Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers
Cat Jarman challenges us to look again at the Vikings, and the way we thinking about the Dark Ages / Early Medieval period more generally.
To do this they bring together the latest cutting edge scientific techniques and long known facts that prevailing historical narratives had disconnected. That the Vikings and the Rus are one and the same people seems self-evident in this telling, yet that is not the received wisdom.
Isotope analysis seems to be a real game changer for Archaeology, combined with genetic analysis – bones found in one location can now tell us where they grew up, and where their parents probably grew up – showing how mobile past populations were – when “exotic” goods are found they may have arrived from a long chain of “local” exchanges, but increasingly they may have arrived in the pocket of a single long-distance traveller.
But there is only so far we can go, and Cat Jarman acknowledges this, we can find a Buddha in Scandinavia and speak of the exchange of goods but we can’t place a Buddhist in Scandinavia – grave goods were clearly meaningful but what, exactly, that meaning was will remind hints and shadows at best. We read so heavily our own world-view onto the objects of the past all interpretations need to be held lightly.
No comments:
Post a Comment