Barcelona, Mar 19 (EFE).- The archaeologist Cat Jarman, who has just published “The Kings of the River”, a new approach to the history of the Vikings that reveals their expansion to the East, including Kievan Rus, considers that ” (Vladimir) Putin is twisting the story” about that medieval federation of Slavic and Finnish tribes to deny the Scandinavian influence of its origins.
“The Kings of the River” (Atico de los Libros) offers, as its author explained in an interview with EFE, two novelties: “It gives a vision of the East and the relationship it had with the Viking world, presenting a broader vision and confirming that they were protagonists of a kind of proto-globalization; and secondly, it provides the evolution of research thanks to the new scientific methods applied to archaeology”.
Until now, recalls Jarman, “the Viking sources were incomplete, they did not refer to the territories such as Scandinavia, basically because the only contemporary sources, not very objective, were English or European, that is, the peoples who were conquered or attacked”.
Archaeology, he continues, is giving a voice to characters that had not had one, such as “women, who do not appear in the sagas, or anonymous individuals who are not kings or rulers, and also to regions such as Iceland or Scandinavia, whose written sources are later”.
Until now it was accepted that the Viking Age began with the looting of the Lindisfarne monastery in the year 793, and from then on they ravaged the coasts and rivers of Europe, from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, but the discovery in an archaeological site in 2017 of a carnelian from India modified that Eurocentric vision.
Jarman traces in the book the journey of that mysterious gem from Gujarat (India) to the British Isles and shows that the Vikings went up the Dnieper to the Black Sea and the Volga to the Caspian, weaving a commercial and human network that united Europe and Asia .
Beyond the human drama, Jarman notes with concern the war in Ukraine, which “could physically affect the sites, although fortunately they are in rural areas, putting cultural heritage, archives and museums at risk, especially in kyiv”.
The archaeologist regrets that the Russian president “twists history in an interested way to justify a genocide in Ukraine” and the only positive aspect that can perhaps be extracted is that “now there is a greater interest in the history of this area and that can awaken the research and archeology on the origins of Kievan Rus and Eastern Europe, since during the Soviet period in the USSR the Scandinavian heritage was denied, to emphasize the Slavic origin, denying any link with Western and Northern Europe “.
Through the study of human remains, it has been possible to trace the migratory and commercial movements of the Vikings, who “were the first responsible for the birth of Kievan Rus, by forming commercial settlements, before continuing their commercial expansion towards Byzantium and Constantinople and the caliphate of Baghdad, to which they provided amber, furs and, above all, slaves”.
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As a bioarchaeologist, Jarman has used forensic techniques such as isotope analysis, radio carbon dating and DNA analysis of human remains, which “serves to discover those individual stories related to migratory flows or verify that women did not stay in house taking care of the farm but were also part of the expansion.
They moved in family groups, as has been confirmed in Estonia, where the bodies of four brothers were found, in the United Kingdom, where a father and a son were found, or two sisters from a site in the Ukraine, says the author, and “also It has been seen that smallpox reached northeastern Europe through the Vikings.”
Still missing, Jarman points out, “filling in many gaps about the knowledge of the Vikings and completing the map because it is not known, for example, how many people migrated, what they did in the Iberian Peninsula, the slave trade, if there was more trade with North America or if they came to trade with China.
Jarman plans to continue excavations at Repton and, future permitting, return to excavations in the Ukraine.
“The River Kings” reflects the importance of the Great Viking Army in Repton because “it was a turning point for the Vikings, who went from petty battles and plunder to determined territorial conquest.”
In fact, his next book, which he hopes will be published next year, deals with the creation of the kingdom of England from the Viking kingdom, with a reading that purges all the myths.
The “bad fame” that the Viking world has aroused is explained, according to Jarman, because “the historical sources were written by their enemies, who presented them as barbarians, bloodthirsty and evil, an image that later expanded television fiction.”
Jarman attributes the decline of the Vikings to “the political centralization that occurred in northwestern Europe that gave rise to the formation of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, combined with their conversion to Christianity.”
The television series, although they perpetuate some of these stereotypes, have served, underlines Jarman, to “awaken interest in the world of the Vikings.”
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By José Oliva
(c) EFE Agency