In addition to being infamous raiders, the Vikings also established
extensive trading channels that were prosperous
from the eighth through the eleventh century.
According to a recent research, some of those ties connected vast
metropolitan commerce hubs with rural outposts where a wealth of natural
resources originated over remarkably extensive distances.
Researchers from the UK and Europe use hair combs discovered in a historic
Viking commercial hub in modern-day Germany to demonstrate the scope of the
Viking commerce. The antlers of a deer species that lives hundreds of
kilometers distant are used to make the combs.
Situated close to the southern tip of the Jutland Peninsula in what was
then Denmark, Hedeby was one of the most significant commercial centers
during the Viking Era. (The town itself was abandoned around a millennium
ago, although the location is currently in northern Germany.)
Hedeby
was one of the major urban sites in Viking Age Europe, functioning as a
junction between the cultural worlds of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, as
well as between Scandinavia and Northern Europe.
The village appears to have been a center for antler crafting as well,
according to the researchers, who cite over 288,000 antler finds from
earlier studies that were made at the location. The majority of these
discoveries are leftover materials from the manufacture of hair combs
similar to the one above.
The researchers aimed to determine the kind of deer from which the antlers
originated, providing insight into their geographical origin, by examining
the collagen found in these antler combs.
Using a technology called Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry, or
ZooMS,
scientists revealed that up to 90 percent of the combs were constructed from
the antlers of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), also known as caribou.
Because reindeer herds only resided in northern Scandinavia, this means
either the antlers or the combs themselves were introduced to Hedeby.
Only 0.5 percent of the antler debris at Hedeby, according to earlier
studies, originated from reindeer. Furthermore, there is little indication
of comb manufacture in the earlier stages of the site, despite the town
having a wealth of evidence of antler-working that primarily dates to later
in Hedeby's heyday.
All of this, according to the researchers, indicates that the combs were
imported, albeit some may have been personal belongings of "mobile
individuals." Either way, the combs were made somewhere else, maybe hundreds
of kilometers distant in upland Sweden or Norway, and ended up at
Hedeby.
The team adds that if the combs were imported, this suggests that Hedeby
and the far north had extensive, long-range economic contacts.
And according to their research, it may have existed as early as 800 CE, or
only seven years after the Viking invasion on Lindisfarne, England, which is
often considered to mark the beginning of the Viking Age.
"We have begun to answer a whole range of questions about the timing of
travel and trade in Viking-Age Britain and Scandinavia,"
says
Steven Ashby, an archaeologist at the University of York.
Ashby and his colleagues point out that there is still much to discover
about life in the Viking Age, including how individuals traveled and how
interconnected the various Viking regions were overall.
The new study is a part of a larger tendency in Viking studies that aims to
comprehend the connections between Scandinavia's far northern settlements,
such Kaupang or Birka, and metropolitan centers like Hedeby.
"This big town at the entrance to continental Europe and the upland
mountains of Scandinavia are connected in a way that makes the work at
Hedeby especially fascinating,"
adds Ashby.
He continues, "it also suggests a period in the ninth century when these northern ties
must have been exceptionally strong."
The study has been published in
Antiquity.
