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Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2018 18:09:11 GMT
The Salme site may change all that, pushing the first evidence for sailing back a century or more. Though, again, most of the wood had disappeared, by measuring the position of the more than 1,200 nails and rivets and carefully looking at soil where the wood had rotted, Peets concluded that Salme 2 was about 55 feet long and 10 feet wide. The craft had a keel, an element critical to keeping a sailing ship upright in the water. Peets believes clusters of iron and wood near the center of the boat and pieces of cloth recovered from the soil are indications of a mast and sail. If he is right, Salme 2 is the oldest sailing vessel ever found in the Baltic. And other scholars are inclined to agree. “I would think that the big Salme boat would be the perfect place to find the first example of a sail before the Viking Age,” says Jan Bill, an archaeologist and specialist in Viking ships at the University of Oslo. “It’s the size of vessel,” says Bill, “where a sail would make a lot of sense.” Salme 2, built, sailed, and beached a half-century or more before the first raids on England heralded the dawn of the Viking Age, was, for all intents and purposes, a Viking ship. The Salme 2 vessel was certainly capable of crossing the open sea between the Swedish coast and Saaremaa, a distance of about 100 miles. The vessel also shows that the key technology of the Viking Age took shape at least decades, and maybe almost a whole century, before 793. Like its nearby sister vessel, Salme 2 brought a crew with it when it was buried. “Three days after we started digging, a sword was discovered, and after some days skeletons in rows began to appear,” says Ragnar Saage, a graduate student who worked with Peets on the excavation. It took two summers of painstaking work to excavate all the bodies: 33 in all, stacked neatly four deep. “We couldn’t believe our eyes,” says Saage. “It was a strange feeling to dig this kind of site.” The Salme finds suggest that the historical view of the Viking Age as a sudden phenomenon needs a radical adjustment. It’s clear from the remains that Scandinavian princes were organizing war parties decades or more before the fateful 793 raid on Lindisfarne: Though the men were interred en masse, the Salme sailing party was far from egalitarian. The weapons paint a picture of warriors led by a rich warlord or chieftain and a handful of well-equipped lieutenants. Even the stack of bodies on Salme 2 was hierarchical. Five men with double-edged swords and elaborately decorated hilts were buried on top. At the bottom, the bodies were buried with simple, single-edged iron blades. “These were some noblemen with their retinue,” Peets says. “The more elaborate swords are clearly connected to people of higher status.” One of the uppermost skeletons even had an elaborately decorated walrus-ivory gaming piece—perhaps the “king”—in his mouth. A jeweled sword hilt, the finest of the 40 blades in the burial, was found nearby. It’s possible the men found in Salme 1 were from the bottom of the social ladder. Konsa thinks they may have been servants or lower-class “support staff,” and buried with less care, and fewer grave goods, far away from the warriors and aristocrats of Salme 2. To find out who these men were and where they came from, archaeologists are looking at the skeletons themselves. Since Peets finished excavating Salme 2 in fall 2012, the remains of the slain warriors have come to rest at the University of Tallinn’s Institute of History, a centuries-old stone building on a narrow side street in the Estonian capital’s medieval center. Neatly arranged in dozens of white cardboard boxes, they line one wall of a lab on the institute’s top floor, accessible via a groaning, creaking Soviet-era elevator. Forensic anthropologist Allmae has spent the last two years trying to untangle the story of the yellowed bones she pulls from the boxes. Allmae has ample reason to think the men were felled in a fierce battle. Lying on a steel lab table is a humerus, or upper arm bone. Lining it up against her own arm, she demonstrates how the man probably raised his right hand over his head to ward off sword blows—to no avail. Deep chop marks cut clean through the bone. Another warrior’s skull was cut straight through. “Somebody chopped off the top of his head,” Allmae says. “I also suppose it was done with a sword—two strokes.” Only five of the 40 skeletons have clear cut marks on their bones, which she says isn’t unusual for mass graves—there are lots of ways to die in battle, after all. “There were also arrowheads in the body or in the pelvic area that could have been deadly but not touched the bones,” Allmae adds. Bloody flesh wounds that didn’t connect with bone could also have felled the men without leaving a lasting trace.
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Post by Admin on Dec 28, 2018 18:13:04 GMT
The Early Medieval Period of northern Europe (ca. 8th–11th century) saw the formation of the Viking world with population growth and urbanization. Already at an early phase of this period, there was a notable population expansion from Scandinavia, not least with the Viking conquest and colonization. The urbanization process in Scandinavia started with the Viking proto-town Birka together with the contemporaneous Ribe, Hedeby, and Kaupang all focusing mainly on trade and craft production. Different forms of Christianity expanded northward, and the pagan ways were pushed back [1]. Goods, wealth, and people moved extensive geographic distances over established networks in northeastern Europe and the first stable urban centers emerged, including Kiev, Schleswig, York, Lund, and Sigtuna [2, 3, 4]. These became important hubs for the commercial and religious activity, as well as local and regional politics. The early medieval period has been singled out as a period with high mobility, and the Viking expansion was an important part of this [5]. Expansion from Scandinavia was undertaken through seafaring often within the urban networks [6]. The mobility of the Vikings has, in fact, been considered one of the major forces shaping the demographic landscape of modern Europe [7, 8, 9]. Analysis of stable isotopes of individuals buried at Birka showed that some individuals were of non-local origin, as judged from δ34S values [10]. This was recently confirmed by strontium (Sr) analyses of human remains [11, 12]. Furthermore, a number of genetic studies of individuals denoted as Vikings have been undertaken, but so far they have mainly focused on extant individuals or uniparental markers and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from Viking Age human remains [13, 14, 15, 16], with only one full genome from Birka published thus far [11]. These studies revealed traces of uniparental genetic Viking legacy in the British Isles, the Orkneys, Iceland, and elsewhere [17]. Few genome-wide studies from Europe have been undertaken on human skeletal remains from the Viking Age. One reason for this is that during the Late Iron Age, the most common pagan burial practice was cremation (with inhumations as exceptions to the rule), leaving no material suitable for DNA analysis. However, early Christian contexts allow for larger genomic studies. Figure 1Sigtuna Location and the Site Organization The town of Sigtuna in eastern central Sweden was one of the pioneer urban hubs in the vast and complex communicative network of the Viking world (Figure 1A). The town that is thought to have been royally founded was planned and organized as a formal administrative center and was an important focal point for the establishment of Christianity [19]. The material culture in Sigtuna indicates that the town had intense international contacts and hosted several cemeteries with a Christian character (Figure 1B; Tables S1 and S2). Some of them may have been used by kin-based groups or by people sharing the same sociocultural background. In order to explore the character and magnitude of mobility and migration in a late Viking Age town, we generated and analyzed genomic (n = 23) and strontium isotope (n = 31) data from individuals excavated in Sigtuna (Figure S1A; Tables S1 and S3). Strontium isotope ratio (87Sr/86Sr) is an established marker for mobility [20] and provides information on individual movement and life history in relation to geological isotopic signature of the landscape. Thus, strontium shows where a person lived (geographically) at the time of tissue (tooth enamel) formation, whereas genetics show to whom or to which group a person is related (in broad context). Given that strontium values present a finer scale of sub-structuring than genomics, we combine the two in order to investigate human mobility patterns in Sigtuna (Figures S1B and S1C). Table 1 Summary Statistics Based on Genome Sequence of 23 Individuals from Sigtuna
Sample ID Location/Burial Site Genome Coverage mtDNA Genome Coverage Mol. Sex mtDNA hg Y-DNA hg
84001 cemetery 1 (Nunnan) ×3.7 ×108.2 XY H2a2a1g N1a1a1a1a1 (N-L392∗) 84005 cemetery 1 (Nunnan) ×1.03 ×132.2 XY H1ap1 I1a1b3 (I-Z74∗) 84035 cemetery 1 (Nunnan) ×0.2 ×149.6 XX H2a3a – nuf002 cemetery 1 (Nunnan) ×0.16 ×44.1 XY T1a1j ND kls001 cemetery 2 (Kålsängen) ×0.13 ×11.8 XY H1b1 R1∗ (R-M173∗) kal006 cemetery 3 (Kållandet) ×1.2 ×87 XX V7a – kal009 cemetery 3 (Kållandet) ×0.19 ×124.4 XX T2f1 – 2072 cemetery 4 (Bensinst.) ×0.01 ×1.5 XY U ND bns023 cemetery 4 (Bensinst.) ×0.02 ×3.7 XX H4a1a3a – gtm021 cemetery 4 (Götes Mack) ×0.43 ×34.1 XX H5 – gtm127 cemetery 4 (Götes Mack) ×0.06 ×11.1 XX H1a3a – 97002 mass grave (St. Lars) ×0.12 ×27.7 XY J2a1a (0.6) R1b (R-312∗) 97026 mass grave (St. Lars) ×0.08 ×87.6 XY U5a2a1 ND 97029 mass grave (St. Lars) ×0.07 ×34.2 XY J1c2 ND stg020 church 1 (St. Gertrud) ×0.18 ×59.4 XX T2 – stg021 church 1 (St. Gertrud) ×3.4 ×136 XX J1d1b1 – stg026 church 1 (St. Gertrud) ×0.61 ×367.2 XX J1c2k – grt035 church 1 (St. Gertrud) ×3.2 ×279 XY H G2a2 (G-L1259∗) grt036 church 1 (St. Gertrud) ×2.2 ×247.8 XY H13a1a5 I2a2/2b (I-M436∗) urm045 church 1 (Urmakaren) ×0.09 ×74.7 XY H1a8 ND urm160 church 1 (Urmakaren) ×1.3
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Post by Admin on Dec 29, 2018 18:09:21 GMT
Figure 2 Genetic Variation of Ancient Individuals from Sigtuna The mitochondrial genomes were sequenced at 1.5× to 367× coverage. Most of the individuals were assigned to haplogroups commonly found in current-day Europeans, such as H, J, and U [14, 26, 27]. All of these haplotypes are present in Scandinavia today (Figure S3A).
The Y chromosome haplogroups were assigned in seven males. The Y haplogroups include I1a, I2a, N1a, G2a, and R1b (Table 1; Data S1, sheet 2). Two identified lineages (I2a and N1a) have not been found in modern-day Sweden or Norway [28, 29]. Haplogroups I and N are associated with eastern and central Europe, as well as Finno-Ugric groups [30]. Interestingly, I2a was previously identified in a middle Neolithic Swedish hunter-gatherer dating to ca. 3,000 years BCE [31]. The Genetic and Isotopic Diversity of Viking Age Sigtuna In order to compare genetic relationships among the individuals from Sigtuna and modern-day and ancient individuals from Europe, we performed principal-component analysis (PCA) using a reference panel of 21 present-day European populations [32, 33] (Figure S3C). We projected all 23 ancient Sigtuna individuals together with Iron Age individuals from England (n = 10; from 360–350 calibrated [cal] BCE to 690–881 cal CE), Hungary (n = 1; 980–830 cal BCE), Montenegro (n = 1; dating not available) and Sweden (n = 1; 427–611 cal CE) [34, 35, 36] onto PC1 and PC2 of the modern-day individuals using Procrustes transformation [37] (Figure 2A). The Sigtuna individuals were widely distributed, with most falling within modern-day variation of Northern Europeans, with the majority of individuals encompassing genomic variation of modern-day individuals from Norway, the North Atlantic Islands, and England. Some samples show stronger tendencies toward modern Eastern, Western, and Central Europeans instead of Northern European populations (Figures 2A and 3). This broad distribution largely overlaps with the distribution of Iron Age English samples and most individuals cluster together with the single sample from Oxie in southern Sweden dated to the 4th–6th century CE. Thus, the PCA indicated substantial heterogeneity among all individuals from Sigtuna and even within sites (Figures S3B and S3C). This pattern also seems to be consistent for ten samples with coverages >0.25×, which are less affected by noise than those with lower coverage. Figure 3 Migration Patterns in Sigtuna Illustrated by a Scatterplot of Individual f3 Values and Strontium Isotope Values Eight of the 16 individuals were confirmed as non-locals with strontium values falling beyond the local range of bioavailable strontium: 0.717–0.732 established for Sigtuna in the present study and also beyond 0.723–0.733 baseline established for the whole of Lake Mälaren region [12]. The correlation between strontium values and local genetic variation predicted using shared drift with modern Norwegians (measured by outgroup f3 statistics) as a proxy is presented in Figure 3. Out of eight carriers of non-local strontium signatures, four were also genetic outliers (cemetery 2: kls001; cemetery 3: kal006 and kal009; church 1: stg020), suggesting migration from a genetically distinct region (first-generation long-distance migrants). Further four carriers of non-local strontium signatures (cemetery 1: 84001; cemetery 4: gtm127 and 2072; church 1: stg021) fell within or close to the genetic variation of modern Norwegians (Figures 2A and S3C). These curious cases may be considered regional immigrants who came to Sigtuna from other parts of Scandinavia (first-generation short-distance migrants) (Figure 3). Finally, six individuals presented strontium values and genetic variation that agreed with a local origin, in or close to Sigtuna (cemetery 1: 84005 and 84035; cemetery 4: gtm021; mass grave: 97029; church 1: urm160 and stg026). However, two individuals with local strontium signatures (cemetery 1: nuf002; church 1: urm035) fell close to Norwegian and Ukrainian gene pools. Though speculative, it is possible that the two individuals represent second generation of immigrants. Thus, by combining the strontium values with the genomic data we could identify three groups: the locals (strontium values between 0.717 and 0.732 and falling within genetic variation of modern Norwegians), regional immigrants (strontium values beyond 0.717–0.732 and falling within genetic variation of modern Norwegians), and long-distance immigrants (strontium values beyond 0.717–0.732 and falling outside genetic variation of modern Norwegians), as well as two likely second-generation immigrants (strontium values within 0.717–0.732 and falling on the fringes of genetic variation of modern Norwegians).
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Post by Admin on Dec 30, 2018 18:42:40 GMT
Genetic Similarities and Differences between and within Sites In order to investigate levels of individual variation in Sigtuna we computed outgroup f3 values between ancient individuals (Figure S4A) and average pairwise distance between pseudo-haploid individuals as a measurement of genetic diversity [31] between and within different groups in Sigtuna, other published Iron and Bronze Age datasets [36, 38], and modern-day populations (Figure 2B; Data S1, sheet 3). To avoid noisy estimates of diversity, we restricted this analysis to ancient samples with 0.8× sequencing coverage or more, which gives an estimate for Sigtuna as a whole plus estimates for two sites, church 1 and cemetery 1. In Sigtuna, the genetic diversity in the late Viking Age was greater than the genetic diversity in late Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures (Unetice and Yamnaya as examples) and modern East Asians; it was on par with Roman soldiers in England but lower than in modern-day European groups (GBR and FIN; Figure 2B). Within the town, the group excavated at church 1 has somewhat greater diversity than that at cemetery 1. Interestingly, the diversity at church 1 is nearly as high as that observed in Roman soldiers in England, which is remarkable, since the latter was considered to be an exceptionally heterogeneous group in contemporary Europe [39]. To investigate genetic structuring among burial locations (excluding “cemetery 2,” represented by one individual only), we tested genetic clustering based on pairwise outgroup f3 values across all ancient individuals. We found significant variation in within-group outgroup f3 values (i.e., some burial location groups, such as church 1, showing less homogeneity than others; Kruskal-Wallis, test p = 0.0021). Testing overall differentiation, the mean within-group outgroup f3 among all burial location groups (median = 0.1562) was higher than would be expected by chance (median = 0.1541, estimated by 100,000 permutations of group identities, p = 0.045), but this slight detected differentiation could not be traced to any two particular groups (Figures S4D and S4E). Social Structures and Mobility Different sex-related mobility patterns for Sigtuna inhabitants have been suggested based on material culture, especially ceramics. Building on design and clay analyses, some female potters in Sigtuna are thought to have grown up in Novgorod in Rus’ [40]. Moreover, historical sources mention female mobility in connection to marriage, especially among the elite from Rus’ and West Slavonic regions [41, 42]. Male mobility is also known from historical sources, often in connection to clergymen moving to the town [43]. Interestingly, we found a number of individuals from Sigtuna to be genetically similar to the modern-day human variation of eastern Europeans, and most harbor close genetic affinities to Lithuanians (Figure 2A). The strontium isotope ratios in 28 adult individuals with assigned biological sex and strontium values obtained from teeth (23 M1 and five M2) show that 70% of the females and 44% of the males from Sigtuna were non-locals (STAR Methods). The difference in migrant ratios between females and male mobility patterns was not statistically significant (Fisher’s exact test, p = 0.254 for 28 individuals and p = 0.376 for 16 individuals). Hence, no evidence of a sex-specific mobility pattern was found. Our results show that the population of Sigtuna was heterogeneous already during the first 200 years of the town’s existence, and the observed heterogeneity is expressed in different ways. High levels of genetic variation are accompanied by large variation in strontium isotope ratios, but the two markers do not mirror one another. The observed patterns are best explained by a scenario in which both males and females were mobile regionally but also migrated over larger distances to a similarly high degree. The long-distance migrants probably moved to Sigtuna from other centers in connection to their profession or goals. They most likely represent the whole network of the Viking world. We do not find a specific Scandinavian “Viking” population distinct from the rest of Europe; rather, the population was integrated in the northern European gene pool at the time. The relatively high genetic and strontium diversity explains the lack of significant genetic sub-structuring between the burial grounds. Previously identified diet-based sub-structuring between burial sites in Sigtuna revealed that individuals from cemetery 1 exhibited significantly lower nitrogen values than those interred in church 1, indicating that the latter group had a diet including more animal protein [44]. As these social groups are not mirrored by our genetic or strontium data, this suggests that the inclusion in them was not based on kinship. Therefore, it appears as if socio-cultural factors, not biological bonds, governed where people were interred (i.e., the choice of cemetery). The genomic and isotope data from Sigtuna paint a picture of a town composed of inhabitants from a much larger region than the town itself and the local area surrounding it. It represents a single node within a network of similar urban hubs located in various parts of northern Europe at the time. If late Viking Age Sigtuna is representative for those towns, their inhabitants did not consist of distinct homogeneous sub-populations, but should rather be viewed as a cosmopolitan group. Pigmentation We attempted to reconstruct the physical appearance of the seven individuals from Sigtuna by predicting eye and hair color. The probability for certain eye and hair shade for each of the seven ancient individual was computed using the HIrisPlex (http://hirisplex.erasmusmc.nl/) online tool [53, 54, 55]. The system was designed for DNA-based phenotype prediction for forensic purposes. The allelic status of SNPs associated with the predictions, as well as probabilities computed by HIrisPlex are listed in Data S1, sheet 5 and sheet 6. Since HERC2 gene rs12913832 is essential for eye-color prediction inputs missing value at that position do not result in phenotype prediction. Hence, no iris pigmentation information is available for individual kal006. Interestingly, all six remaining individuals were derived homozygotes at rs12913832, a variant associated with blue eye-color phenotype [117, 118]. Almost none of the individuals were carriers of variants typically associated with red hair (rs1805006, rs1805007, rs1805008, rs1805009), but they were all predicted to have had blond hair color of varying shades (Data S1, sheet 5). Based on the genetic variants at the positions rs16891982 (in the SLC45A2 gene) and rs1426654 (SLC24A5) SNPs (Data S1, sheet 5) all tested individuals are predicted to have been light-skinned [119, 120, 121]. Current Biology, VOLUME 28, ISSUE 17, P2730-2738.E10
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Post by Admin on Jul 26, 2019 17:40:46 GMT
When archaeologists discovered the remains of a woman in a Viking graveyard in Denmark, an axe near her skeleton told them that she may have been a fighter. But closer examination of both the weapon and her burial revealed something unexpected: She was no Viking. Rather, the woman was Slavic, and likely came from a region in Eastern Europe that is now Poland, representatives of Poland's Ministry of Science and Higher Education said in a statement. A coin from the cemetery, on the Danish island of Langeland, revealed that the burial site is about 1,000 years old, according to the statement. The woman's grave was the only one that held a weapon. Throughout history and across the globe, women have wielded weapons. In recent years, archaeologists have found evidence that some Viking women were buried with weapons. But in many of those cases, there were no human remains in the graves, and the gender of the former occupants was inferred from the presence of jewelry and other objects that typically belonged to women, Leszek Gardeła, an archaeologist with the University of Bonn in Germany and the University of Bergen in Norway, said in the statement. However, the Slavic woman's skeleton was still lying in the grave. The skeleton showed no obvious injuries that would have indicated how she died, Gardeła said. The axe resembled similar tools from the southern Baltic — a region that includes modern countries bordering the Baltic Sea, such as Poland, Germany and Lithuania — and the chambered construction of her grave is reminiscent of cemetery structures from that part of the world during the Middle Ages. To date, approximately 30 graves of women containing weapons have been discovered in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Of those, 10 graves — including that of the Slavic warrior — were identified by Gardeła. His findings will be published in 2020 as part of a project investigating Viking and Slavic women warriors, titled "Amazons of the North," according to the statement.
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