Commercial expansion likely led to the start of the Viking Age, study says

The so-called Viking Age, during which Scandinavian pirates, merchants and settlers spread across a vast area from Canada to Uzbekistan, probably started thanks to the growth of trade networks within Scandinavia itself and with neighboring regions of Europe bathed in the River Rhine, like present-day Germany and Holland.

The data supporting the idea were obtained through the meticulous dating of artifacts found in a trading center in medieval Denmark, the city of Ribe, on the Jutland peninsula. According to researchers who established a detailed chronology of the Danish emporium, Ribe took a few decades to start receiving goods from more distant areas, such as the Middle East.

“I believe that trade with Western Europe, as well as maritime exchanges with places like Norway, was an early catalyst for the development of large-scale trading networks, facilitating the emergence of all the necessary infrastructure — ships, ports, markets” , says Bente Philippsen, a researcher at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and author of a new study on the subject.

“These networks were later expanded and intensified through connections with the Islamic Middle East through Russia, which resulted in the protoglobalized trade patterns we are used to associating with Viking activity,” explains Philippsen, who told the leaf having been an exchange student in São Paulo 20 years ago.

The expert in carbon-14 dating (the main method used to estimate the age of archeological samples as young as 40,000 years) subscribes to an article on Ribe’s chronology in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature, along with three other colleagues.

The work is an important piece in trying to understand the causes behind the Viking Age, which conventionally spans the period between 793 and 1066 AD.

Although the most visible face of the Viking Age is that of attacks by sea against European monasteries and cities, the phenomenon was much broader.

Everything indicates that the same guys who threw themselves overboard in hopes of plundering defenseless churches could also behave like shrewd merchants in other contexts, forging long-distance connections both across the European Atlantic and the rivers of the interior of Eastern Europe capable of carrying them. them to the rich zone of influence of Islam.

In fact, Scandinavia is among the places in the world that most preserved silver coins from the Abbasid Caliphate, a great Muslim empire at the time, in its archaeological record. The question was whether the apparently intense commercial interaction with the Middle East was the trigger that triggered the Viking advance, seeking control over the routes associated with Islamic prosperity, or something that became important later.

To answer this question, the only way would be to accurately date the archaeological strata of a Scandinavian mercantile center such as Ribe. Philippsen and his colleagues managed to do this with the help of so-called SPEs (English acronym for “solar particle events”), moments in the past when very energetic particles emitted by the Sun affect the composition of organic matter on Earth.

In these situations, the atoms that a tree incorporates into the formation of its wood, for example, have a much higher than normal proportion of carbon-14, an unstable form of the chemical element carbon that disappears at a known rate.

When this information is added to the count of tree trunk growth rings, which are formed once a year, it is possible to estimate with yearly accuracy the age of a piece of wood. Simply use a growth ring with the solar storm’s carbon-14 “signature” as a fixed point, with a more accurate date.

The amount of carbon-14 in other artifacts with growth rings allows you to estimate their age and assemble the rest of a site’s chronology.

Based on this technique, Danish scientists showed that, in Ribe, the first decades of commercial activity, from the year 700, are marked by the arrival of colored beads made from broken glass chalices or pieces of ancient Roman mosaics, both typical articles from Western Europe. At that time, the emporium is also receiving ceramic objects produced in the basin of the River Rhine.

From the year 740 onwards, whetstones and reindeer horns (used to make combs) of Norwegian origin began to circulate there. A little earlier, in 725, bills emerge from the southern Baltic Sea, which bathes Sweden and Finland today, among other countries. Finally, accounts from the Middle East appear, in layers attributed to the period between the years 785 and 810 — according to the researchers, it is too late to attribute the beginning of the Viking Age to this phase of commerce.

Soren Sindbaek, co-author of the research, says one possibility for the future is to analyze the chronology of Scandinavian ports that are further east, such as Birka, Sweden, to see if the pattern detected in Ribe is reflected there as well. This would help to strengthen the idea of ​​a more local origin for the “globalization” of the Viking Age.