The trauma of popular science continues

Couple of weeks ago news story was published on popular scientific website:

http://sciencenordic.com/vikings-abused-and-beheaded-their-slaves

An interesting study of an interesting subject where bioarchaeology had proven not to show the expected results.  The research question probably was: does the individual interpreted as slaves present evidence of non local origin and mistreatment and/or peri mortem trauma? The answer is mostly not. :) Does it challenge the interpretation of burials as funerary sacrifice of a slave? Not really since according to the researchers slaves might be local and just shoved a little bit :). The problem of funerary sacrifices is more complex as it is connected to pretty much most of the controversial subjects in Viking age research. Here are some of the subjects that are not so obvious as presented in the article:

1.        We don’t know if we should treat Rus’ as phenomenon purely “Viking” and as such use ibn Fadalan and others as text to which we later find archaeological illustrations in Scandinavian material. The idea that the group consisted of people of different background is thought provoking and has been presented many times (among others: Hedenstierna – Jonson 2006; Urbańczyk 2014) and perhaps this should be mentioned in the short press release as…

1.       Accounts of Arab travellers form the majority of the written sources we have for the phenomena human funerary sacrifice (also mentioning wives and lovers as people who die during the funeral) and there a problem of translation of term Jaria arises, which can mean a young girl or a slave girl and it is both used in Ibn Fadalan’s account to describe the position of the sacrificed girl as well as the women who was performing the sacrifice (Petrukhin 2007). This creates a bit of a problem for interpreting their social position, even more since…

1.       We should not expect burials to mirror the social standing of the buried individual. Some people had this idea before, it didn’t worked out well, possibly we should start thinking in this way in Viking studies – we will have less witches, warriors and sacrificed slaves, possibly as well as blacksmiths but maybe we will have some  more interesting theoretical perspectives and present some thoughts that are more valid. To remind everyone once again, burial context is a result of a group effort of establishing and fixing the social identities of both the deceased and the participants (Oestigaard 2000; Ekengren & Nilsson Stutz 2009; Williams 2006; Graham 2009) – the identities are changed because of the event. And what complicates thing even more…

1.        According to some researchers we should not trust the narrative in Rigsthula (Simek 2006) – it is a late description and possibly not entirely applicable. The Viking age societies should be viewed as more complex with many other forms of dependency other than slavery.

1.        There are no criteria of how to recognize a slave in the grave presented in the text – this is just sad – since the text is about the burials with a slave. No clear definition makes the reasoning hard to understand. For my research minimal conditions for considering burial context as a result of funerary sacrifice is presence of remains of more than one individual, deposited as a result of primary rite in which one of them bears the traces of intentional violence that might have lead to his or hers demise. This is still not enough to make a solid claim but at least it is starting point.

1.             And the whole Scandinavia is treated as a homogenic area in which – if the sacrifices occur – they are all of the people of the same social standing and in similar context as in the ibn Fadalan narrative from the steeps by the Volga river. With the highly diversified burial customs across the peninsula, and with the recognition of the more local character of the pagan “religions” this seem highly unlikely.

Sadly this study seems to write itself in to the new narrative that claims that Viking age was presented as too gentle time period, a narrative that is in my opinion a reactionary approach to the critical studies that recognized the roots of the Viking age related scholarship in national romanticism and took adequate approach to modernise the subject and tried in some aspect to bring it up to date. In this research  stand a substantial effort is taken to prove the mistreatment of slaves and it is based at speculations at best. An example can be found here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/151228-vikings-slaves-thralls-norse-scandinavia-archaeology/  or  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/140926-vikings-norse-raiding-berserkers-scandinavia-winroth/ . This work is unfortunately plagued with source critical errors which were I hope the result of journalist writing something hip and short and not archaeologist looking for hype subject. I would never claim that people in medieval Scandinavia did not beaten their slaves or not mistreated them as they were not considered as persons in understanding of possessing an identity of a group member, but I at this date there is no evidence for any of the situations described in the popular scientific texts. Good research would rather look for the root of the problem – why the double burials discovered in Scandinavia so often are presented as the result of human sacrifice? What is the relation between the archaeologist, material sources and ancient text? When compared to other parts of Iron Age can we claim that Viking age was specially brutal?

In conclusion someone was beheaded and abused but we don't know if it was a slave or not, further we can't really tell with the currently aviable sources.

Literature

Ekengren, F. & Nilsson Stutz, L. 2009. I tillvarons gränsland. In: Ekengren, F. & NilssonStutz, L. (eds.). I tillvarons gränsland: perspektiv på kroppen mellan liv och död. Lund

Oestigaard, T. 2000. Sacrifices of raw, cooked and burnt humans. Norwegian Archaeological Review vol. 33 (1), 41–58

Graham, E-J..2009. Becoming person, becoming ancestors. Personhood, memory and the corpse in Roman rituals of social remembrance, Archaeological Dialogues vol 16(1), 51-74

Hedenstierna – Jonson Ch.  2006 Birka Warrior, Stockholm

Petrukhin, V. 2007 Viking Woman in Rus’: Wives, Slaves or ‘Valkyries’? In: Fransson, U., Svedin, M., Bergerbrant, S. Androshchuk, F. (eds.) Cultural interaction between east and west. Archaeology, artefacts and human contacts in northern Europe, Stockholm, 66 - 69

Urbańczyk, P. 2014 Bliskie spotkania wikingów, Wodzisław śląski

Williams, H. 2006. Death and memory in early medieval Britain. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press