Something About The Vikings In Ireland No Longer Makes Sense

Archaeologists opened a warrior grave in central Dublin, full Norse burial, sword and shield and every marker the field uses to classify a grave as Viking, and the DNA said the man was Irish. Y-chromosome lineage most common in the northwest of the island. Pale skin, blonde hair. Then a grave in Galway, sword and spearhead, majority Norwegian ancestry, and his predicted appearance was brown hair, brown eyes, darker complexion. The blonde one was local. The Scandinavian looked nothing like the stereotype. In this one I go through what that inversion actually means, because it takes the word Viking apart. It was never a bloodline. It was a way of living somebody could adopt. The Irish chronicles were already saying so, naming the Gall-Gael as a recognised mixed population fielding armies within about forty years of the first raid on Rathlin, not four centuries of reluctant blending. The objects agree from a completely separate direction, locally made goods in Scandinavian style, over a hundred Hiberno-Norse arm-rings produced in Dublin, and the Cross of Cong carrying Norse ornament so deeply embedded you can no longer extract it from the Irish tradition. And at Woodstown near Waterford there is a Viking settlement that was abandoned and never built over, so its ground plan sat under farmland for a thousand years while every other one got buried under a modern city.
#archaeology #history