You're listening to Digging for meaning? Research from the Oxford School of Archaeology, a podcast.
Welcome to the Digging for Meaning podcast, a podcast exploring research being carried out at the School of Archaeology in Oxford.
I'm Dr Jane Kershaw.
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.
I'm going to be talking about something that was extremely important to the Vikings,
those people most famed for leaving Scandinavia to raid Western Europe in the hundreds,
but who also adventure to North America, settled Iceland and established trade networks with the Islamic empire.
And that thing is silver. Silver is a really important source of information for archaeologists because it's
the only surviving physical evidence we have for the spoils of Viking expansion.
In this podcast, I'll be discussing how and where the Vikings acquired Silver,
why they valued it so greatly and why they so often deposited it in the ground.
Before lockdown, I had a chance to study in person one of the most impressive Viking age silver items I've ever come across.
An enormous silver neck ring made by Scandinavian metal casters sometime around the year 980.
The ring consists of four ropes of twisted, implanted silver rods.
The ends of which had been hammered together and formed into two s shaped hooks for fastening, weighing over half a kilo.
It was probably not the most comfortable item of jewellery to wear.
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.
Although the ring is a Scandinavian type. It was buried in the ground in Beadell North Yorkshire, about 35 miles northwest of York.
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.
BDO Hoard is a spectacular display of the wealth acquired by the Vikings altogether.
The silver weighs nearly four kilograms. That's almost nine pounds in the Viking age.
That's amounts of silver. Could have purchased some 500 sheep.
We might think of a modern day equivalent value of between 35 or 50 thousand pounds.
It sort of depends on the modern value of sheep. But hordes.
By which I mean collections of valuable artefacts usually deposited in the ground are surprisingly common feature of the Viking age.
Hundreds of silver deposits comprising tens of thousands of individual coins and artefacts
are known from the Scandinavian homelands and the overseas areas settled by the Vikings,
a vast region ranging from Iceland in the West to Ukraine and Russia in the east.
It's for this reason that archaeologists sometimes referred to the Viking age as an age of silver.
Although Scandinavia does have native silver O's, the Vikings were unaware of this or their silver was acquired from overseas.
Close study of the objects and coins found in silver hoards shows that the Vikings acquired silver from two major sources.
One was through raids in Western Europe, the looting and plundering that the Vikings are well-known for attacks on the Carolingian continent.
And are covering modern day France, Germany and parts of northern Italy were particularly fruitful.
Is estimated at the Vikings, acquired thirty thousand pounds of silver.
That's around seven million pennies during raids on the Carolingian continent in the 9th century.
One estimate puts this at 14 percent of the wealth of the Carolingian Empire.
Some of this wealth was taken back home to Scandinavia and we can see it in the hordes.
But it was also taken further west and may have been used by the Vikings to purchase land in England's.
The second source of silver is less well known outside of academic circles, but was probably far more significant than European silver.
It was Islamic silver coins known then as now as Durham's.
Over the course of the Viking age, Scandinavians acquired massive quantities of these coins in exchange for furs and slaves,
not necessarily within the Islamic caliphate itself,
but via trading stations located at strategic points along the river systems leading from the Black and Caspian Seas up through Ukraine and Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of dirhams are preserved in hordes in Scandinavia, particularly on the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland,
which appears to have had an important role in establishing Eastern trading routes.
They even reached as far west as Britain and Ireland.
One diver found not far from BDO on the Yorkshire world's was minted in Tashkent in ninety eight or ninety nine.
The Vikings often kept the Silver Bear acquired in its original form,
and this is great for archaeologists because it means that we can track their contacts and sources of wealth,
but they also melted it down to create new Scandinavian forms of rings and ingots.
And with a few exceptions, the Scandinavians didn't produce their own coins until the end of the Viking age.
And this is the case with the BDO horde. It preserves lots of Scandinavian artefacts, but no coins in these cases.
It's kind of difficult to know where the silver originated. Was it from Western Europe or was it from the Islamic East?
The only way of answering this question is through scientific analysis of the silver alloy.
And that's something we're undertaking now in my current project,
which is called Silver by Origins of the Viking Age, by combining trace element data with data from lead isotopes.
Those are the isotopes of the ledge that's contained in the silver.
And comparing it with potential source coinages and awes, we can narrow down provenance.
We've done this analysis for the BDO horde, and the results were surprising.
They suggested that most of the silver originally stemmed not from Western European coins,
which we would expect given the location of the hoard in a Western Viking settlements.
But from early by Nate Silver from Scandinavia. This silver, in turn, represents a homogenisation of dirham Silva,
which basically means lots of Darians coming into Scandinavia were melted down together and cast into objects.
Ultimately, then, the silver in the BITA horde came from the Islamic caliphate.
The Vikings didn't just take silver out of Britain. They also bought it in.
So the Vikings went to great lengths to acquire Silver as a rare precious metal.
We take it for granted that past societies would have found silver a valuable, worthwhile thing to have.
But the Vikings apparently insatiable desire for precious metal requires explanation,
particularly because silver was practically unknown in Scandinavia in the century before the Viking age.
Scandinavian society was an agrarian society.
With the exception of a small number of merchants and craftspeople working in the region's fledgling towns,
almost everyone was a farmer consumed by the tasks of raising livestock,
tending to crops such as barley and oats, and processing, spinning and weaving wool to make clothes and other textiles.
This is true even of the Viking raiders themselves, who raided seasonally in keeping with the aquacultural calendar.
In such a society where so much energy was expended on meeting the basic requirements for survival, what use was precious metal?
As one of his ologist has put it, who would exchange their cows, butter or grain for metal in times of famine?
We can gain an idea of why the Vikings valued Silva so much by looking at the form the silver took.
Items such as the impressive knackering from Beadell were intended to be worn.
Probably not every day, but on special occasions at feasts or other public events.
It was a status symbol. A modern day Rolex showcasing wealth.
It also made a nice gift,
a reward to loyal followers and could be used for what we might described as social rather than strictly commercial payments.
Payments such as bride price paid by a groom to his bride's family or dowries or offerings over ritualistic nature.
Yet other silver items are small, deliberately cut up pieces of rods or coin, which archaeologists call hacked silver.
These items, merely fragments, likely functioned as currency, passing by weight as a means of exchange within a metal weight or billion economy.
They are often found at trading sites alongside weights and scales.
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.
You would have wanted a universal currency accepted by all.
There was easy to cheque for its quality. Small knife,
nicks and pecks on Haak silver are a sign that trade is did indeed inspect the silver to
ensure that it was neither plated nor debased with cheaper metals like leadore copper.
There is no hard and fast rule concerning the relative importance of these two functions of silver.
It's likely that silver was used in different ways at different times and places.
But in the very first fighting each horse from Skandinavia, Silver chiefly takes the form of ornaments.
The beads hoard with its complete neck rings and ingots and lack of coin and haak.
Silver is a good example of one such hoard.
It suggests that at the outset of the Viking age,
Silva was worth acquiring even at the considerable risk of death or great injury because it was a source of social capital.
It gave you the ability to enhance your standing, build a following, create alliances, perhaps secure a marriage.
Here,
the inherent physical qualities of silver are important for understanding why it became such a highly desired form of wealth in an agrarian society.
Silva, unlike cattle or lands, was easily divisible.
Unlike cattle or crops, it couldn't fade over time.
Or die. It was versatile, physically malleable, and could be worn,
then cut off and uses payments and subsequently melted down again and recast into a different object for a different purpose.
It was the ideal form of wealth to pass on to future generations.
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.
One final question remains. As archaeologists, we can study silver because it's been preserved in the ground.
But why was it so often horded? This is a really big question in the field.
And there were lots of different opinions. The 13th century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturr, listen, offered one explanation.
He suggested that people believed they had they would have access to whatever they had buried in the ground in the afterlife,
a principle sometimes referred to as Oden's law.
We see this belief and acted in the Icelandic sagas fictional text, which nonetheless capture the essence of Viking, a society.
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.
Before he dies, Aguer himself hides two chests of silver again in bobbly land.
The problem with these sources is that they post states the end of the fighting age by a couple of hundred years.
Do such accounts reflect genuine 10th century beliefs or are they literary devices to account for the activities of earlier pre-Christian generations?
It's possible that some people buried hordes without ever intending to recover them.
Some holes like those in the saga are found in box rivers and lakes, making them almost impossible to retrieve.
However, such hordes usually contain gold artefacts.
And gold has a very different status to silver in the literature from the period and in the archaeological record.
We can also see that it was treated in a more ritualistic way.
Facility affords some deposits may have been made for the purpose of storing value and stockpiling wealth for future use.
In other words, they serve as a source of savings bank without the benefit of interest.
This is likely to be the case when silver hordes have a very long lifespan containing objects added over many, many years.
But it's also likely that he was buried for safekeeping during periods of political turmoil or absence,
Silver, who often buried within containers such as led vessels or ceramic pots.
The BDO hoard, for instance, was buried under an iron sheet itself, secured by a stone placed on top of its.
This suggests a desire to keep contents together. Vital if the hoard was to be recovered in full.
And if we look at where in Britain Viking age, silver [INAUDIBLE] are found.
We see a concentration around the Irish Sea littoral from southern Scotland all the way south to the Wirral Peninsula.
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.
The Irish Sea area experienced a lot of political upheaval in the Viking age, a Scandinavian settlers from Ireland sought to colonise new lands.
And competed for power with Anglo Saxon rulers from further south.
By contrast, Scandinavian settlement in eastern England was based on family groups, it was largely peaceful.
Political instability likely caused people to bury their valuables and also explains why so many did not return to collect them.
No doubt much more Viking Silva was originally confined to the soil, but was later reunited with its owners.
What we as archaeologists study is then a very partial record of Viking wealth.
But as we continue to study this material from new perspectives to press it to reveal its secrets,
we can learn more and more not just about Viking sources of wealth, but about fundamental aspects of their economic practise and social values.
Thank you for listening. Digging for meaning for more information about this topic, offer any of our other episodes.
Please go to our Web site at a r c h dot o x dot, ac dot.
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