Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

In popular culture, ancient Norsemen are often depicted as murderous invaders, but a new study published earlier this week in the European Journal of Archaeology suggests that the early days of the Viking Age were more about commerce than conquering.

In the study, Dr. Steven Ashby of the University of York’s Department of Archaeology and his colleagues discovered that the Viking Age may have predated the first raid on England by about 70 years, and that the Scandanavians were travelling to a trading center in Denmark.

Those journeys from Norway to the Ribe, Denmark were underway during the eighth century CE and can be directly linked to the development of that town as a commercial hub, the authors said. They based their finding on the discovery of reindeer antlers in the archaeological remains of the town’s former marketplace, since reindeer are not native to Denmark.

Trade likely kickstarted the Viking expansion

The antlers, Dr. Ashby and his fellow researchers surmise, was likely imported from Norway and serves as proof that the Vikings visited Ribe well before they started pillaging raids. The antlers were essential to the manufacture of hair combs, one of the key industries of the Viking Age, and the fact that they were hard to find locally suggests the presence of a trade network.

The study demonstrates that early Viking travelers had access to large quantities of these reindeer antlers, and that they likely sold them to craftworkers in Southern Scandinavia, Dr. Ashby noted. This indicates that merchants from the north were visiting the trade center earlier than previously believed, and may have “kickstarted the Viking expansion.”

While the new discovery does not disprove the existence of violent, aggressive Vikings, which Dr. Ashby said are known to have existed, it reveals that there is far more that characterizes the Viking Age, including “transformations across northern Europe in terms of political organization, religion, economics, and social structure.”

“However, the changes we see – the development of long-distance trade, the spread of Christianity, the rebirth of towns, the centralization of authority are ultimately sparked by the fact that Scandinavians (and others) are travelling around a lot more,” the professor told redOrbit via email. “No doubt their trading missions contained an element of violence too!”

So why did the Viking Age happen in the first place?

What was it that originally made Scandinavians decide to get in their boats, and travel off on long voyages to dangerous places, to bring back personal wealth? What Dr. Ashby and his co-authors found is that the earliest recorded raids (which began around AD 793 in Britain) are not actually the times that early-medieval Scandinavians engaged in long-distance travel.

“They were travelling down from the arctic to southern Scandinavia as early as the 720s,” he told redOrbit. “They were probably doing this for commercial gain. This suggests that a network of trade, centered around the early town of Ribe, and soon to incorporate others such as Birka in Sweden, Hedeby in Germany, and Kaupang in Norway, was already starting to develop before the traditional start of the Viking Age.”

“What is really exciting about this is that it answers a very long-running debate in Viking studies,” he added. “Did the raiding activity that characterizes the Viking age eventually lead to commercial trade, the development of towns, and so on, as Scandinavians came into contact with other kingdoms? Or was urban trade already in existence, thus creating awareness of and contact with the outside world, which eventually turned violent?”

“Our results demonstrate that the latter is far more likely,” Dr. Ashby concluded, as the Vikings were members of an urban network that bound people living in rural and wilderness regions with those residing in important commercial hubs. Rural peoples that comprised raiding parties would likely have known what was taking place all over the world.

The biomolecular technique behind the discovery

The discovery was made using a biomolecular technique known as ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry), which was invented at York University and characterizes the proteins in the collagen component of organic material. This minimally-destructive technique is used to identify animal species, and this is not the first time that Dr. Ashby has enjoyed its benefits.

“The advantage of ZooMS is that although not so precise, it is more reliable that ancient DNA, as well as being quicker and cheaper, and requiring very small samples,” he said. “That means that we can do two things: One, we can analyze very highly-worked objects that curators would otherwise be nervous about us damaging in the sampling process, and two, we can analyze very large quantities of very tiny fragments of bone and antler.”

Bone and antler are “very difficult to afford with DNA,” the professor added. “For these reasons, it is an excellent choice for those of us who work in the study of bone objects, and so far I have used it in two big studies: This Danish one, and another Scottish one, where we showed that pre-Viking combs thought to be made of reindeer, and thus indicated early contact with Scandinavia, were in fact nothing of the sort.”

“So we have pushed back the date for long-distance travel in Scandinavia itself, but done the opposite for the first appearance of Scandinavians in Scotland,” he said. Specifically, previous findings eliminated the possibility of contact between Scandinavia and the British Isles prior to AD 793, and the new study provides evidence that residents of the remote parts of Scandinavia were visiting Ribe and possibly other trade centers early on in their culture.

“I expect the technique is going to continue to transform our understanding of craft and trade in the Viking Age and beyond,” noted Dr. Ashby, who was joined by Soren Sindbaek, a specialist in Viking Age trade and urbanism from Aarhaus University in Denmark, and Ashley Coutu, who specializes in the biomolecular analysis of bone, antler, and ivory, on the study.

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