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You're listening to Digging for meaning? Research from the Oxford School of Archaeology, a podcast.

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Welcome to the Digging for Meaning podcast, a podcast exploring research being carried out at the School of Archaeology in Oxford.

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I'm Dr Jane Kershaw.

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I'm a researcher in the school and I specialise in the archaeology of the Viking age, the period roughly between 750 and 10, 50 A.D. in this podcast.

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I'm going to be talking about something that was extremely important to the Vikings,

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those people most famed for leaving Scandinavia to raid Western Europe in the hundreds,

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but who also adventure to North America, settled Iceland and established trade networks with the Islamic empire.

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And that thing is silver. Silver is a really important source of information for archaeologists because it's

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the only surviving physical evidence we have for the spoils of Viking expansion.

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In this podcast, I'll be discussing how and where the Vikings acquired Silver,

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why they valued it so greatly and why they so often deposited it in the ground.

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Before lockdown, I had a chance to study in person one of the most impressive Viking age silver items I've ever come across.

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An enormous silver neck ring made by Scandinavian metal casters sometime around the year 980.

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The ring consists of four ropes of twisted, implanted silver rods.

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The ends of which had been hammered together and formed into two s shaped hooks for fastening, weighing over half a kilo.

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It was probably not the most comfortable item of jewellery to wear.

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But it seems to have been well used, a small length of silver rod has been threaded through one of the ropes indicating an old repair.

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Although the ring is a Scandinavian type. It was buried in the ground in Beadell North Yorkshire, about 35 miles northwest of York.

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It was here in 2012 that it was discovered alongside other rings, ingots or bars of silver and gold fittings from an Anglo Saxon sword.

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BDO Hoard is a spectacular display of the wealth acquired by the Vikings altogether.

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The silver weighs nearly four kilograms. That's almost nine pounds in the Viking age.

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That's amounts of silver. Could have purchased some 500 sheep.

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We might think of a modern day equivalent value of between 35 or 50 thousand pounds.

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It sort of depends on the modern value of sheep. But hordes.

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By which I mean collections of valuable artefacts usually deposited in the ground are surprisingly common feature of the Viking age.

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Hundreds of silver deposits comprising tens of thousands of individual coins and artefacts

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are known from the Scandinavian homelands and the overseas areas settled by the Vikings,

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a vast region ranging from Iceland in the West to Ukraine and Russia in the east.

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It's for this reason that archaeologists sometimes referred to the Viking age as an age of silver.

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Although Scandinavia does have native silver O's, the Vikings were unaware of this or their silver was acquired from overseas.

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Close study of the objects and coins found in silver hoards shows that the Vikings acquired silver from two major sources.

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One was through raids in Western Europe, the looting and plundering that the Vikings are well-known for attacks on the Carolingian continent.

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And are covering modern day France, Germany and parts of northern Italy were particularly fruitful.

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Is estimated at the Vikings, acquired thirty thousand pounds of silver.

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That's around seven million pennies during raids on the Carolingian continent in the 9th century.

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One estimate puts this at 14 percent of the wealth of the Carolingian Empire.

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Some of this wealth was taken back home to Scandinavia and we can see it in the hordes.

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But it was also taken further west and may have been used by the Vikings to purchase land in England's.

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The second source of silver is less well known outside of academic circles, but was probably far more significant than European silver.

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It was Islamic silver coins known then as now as Durham's.

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Over the course of the Viking age, Scandinavians acquired massive quantities of these coins in exchange for furs and slaves,

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not necessarily within the Islamic caliphate itself,

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but via trading stations located at strategic points along the river systems leading from the Black and Caspian Seas up through Ukraine and Russia.

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Hundreds of thousands of dirhams are preserved in hordes in Scandinavia, particularly on the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland,

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which appears to have had an important role in establishing Eastern trading routes.

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They even reached as far west as Britain and Ireland.

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One diver found not far from BDO on the Yorkshire world's was minted in Tashkent in ninety eight or ninety nine.

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The Vikings often kept the Silver Bear acquired in its original form,

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and this is great for archaeologists because it means that we can track their contacts and sources of wealth,

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but they also melted it down to create new Scandinavian forms of rings and ingots.

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And with a few exceptions, the Scandinavians didn't produce their own coins until the end of the Viking age.

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And this is the case with the BDO horde. It preserves lots of Scandinavian artefacts, but no coins in these cases.

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It's kind of difficult to know where the silver originated. Was it from Western Europe or was it from the Islamic East?

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The only way of answering this question is through scientific analysis of the silver alloy.

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And that's something we're undertaking now in my current project,

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which is called Silver by Origins of the Viking Age, by combining trace element data with data from lead isotopes.

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Those are the isotopes of the ledge that's contained in the silver.

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And comparing it with potential source coinages and awes, we can narrow down provenance.

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We've done this analysis for the BDO horde, and the results were surprising.

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They suggested that most of the silver originally stemmed not from Western European coins,

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which we would expect given the location of the hoard in a Western Viking settlements.

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But from early by Nate Silver from Scandinavia. This silver, in turn, represents a homogenisation of dirham Silva,

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which basically means lots of Darians coming into Scandinavia were melted down together and cast into objects.

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Ultimately, then, the silver in the BITA horde came from the Islamic caliphate.

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The Vikings didn't just take silver out of Britain. They also bought it in.

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So the Vikings went to great lengths to acquire Silver as a rare precious metal.

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We take it for granted that past societies would have found silver a valuable, worthwhile thing to have.

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But the Vikings apparently insatiable desire for precious metal requires explanation,

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particularly because silver was practically unknown in Scandinavia in the century before the Viking age.

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Scandinavian society was an agrarian society.

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With the exception of a small number of merchants and craftspeople working in the region's fledgling towns,

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almost everyone was a farmer consumed by the tasks of raising livestock,

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tending to crops such as barley and oats, and processing, spinning and weaving wool to make clothes and other textiles.

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This is true even of the Viking raiders themselves, who raided seasonally in keeping with the aquacultural calendar.

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In such a society where so much energy was expended on meeting the basic requirements for survival, what use was precious metal?

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As one of his ologist has put it, who would exchange their cows, butter or grain for metal in times of famine?

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We can gain an idea of why the Vikings valued Silva so much by looking at the form the silver took.

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Items such as the impressive knackering from Beadell were intended to be worn.

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Probably not every day, but on special occasions at feasts or other public events.

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It was a status symbol. A modern day Rolex showcasing wealth.

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It also made a nice gift,

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a reward to loyal followers and could be used for what we might described as social rather than strictly commercial payments.

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Payments such as bride price paid by a groom to his bride's family or dowries or offerings over ritualistic nature.

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Yet other silver items are small, deliberately cut up pieces of rods or coin, which archaeologists call hacked silver.

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These items, merely fragments, likely functioned as currency, passing by weight as a means of exchange within a metal weight or billion economy.

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They are often found at trading sites alongside weights and scales.

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And this makes sense, if you would, trading with people you didn't know or necessarily trust and who you may not ever see again.

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You would have wanted a universal currency accepted by all.

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There was easy to cheque for its quality. Small knife,

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nicks and pecks on Haak silver are a sign that trade is did indeed inspect the silver to

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ensure that it was neither plated nor debased with cheaper metals like leadore copper.

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There is no hard and fast rule concerning the relative importance of these two functions of silver.

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It's likely that silver was used in different ways at different times and places.

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But in the very first fighting each horse from Skandinavia, Silver chiefly takes the form of ornaments.

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The beads hoard with its complete neck rings and ingots and lack of coin and haak.

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Silver is a good example of one such hoard.

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It suggests that at the outset of the Viking age,

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Silva was worth acquiring even at the considerable risk of death or great injury because it was a source of social capital.

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It gave you the ability to enhance your standing, build a following, create alliances, perhaps secure a marriage.

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Here,

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the inherent physical qualities of silver are important for understanding why it became such a highly desired form of wealth in an agrarian society.

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Silva, unlike cattle or lands, was easily divisible.

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Unlike cattle or crops, it couldn't fade over time.

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Or die. It was versatile, physically malleable, and could be worn,

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then cut off and uses payments and subsequently melted down again and recast into a different object for a different purpose.

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It was the ideal form of wealth to pass on to future generations.

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And for those not in line to inherit land or cattle, it could also be one right off the bat through activities requiring little capsule investments.

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One final question remains. As archaeologists, we can study silver because it's been preserved in the ground.

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But why was it so often horded? This is a really big question in the field.

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And there were lots of different opinions. The 13th century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturr, listen, offered one explanation.

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He suggested that people believed they had they would have access to whatever they had buried in the ground in the afterlife,

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a principle sometimes referred to as Oden's law.

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We see this belief and acted in the Icelandic sagas fictional text, which nonetheless capture the essence of Viking, a society.

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In Eagle Saga, for instance, a girl's father deposits a chest of silver and bronze coldren in a marsh immediately prior to his death.

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Before he dies, Aguer himself hides two chests of silver again in bobbly land.

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The problem with these sources is that they post states the end of the fighting age by a couple of hundred years.

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Do such accounts reflect genuine 10th century beliefs or are they literary devices to account for the activities of earlier pre-Christian generations?

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It's possible that some people buried hordes without ever intending to recover them.

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Some holes like those in the saga are found in box rivers and lakes, making them almost impossible to retrieve.

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However, such hordes usually contain gold artefacts.

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And gold has a very different status to silver in the literature from the period and in the archaeological record.

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We can also see that it was treated in a more ritualistic way.

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Facility affords some deposits may have been made for the purpose of storing value and stockpiling wealth for future use.

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In other words, they serve as a source of savings bank without the benefit of interest.

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This is likely to be the case when silver hordes have a very long lifespan containing objects added over many, many years.

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But it's also likely that he was buried for safekeeping during periods of political turmoil or absence,

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Silver, who often buried within containers such as led vessels or ceramic pots.

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The BDO hoard, for instance, was buried under an iron sheet itself, secured by a stone placed on top of its.

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This suggests a desire to keep contents together. Vital if the hoard was to be recovered in full.

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And if we look at where in Britain Viking age, silver [INAUDIBLE] are found.

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We see a concentration around the Irish Sea littoral from southern Scotland all the way south to the Wirral Peninsula.

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And yet there's a marked absence of hordes in eastern Englands, an area that was densely censored by the Vikings towards the late 9th century.

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The Irish Sea area experienced a lot of political upheaval in the Viking age, a Scandinavian settlers from Ireland sought to colonise new lands.

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And competed for power with Anglo Saxon rulers from further south.

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By contrast, Scandinavian settlement in eastern England was based on family groups, it was largely peaceful.

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Political instability likely caused people to bury their valuables and also explains why so many did not return to collect them.

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No doubt much more Viking Silva was originally confined to the soil, but was later reunited with its owners.

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What we as archaeologists study is then a very partial record of Viking wealth.

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But as we continue to study this material from new perspectives to press it to reveal its secrets,

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we can learn more and more not just about Viking sources of wealth, but about fundamental aspects of their economic practise and social values.

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Thank you for listening. Digging for meaning for more information about this topic, offer any of our other episodes.

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Please go to our Web site at a r c h dot o x dot, ac dot.

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U.K. forward slash podcasts. Thank you.