The Viking Age: A Time of Many Faces

THE VIKING AGE

THE VIKING AGE

A TIME OF MANY FACES

by

CAROLINE AHLSTRÖM ARCINI

With

T. Douglas Price, Bengt Jacobsson, Maria Cinthio, Leena Drenzel, Bibiana Agustí Farjas and Jonny Karlsson

Illustrated by

Staffan Hyll

Published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by

OXBOW BOOKS

The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

and in the United States by

OXBOW BOOKS

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© Oxbow Books and Caroline Ahlström Arcini 2018

Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-938-8

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-939-5 (epub)

Kindle Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-940-1 (mobi)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939501

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Front cover: A male skull with filed teeth from the Viking Age cemetery in Fjälkinge, north-east Skåne in Sweden. Superimposed on the skull is a mask from a runestone in Lund, Lundagårsstenen DR 314. (Photo Staffan Hyll)

Contents

Preface and acknowledgment

1. The bare bones

2. Eight Viking Age burial grounds in south-east Sweden

Trinitatis: an early Christian graveyard in Lund

Vannhög: a burial place near an old Viking fortress

Fjälkinge: a remarkable burial ground on the fertile plain

Kopparsvik: a cemetery south of Visby

Slite Square: with a view of sailing routes to the east

Fröjel: a burial ground beside a Viking Age harbour

Birka: a well-known trading place in the realm of the Svear

Skämsta: a farm cemetery

A wide range of burial practices

Everyone was buried

3. Immigrants or locals?

A geological signature can be detected in dental enamel

Different patterns emerge

Someone knew how the deceased wanted to be buried

Did everyone come here voluntarily?

4. Health and care for the frail

Tall as palm trees

Toothless or shining white?

Joint problems

Everyday accidents and battle traumas

The dwarf

Leprosy: noseless and numb

Health in Viking Age society

5. Markers of identity?

Filed grooves on the teeth

Young, old, short, and tall

Buried like other people?

Was Gotland the gathering point?

A Nordic custom or inspiration from elsewhere?

Why file grooves in teeth?

6. Burial grounds designated for particular purposes?

The influence of Christianity or division into special areas?

Market places and harbours?

7. A time of many faces

Appendix: Strontium values

Notes

References

Preface and acknowledgment

Suffice it to say, the Viking Age represents the most exposed period in the prehistory of Scandinavia, with many academic texts as well as representations in popular culture. Too often, however, the descriptions about this period concentrate on death, violence, raids and fear. However, archaeological and osteological studies have delivered, and continue to deliver, other perspectives regarding Viking Age society. This book is one such example, where the everyday life of people is in focus. It is via the skeletons that we present the life history of children and adults during the Viking Age. As an osteologist working in the field of archaeology I regularly work with human skeletal remains from the Viking Age. The material presented here is based on excavations from the twentieth century. The purpose of the project was to synthesize what the skeletons tell us about the living condition for people during the Viking Age.

Several colleagues have in various ways contributed to this publication. My husband Torbjörn Ahlström, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund University, suggested already at the beginning of this project that we should use strontium isotopes to map mobility in Viking society. Douglas Price, University of Wisconsin, with his knowledge and experience of this method, has contributed not only to this publication, but also through other studies showing the variation in mobility in Scandinavia during this period. Leena Drenzel, National Historical Museum, Stockholm, has spent several weeks with me in the museum depot in Tumba, where teeth were studied under the magnifying glass. Jonny Karlsson, National Historical Museum, Stockholm, Bibiana Agustí Farjas, Insitu S.C.P. Arqueologia funerària, preventiva i patrimoni cultural Begur/Centelles/Sant Feliu de Guíxols, and Torstein Sjøvold have delivered discoveries of new cases of modified teeth in Sweden. I also thank Johan Calmer and Ingmar Jansson for communicating contacts in Russia and Ukraine in search of possible traces of the phenomenon of modified teeth. Bengt Jacobsson, Riksantikvarieämbetet UV Syd, and Bertil Helgesson, Sydsvensk Arkeologi AB, first introduced me to grave materials from the Viking era. Together with Maria Cinthio, I have had intensive and constructive discussions about Viking burials in a Christian context and especially in Lund. Dan Carlsson, Arendus and Lena Thunmark-Nyhlén have been valuable discussion partners regarding the Gotlandic surveys. Together with Per Frölund, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, I have worked with the graves from Skämsta. Rita Larje has provided valuable osteological information about the graves from the cemetery in Kopparsvik, Gotland. With Mattias Toplak, Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, I have had several interesting discussions regarding the phenomenon of prone burials. Gunnar Andersson, National Historical Museum, and Ingrid Gustin, Department of Archaeology, Lund University, have contributed information regarding Birka. I have had interesting discussions regarding strontium with Ola Magnell and Mathilda Kjällquist, The Archaeologists, National Historical Museum, and Helene Wilhelmson, Sydsvensk Arkeologi AB. I have discussed the difference between Slavic ceramics and Baltic ware with Mats Roslund, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund University, and Torbjörn Brorsson, KKS. I want to thank Göran Possnert, Tandem Laboratory at Uppsala University for radiocarbon dates. I have received valuable comments on the text, especially from my good friend Annica Cardell. The translation into English was made by Alan Crozier. I also want to thank Helene Borna-Ahlkvist at The Archaeologists, National Historical Museum, for support during the whole project. Funding has been provided from the Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation for Humanistic Research, Ebbe Kock Foundation, Berit Wallenberg Foundation, Gotlandsfonden, Åke Wibergs stiftelse and DBV. I also want to thank Gotlands fornsal in Visby, National Historical Museum, Stockholm, Historical Museum and Kulturen’s Museums in Lund and Trelleborg Museum in Trelleborg. Finally I will thank Staffan Hyll who has a fantastic ability to visualize my ideas as comprehensible illustrations.

I dedicate this book in memory of my tutor, colleague and good friend Pia Bennike, who followed and supported this project from the beginning but alas, did not see the final book.

1

The bare bones

Vikings. Say the word and we think of robbery, rape and pillage, assault, battles, kings, chiefs, mercenaries, and colonization. Vikings. We think of ships, long-distance travel and connections, runes, buried hoards of silver, and trade in both goods and people. Vikings. We think of the meeting between paganism and Christianity. Vikings. We think of the Icelandic sagas, of European settlers in Greenland and Vinland and ibn Fadlan’s descriptions of the Norse traders in the east, Rus as tall as palm trees, with blond hair and tattooed bodies and young female slaves following their masters into death. But there is much more to tell.

Some scholars believe that the Viking Age is not a correct designation because the word Viking mainly denotes a pirate and describes only that part of the population who set off on plundering expeditions.¹ Nor was there any homogeneous Viking Age culture or a Viking Age people, since Scandinavia at this time consisted of small geographical areas with different names and traditions (Fig. 1), not countries with borders like the present-day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.² On the other hand, the Old Norse mythology and language were the same.³

Although the word Viking is mainly associated with the more violent activities of this period, precious metals in different shapes and labour in the form of slaves were brought home and thus also benefited the more sedentary part of the Norse population. In other words, the results of the actions performed by the Vikings were deeply integrated in the society of the time. The traces of the period we today call the Viking Age, AD c. 750–1050, represent both those who travelled on raids and military expeditions, and those who peacefully pursued trade and made their living from what the farm yielded. Representatives of the different groups were, in all probability, intimately associated with one other. So, is it really possible to distinguish between those who are called Vikings and the rest of the population?

This book deals with both those who lived their entire lives in Scandinavia and with those who set off í víking, on plundering expeditions. The latter usually came back, perhaps switched to another livelihood, and were buried at home. The findings presented here are based on the skeletons of those who originally came from Scandinavia. But as we shall see, there were also foreigners in these places of burial. Clues to a knowledge of this period come from archaeological excavations of burial grounds. Here we find the skeletons of people of all ages from different social classes. Studies of the skeletons not only give us insight into how people expressed their identity but also enable us to detect the situation of the most vulnerable individuals in society, namely, children and the elderly. We get a glimpse of health conditions in those days, and how social networks functioned, and of how people viewed and treated those who differed in various ways.

Previous scholarly studies of Viking Age populations in Scandinavia, based on analyses of skeletal material, have been published by a number of researchers.⁴ These studies deal with matters of health and migration, and the fact that a proportion of the population consisted of slaves. Researchers have also examined the dental health of the Viking Age population and found a high degree of tooth loss and heavy wear, along with a widespread prevalence of caries, but there are also examples of attempts at dental hygiene reflected in the use of toothpicks.⁵ A study of cemeteries in the Mälaren valley suggests, for instance, that the health status of the people buried in the cemeteries adjacent to the well-known trading site of Birka seems to have presented more infections and disturbances in nutritional intake than, say, those buried in the early Christian graveyards in Sigtuna.⁶ Dietary analyses of the early Christian burial places in Sigtuna also show that the women consumed more vegetables than men.⁷ That people did not only travel from but also to Scandinavia is seen, for example, in an aDNA analysis of the skeletons in the Viking Age Oseberg ship in Norway. The young woman buried in the ship may even have come from as far away as the region around the Black Sea.⁸ Even more examples of mobility – perhaps not always voluntary – are indicated by the study of a dozen or so graves at Flakstad in Norway. Isotope and aDNA analyses led to the conclusion that some of the individuals were slaves.⁹ Another recent study of conditions in the Iron Age concerned the population of the island of Öland in the Baltic Sea. Based on strontium analyses, this study demonstrates that immigration of people to Öland was greater in the Viking Age than in earlier periods of the Iron Age.¹⁰ It was also observed that the origin of the newcomers varied, from nearby to far away.¹¹ Large-scale strontium analyses of Viking Age grave material from Denmark has also shown that those who came from outside tended to be buried with more grave goods than the local people,¹² and that a large number of the men in the military forces of Harald Bluetooth, who reigned in the 10th century, were recruited outside Denmark.¹³. Our study, however, is the first synthesis of its kind examining Viking Age populations from several different regions in present-day southern Sweden.

Fig 1 Map of Sweden with known names of historical areas. (after Fredrik Svanberg 2016 and sources cited therein)

During the Viking Age there were two different ways of handling the bodies of the deceased: they were either burnt on a pyre (cremation) or buried unburnt (skeletal graves). To some extent these burial practices occurred in parallel depending on where in Scandinavia we look, but a certain chronological shift can be observed, as cremation graves dominated in the earlier phase of the Viking Period. In several of the geographical areas investigated here there was a switch to skeletal burials early in the Viking Age. The graves used in this study are exclusively skeletal. The reason for this is that one of the main purposes was to study health and living conditions in the Viking Age, which is difficult in the case of cremation graves, where diseases cannot be detected in the same way as with a skeleton.

In the chapter Eight Viking Age burial grounds in south-east Sweden we present the burial sites and the roughly 1800 graves which form the basis for this study. It will show the geographical distribution of the Viking Age settlement and different burial customs and form the basis for demographic discussions, i.e. age and sex distribution. The majority of all the investigated sites are located near the coast in southern and south-eastern Sweden (Fig. 2). Immigrants or locals? is the chapter where we use strontium analysis to study mobility. Strontium analysis of the enamel of individuals is a method that has been frequently used in recent years to discern who is local and who originated from another region. To study and compare the non-locals’ burial customs with those of the locals could give us an indication of how integrated the foreigners were in the society and whether they kept some of their customs. This study covering nearly 400 individuals from both rural and early urban Viking societies provides new knowledge about the movement of individuals in a geographical perspective during the Viking Age.

The chapter Health and care for the frail deals with the possibility to obtain both knowledge of living conditions in a population and how the relatives and the community cared for the sick and disabled. The material has provided good indications of the health situation during the Viking Age, and we will discuss for example whether the disabled lived long despite their handicap and if they were buried in the same careful way as others. During this period, the infectious disease leprosy was introduced to the population, and we have used strontium analysis to investigate whether migration is a likely reason for the spread of the disease. In the Middle Ages people with leprosy were not allowed to live and be buried among the others, but what was the custom during the Viking Age? All this is interesting not least because the Viking Age is often described in brutal terms.

Fig 2 Map of Sweden with the eight burial sites presented.

People in all times worldwide have adorned their bodies with temporary or more permanent decorations. The best known and most common permanent decorations are tattoos. However, there is also a permanent decoration that people made by filing their teeth –