Vikings Brought Animals To England As Early As The Year 873

A new study has found that the Vikings brought horses and dogs to the British Isles from Scandinavia.

Chemical analysis of bone fragments from an English cemetery provides the first solid scientific evidence that animals traveled across the North Sea with the Vikings, scientists report Feb. 1 in the journal PLOS ONE.

In the 1990s, researchers discovered the cremated remains of an adult and a child, as well as a dog, a horse and possibly a pig, in a barrow at a Viking graveyard in Derbyshire, England. In previous work, radiocarbon dating of femurs, skulls, and rib fragments showed that the entire population died out between the 8th and 10th centuries. This date was shortened to 873 IX. Thanks to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle of the 16th century, which reports that in that year a Viking army wintered near the city.

Where the animals came from remains a mystery. Scandinavian raiders are known to have stolen horses from the people of England at the time. In general, researchers believe that the Viking ships of that time were too small to transport animals from Scandinavia to the British Isles. An entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes a Viking journey from France to England on horseback in 892, but no physical evidence of this activity has been found.

In the new work, Tessie Lovelman and her colleagues have turned to specific forms, or isotopes, of strontium to uncover the origins of humans. This element builds up in the bones over time during dieting, leaving a clear record of a person's whereabouts ( SN: 2/4/19 ).

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The proportions of strontium in the child's remains match those found in the bushes growing at the burial site, indicating that the child spent most, if not all, of his life in England. On the other hand, the team found that the relationship between adults and the three animals was significantly different from that between native animals. This indicates that people did not spend much time in the country before they died. Instead, their accounts were similar to those from the Baltic Shield region of Norway, central and northern Sweden, and Finland, suggesting a Scandinavian origin.

“One of the beauties of isotope analysis is that you can really identify things that we could have been talking about all the time,” says Marian Moen, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo who was not involved in the study. The use of strontium to analyze various cremated remains, including carbon and nitrogen, which could replace traditional isotope analysis, "is the next logical chapter in understanding prehistoric navigation."

Isotope analysis helped shed light on where these people lived and when they died, but could not answer why dogs, horses and pigs went to England. That's where historical records can help, says Lovelman of the University of Durham in England and the Free University of Brussels in Belgium.

According to Loeffelman, the small size of early Scandinavian vessels and the co-burial of animals and humans suggests that the Vikings originally brought animals for socializing, not just for work.

“Perhaps it was the chosen animals that made the journey,” he says. "They were important to a person ... They lived together, and now they are dying."