters.
They weren't so frightening. They weren't so alien.
But will this idea be ever more than speculation?
What archaeologists would really like to find in Britain
is some indisputable evidence of early Viking contact.
And these bone combs, which date from the 7th century,
may provide the very first clue.
But only if scientists can tell whether they're red deer
or raindeer.
This distinction is critical.
Because while red deer are native to Scotland,
raindeer only come from Scandinavia, the Viking homelands.
Dr Ljuba Smirnova has analysed hundreds of bone combs
from Viking age and medieval sites in Europe
and has worked out ways of telling if they're made from red deer or raindeer.
All antlers are porous in the centre
with a transition to compact solid material at the surface,
the useful part.
The transition is sharp in red deer antler
and the porous material is rarely used.
But in raindeer antler the transition is gradual,
and this semi-porous material is often used.
Raindeer combs also tend to look darker and rougher.
We asked Ljuba to examine a group of combs from Pictish sites across Orkney.
All of them were discovered in layers dated to the 600's.
If any of them are from raindeer
that is proof of early contact with the Vikings.
Ljuba begins with an examination of the surfaces.
So this is one of the typical Pictish combs.
It's well polished, it's light in colour,
and the surface looks almost structureless,
extremely compact, solid material
with very, very fine threads of fibers.
This would be red deer.
But there are several more Pictish combs to be tested.
It's a different type of Pictish comb, double-sided Pictish comb.
It's also very dark, very brown, very woody in appearance.
Very rough surface with little polish.
Let's see if we can find any transition areas.
Beneath the surface of the left edge of the comb
Ljuba has identified a semi-porous region.
That is one of the rare examples
when you are absolutely sure,
or as absolutely sure as it's possible to be,
that you are dealing with raindeer antler.
Ljuba's examination has found that several of the Pictish combs
are made of raindeer antler.
This is the first tangible evidence for early contact,
perhaps peaceful trading, between Picts and Vikings.
Although it doesn't prove that Viking contact was always peaceful.
So what was the impact of the Vikings at this time?
With no historical records in Scotland
we have to rely totally on archaeological evidence.
Dr James Barrett hopes to find some answers
at a newly discovered site on the Island of Westray in Orkney,
where it appears that the Vikings took over one of the original settlements.
He's been searching for clues in ancient rubbish dumps or middens.
So here we have about 50 cm of the Viking age bin.
It's dominated by fishbones, see the pieces sticking out all over the place,
also marine shell.
But here we have a major break into this...
- It changes completely, doesn't it? - Yes.
...this material, which has very little fishbone in it,
a lot less shell and the majority of the bone that's there
is mammal bone, often quite large pieces.
It's incredible that you can see the point in time when the Vikings arrived
by just looking at the change in refuse.
And closeby, on the shore, waves have exposed another midden
and another sign of Viking life.
It contains even more fishbone.
It's just incredible actually. You see a lot of shell,
the shell is almost certainly bait
but in fact is the fish that are really important,
where you have a lot of skull bones
and then the vertebrae from the very front of the fish, the ones like this.
This is a butchery pattern which we know from medieval depictions
of dried, or dried and salted fish.
So, they're chucking the heads away and drying the rest of the fish?
That's certainly the likelihood, yes.
Now, the question is, why is there this explosion in the use of marine resources?
There's no apparent increase in the consumption of fish
based on the dietary evidence from the human bone.
So what were they doing with all those fishes?
The most likely explanation, in my mind, is that this material is going elsewhere.
And that it's part of the commercial revolution
that happens at the end of the late Viking age
and into the Middle Ages, where trading commodities becomes important.
James' unusual site tells a story about the entire Viking period.
From how their arrival influenced diet to the establishment of big business.
It seems that Orkney was an important Viking colony.
But can we tell anything about what these new colonials were like?
Burials can provide vital evidence
because, as part of their pagan rituals,
Vikings were often buried with treasured possessions for the afterlife.
A few years ago, an unusual discovery was made on the island of Sanday, in Orkney.
A farmer came across human bones on the beach.
He thought they might be the remains of a sailor lost at sea,
so he left them there.
He also noticed a curious metal object,
like the top of an old car battery and took it home.
But he died before anyone realised the significance of what he'd found.
Three years later, a colleague of Olwyn Owen's
decided to investigate the farmer's story.
She'd been told there were bones coming out of the cliff at Scar
so she went along and had a look for the bones.
And when she got there she found boat rivets as well
and she knew what Viking boat rivets looked like
and she realised that maybe there was more to this grave than met the eye.
Could the rivets be part of a Viking boat burial?
Archaeologists would need to excavate the site,
and soon, because within days the first winter storms would hit the island.
In the first few weeks of the excavation the conditions were almost indescribable,
they were dreadful, there were howling gales and winds
and rain driving horizontally.
We have some wonderful pictures of one of the diggers
being almost overwhelmed by what looks like a tidal wave
coming across the site. It really was terrible.
For weeks the digging team battled against the worsening weather.
And I 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.
And it was marvelous. My heart was pounding.
I believed then it was a boat... a boat burial.
On hearing that they'd found the rare remains of a Viking boat
Olwyn hurried to the site to supervise excavation of what lay inside.
There were three bodies. A man, a woman and a child.
They also had with them a rich variety of grave goods,
including some quite spectacular ones.
And they're not just objects in museum cases,
they're like a window into Viking life.
In this incredible grave, the man was buried with a sword,
two lead weights, a quiver of arrows, a bone comb
and twenty two carved whale bone gaming pieces.
He didn't have any ordinary domestic tools or utensils as you'd expect,
they may have been lost at sea because his part of the grave
had been quite badly damaged by sea erosion,
but he did have the set of gaming pieces, which were lovely,
so on the basis of the finds that survived in the grave,
he was a warrior with plenty of leisure time.
The woman was buried with possessions
that included a round spindle whorl and a pair of shears,
a needle case,
a small sickle,
and a bone comb.
And something really special,
the most exciting single find, in the ground at least,
has to be the whale bone plaque.
And the wonderful thing about the plaque
was that it was lying face down in the sand at the bottom of the burial chamber.
It took a couple of days before it could be lifted.
And the back of the plaque is rather boring,
and we had no idea how beautiful the front was going to be,
or, indeed, if it was well preserved.
And when it was turned over you could hear this audible gasp of intake breath...
-Oh, yes. - Yes.
And it really was in superb condition.
The moment it was turned over you could see
what a fantastic object it was.
The 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.
And another discovery, which showed just how wealthy this woman was -
a beautiful gild bronze broach.
Her broach is absolutely gorgeous. It's quite rare amongst Viking broaches.
There's only about ten or twelve from anywhere
and every part of the surface of the broach
was decorated with ornament and, particularly prominent,
a little, almost like cat masks, little faces and...
So it was a really, really luxurious and opulent object
which she must have taken care of.
But in the boat, amongst these signs of wealth and status,
was the evidence of what may have been a tragedy.
While the woman was elderly, in her seventies,
the man was aged about 30,
and the child was only about 10.
We'll never know what happened to these Viking settlers in their new land.
And new finds keep coming up on this tiny island.
A particularly surprising one was made by the landlord of the local pub
when he was repairing a neighbour's wall.
I was just building the wall and picked up a stone
and there was something unusual.
I gave it to the kids to go to school to the headmaster
to have a look at it.
Robbie had discovered a Viking runestone.
Translated, it revealed the name of 'ãska...:r',
the man who probably carved it.
Such a rare discovery aroused national interest.
We kept it under our bed for a while
but then the Crown claimed it as 'treasure trove'
so we had to end up handing it over to the museum.
But we got the local community council to back us
and we got it back into Sanday.
A lot of people do drop in by to see it and it's nice to have it in the island.
So, having taken Orkney and Shetland so convincingly and settled there,
where would the Vikings go next?
Well, mainland Scotland might seem like the obvious choice
but archaeology, our main source of information
for this period of Dark Age history,
has provided remarkably little evidence of the Vikings being there.
But 200 miles south-west of Orkney, on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides,
new evidence of Viking settlement is starting to emerge.
Niall Sharples has discovered the remains of a large building.
Long and narrow with a central hearth, a Viking longhouse.
We're actually standing on top of the main the hearth,
and you can see here, where Lynn's working,
these orange layers are coming up in this charcoal,
this is the result of burning peat, and that defines the hearth theory.
Is that quite long and thin as well?
Yes. We've got six meters already exposed that way,
and it goes on behind us. You can see the top of it it's exposed here.
But again, this is a very distinctive feature of the Viking house
and it gives you some idea of communal living conditions.
People would come in to houses and sit around the hearth
and they would tell the sagas.
*** It'd be from people talking around these long, central hearths.
The size of the hearth and the building that it lies in
suggest that this was the most important house in the settlement.
But a closer look at the way it was built
shows that it was not a standard Viking longhouse.
One of the interesting things about this house is you immediately notice
as we came into it, was that it's subterranean.
Now, originally the wall probably stood about this height,
and then the roof rafters would come in here
and I suspect this about here would be the original ground level.
It's all been dug into and the walls have been placed against it.
All you see is the roof coming out above it.
Building sunken houses was a tradition native to the Outer Hebrides.
But buildings like this are also found in Iceland
so it appears that the Vikings took these traditions from the Hebrides
to their colonies in the North Atlantic.
There's an enormous range of artifacts from the site
including rare pieces of Viking artwork.
And yet, it's this unattractive, very crude attempt at pottery
that tells us more about these Viking settlers.
Because Vikings, traditionally, didn't make pottery.
Instead they used vessels carved from soapstone.
A soft stone found in Norway and also Shetland.
The discovery of pottery strongly suggests they were taking up
new ideas from native Hebrideans.
This here, this is what we would call 'platterware'
and it's a kind of baking plate, very distinctive...
you have this grass-marked surface, which is how they produced it.
They laid a flat slab of pottery on some kind of vegetable matting
and then they puncture holes press it down with their fingertips
on this surface. You can see the fingernails where they pressed it down.
These little puncture marks.
And then they produced some kind of baking plate.
So that's the impression of a Viking fingernail there, is it?
Yeah. That's it. Viking fingernails.
But alongside these attempts at a new and unfamiliar technology
the Viking craftsmen were still making their traditional Scandinavian goods.
And with great skill.
You can see that you've got an almost complete antler.
And you can see this segment here is actually
a bit off the main beam of the antler,
and it's chopped it off, sawn off, and this is the beginning of the process
of working down a piece of antler to make a composite comb
which you see here. A very nice comb there.
And so you chop it down to get roughly rectangular pieces like this
and these are eventually gonna be worked down to these little pieces here.
And this piece here is almost the very final stage
of the piece that would slot in there and it would be riveted
by putting a spacer plate on there, and then they would cut the teeth
after it's all been riveted together.
In a nearby barn Niall's team have been sorting fragments of fishbone
sift from the soil around the settlement.
If you look at this tray here
all we've got here are the residues from the very fine sieving,
and if you look at some of the stuff here,
some of these vertebrae have turned out to be from herring.
And it seems as though there's a very substantial herring fishing
and this kind of herring-fishing requires organisation.
You know, several families coming together, pulling their resources.
Several boats go out and you might catch absolutely nothing
for a week.
And then suddenly, the herring will come and you have thousands, millions perhaps,
of herring coming out.
And so, what do you do with them? You can't eat them all yourself.
There's only so many herring a man can eat.
So you have to start trading. If you're herring fishing, I think,
then you're trading.
This site, protected for centuries by its very isolation,
is one of the largest rural Viking settlements ever found in Britain.
On the Hebrides, as in Orkney and Shetland,
archaeology is showing another side to the Vikings.
As settlers, adapting to live in a new land.
The northern and western isles of Scotland
provided the Vikings with good farming and good fishing.
But, was that all they came for?
Or was there another reason why these islands were so important to them?
Maybe they provided the ideal staging post
on the route to a much bigger prize.
The next stage of the sea road was the short sail to Ireland.
A country full of wealthy monasteries that the Vikings knew very well.
They had, after all, ravaged the country with their early raids.
But was Ireland seen only as a source for plunder?
Here, 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.
The world's leading expert on the Annals is Prof. Donnchadh Ó Corráin
and he believes they tell us when the Viking settlement of Ireland began.
There are two entries in the Annals.
One is about the Vikings on Loghneagh in 840.
And the first entry in the following year is:
"Heathens still on Loghneagh."
And for the winter, which went 840 to 841,
the entry in the Annals says: "Heathens still in Dublin."
So we know that the Irish annalists note that they are staying over
and not going home as they should in the winter.
And this is the beginning of settlement.
The Annals report that the Vikings in Ireland made their camps in 'longphorts'.
Fortified basis close to rivers.
But finding any archaeological remains
of these early settlements has proved difficult.
Now, though, Ned Kelly believes that he's found the first good evidence
for an Irish longphort.
He was drawn here to Athlunkard, on the river Shannon,
after hearing about the discovery of Viking-age artifacts.
When I came here first I didn't know what the site was
and it puzzled me because it didn't look like any
typical Irish archaeological monument that I'd seen before.
We have a razed area here
and that was originally surrounded by a ditch and a bank outside it.
So this would be a citadel, and outside of that
we have a D-shaped enclosure
which is running from this little stream coming round to the river again.
And as you can see, you have a fairly impenetrable marsh on this side.
And that's particularly interesting because the references to longphorts
described the Scandinavians building D-shaped enclosures
with their back to a river and surrounded by marshy ground.
So it fit in perfectly.
But Ned's conviction is not shared by everyone.
I think the initial reaction was quite scathing.
People said, you know, these things don't exist.
What's a longphort anyway?
And my response to that was,
well, if these sites aren't longphorts, what are they?
I'm convinced that's what this site is
and that there are many others like it to be found still.
And I agree with Ned.
All of the bits of evidence that I've been shown
seem to point in one direction.
Its position right next to the river, defended on one side by
an earthward bank and enclosure with a marsh beyond it.
The 10th century finds that were found within the enclosure.
All of these things seem to come together
to point to the fact that this must be a Viking longphort.
The Annals suggest that the most important phort is in Dublin.
And it's here that we find the highest concentration of Viking dead.
Between the mid 1800's and the 1930's
workmen in Dublin uncovered up to a hundred Viking burials.
Most of them were found before the development
of modern archaeological recording.
And it's taken years for Stephen Harrison
at the National Museum of Ireland
to sort out all the artifacts.
There's a distinct contrast with Viking graves from the Northern Isles.
Those from around Dublin contained many swords.
The largest collection of Viking weaponry outside Scandinavia.
This is the most beautiful sword, isn't it?
Is this one of the most special ones in the whole collection?
This is definitely right up there.
I think it's certainly one of my favourites, if nothing else.
But it's not the only one.
There are actually five very elaborately decorated swords.
And they were all found in railway cuttings at Kilmainham in 1845.
As indeed was this one rather more plain sword,
which is rather more typical, I'm afraid, of Viking swords in this era.
It's much less highly decorated and rather more functional.
And why is it bent in too?
This is a ritual which in Scandinavia is normally associated with cremation.
You very often find the artifacts buried
have actually been subjected to an intense heat
and then bent or damaged in some way.
We don't know what this practice meant.
It may have been the symbolic killing of the weapon.
Or simply done to prevent it being re-used by a grave robber.
Do you have any sort of real favourite artifacts among these collections?
This amber broach here.
If you look at it you can see that it has actually been cut from a larger object.
You can see that the edges are quite definite here and here,
but here and there the edges are actually very rough.
And the whole thing has then been converted into a broach.
So we don't actually know what object it was cut from,
but it was certainly being used as a broach
at the time it was placed in the Viking grave.
But what about identifying the objects themselves?
Can you always tell exactly what they are?
I mean, what, for example, is that rather strange looking thing?
We actually do know what this is.
This is actually a glass linen smoother.
If you turn it around this way you can actually see the marks
from the point when the glass was still fluid.
This one actually came from a woman's grave at Kilmainham.
It was found in a small gravel pit in the area in 1848.
Taken together these discoveries tell us
that Dublin must have been a major centre of Viking power.
We are made even more aware and more conscious
of the wealth of Viking graves in Dublin,
which is a reflection of the wealth of Dublin
and its status and its importance in the 9th century.
In the years that followed,
the Vikings would strengthen their presence in Dublin.
Which takes its name from the black pool where they first moored their ships.
Under the Vikings, the longphort expanded to become Ireland's first town.
Its streets still followed by those of today's booming city.
And these Viking roots are still celebrated by Dubliners.
If not always in the most authentic way.
Before we go I've gotta teach you how to do the Viking roar.
The Viking roar* is for very vocal men.
The Viking roar comes from down here somewhere.
And it goes something like this: Put your hands above your head.
On the count of three: 1, 2, 3...
It was a bit halfhearted at the moment. Try it again.
One, two, three...
Evidence for the wealth of the Irish Vikings
is found not only in their towns,
but in what they buried across the whole of Ireland.
Silver.
Treasure that was hidden over a thousand years ago
and never reclaimed.
Archaeologist Dr John Sheehan has been trying to explain
why the Vikings buried so much silver in Ireland.
We have huge quantities of silver and silver hoards
compared to those found in Britain
and indeed compared to those found in some of the Scandinavian countries.
For instance, we have a lot more hoards than are found in Norway.
In total, today, there are 140 recorded silver hoards in Ireland.
So, why is there so much more silver in Ireland, then?
The reason is really to do with the nature of Viking settlement in Ireland.
If you look at Scotland, or indeed England,
it tended to be farming settlements.
In Ireland the Vikings settled in towns
and towns survive through economic activities,
trade, in other words. And the Irish Viking towns grew very wealthy
and silver is an expression of that wealth.
Judging from these hoards, the Vikings were making fortunes.
But the silver also reveals the true extent of their trading networks.
It's coming from pretty far field.
Some of it certainly is coming from Anglo-Saxon England
in the form of coin which is then melted down to produce ingots and ornaments,
but there's also evidence to indicate that large quantities of it
are coming from the Arabic world.
And the silver is being imported into Scandinavia,
up the great Russian rivers,
and from there to be re-distributed across Scandinavia,
and to the West.
But what was it in Ireland that attracted so much Viking commerce?
The usual trade items that the Irish dealt with
throughout most archaeological periods
would have been animal hides, and wool, for instance.
But there's also little doubt that a very significant proportion of the trade
was in the form of slaves.
There's a hint of the scale of this trade in the Annals of Ulster from 871.
The chronicler writes about the Viking rulers of Dublin
returning from an expedition to Scotland.
"Amlaíb and Ímar came back to Dublin from Scotland with 200 ships.
"And they brought with them in captivity to Ireland
"a great prey of Angles, Britons and Picts."
Now, that must have been a very large haul of slaves.
And there would have been brought back to Dublin
because it must have been functioning primarily
as a sort of slave emporium within the western Viking world.
The Viking farmsteads are characterized by their huge size
and slave labour would have been needed to operate those
to the maximum efficiency.
The 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.
And there are even objects that could have been used in this trade.
We have slave chains. There 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.
So, could slavery have been the main attraction
for the Vikings on their route down the sea road?
It seems that they take any opportunity to make money,
whether it was from looting, farming, or trading.
And it didn't seem to matter whether the trade was in fish or slaves.
In my journey through these islands
I feel like I've come closer than ever to the Vikings.
But did they really settle here in large numbers?
The answer may lie in the genetic make-up of today's population.
Pr. David Goldstein's team are still collecting samples
from across Britain and Ireland.
But they're starting the analysis with the data from Orkney and Shetland.
When we carry out just this very simple analysis
asking, of those chromosomal types we only find in Norway
how much of them do we see in the Scottish islands?
We actually see quite a lot.
When we look at Shetland and Orkney
we see something just under 30% of the chromosomes are found in Norway
but we can't find them in the indigenous population.
So it looks actually quite likely
that those chromosomal types have a Norwegian origin.
So we right away see a clear indication of substantial
Norwegian genetic input into those islands.
That's quite a hefty figure, isn't it, really? For a first stage.
It is a high figure and, in fact, probably, in the end,
when we've carried out a more complete statistical analysis,
the figure will only go up, because those are the types
that look pretty clearly to be Norwegian in origin.
Other chromosomal types may turn out in fact to be Norwegian,
it's just that you can't see it clearly.
The preliminary results from the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland
provide for the first time clear evidence
that people in Britain share genes with the Vikings.
Fascinating. It really *** interest
I would say that we definitely should be Scandinavian more than Scots.
So we're all Vikings at heart.
I think these results are really exciting.
I'm quite surprised, actually, that you're getting such good results
along the sea road that the Vikings took from Scandinavia
through Orkney and Shetland.
You're getting what seems to me a significant
genetic impact on the population even at this distance in time.
There's still lots of sample-collecting and analysis to carry out
before the precise meaning of these results becomes clear.
But it now looks certain that some secrets of our Dark-Age past
will be revealed by the blood of the Vikings.
Transcription by Fry