The giant mass grave, uncovered in the north of England four decades ago, is the last resting place of the legendary "Great Pagan Army" that plundered the Celtic kingdoms of Britain in the middle of the Middle Ages, archaeologists say in an article published in Antiquity.
“Correct dating of the remains from the grave in Repton is extremely important for us, since we know almost nothing about the first Viking campaigns in England, which served as the foundation for the construction of the first Scandinavian settlements on the island. And although these dates are not unequivocal proof that soldiers of the Great Army are buried here, now we can say that this is most likely true,”said Cat Jarman of the University of Bristol (UK).
Time of legends
The inhabitants of the British Isles, according to the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", first met the Vikings at the end of the 8th century, when small groups of pagan sea robbers began to raid the western shores of England. The Scandinavians quickly realized that monasteries and churches were a rich and easy source of loot, and the frequency of their campaigns on Albion increased dramatically in the following decades.
When the Anglo-Saxon kings and feudal lords began to fight against sea robbers, the Vikings abruptly changed tactics and sent a gigantic army of several thousand Danish and Norse soldiers to England. Reaching the shores of Albion in 865, the Vikings successfully landed, defeated the forces of Northumbria and other eastern Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and went inland.
With several reinforcements in the following years, in 874 the Vikings conquered Mercia, one of the two most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England at the time. After the conquest of Mercia, the Vikings, as the authors of the Chronicle write, stopped for the winter in the town of Repton in the modern county of Derbyshire.
In the late 1970s, according to Jarman, archaeologists discovered a giant burial ground in the vicinity of one of Repton's churches, where over two hundred men and women were buried. The manner in which they were buried, decorations and weapons led many archaeologists to believe that this mass grave was a trace of the "Great Army".
Promotional video:
These hopes were dashed almost immediately after the discovery of this mass grave - the very first radiocarbon analysis of the remains showed that they fell underground not in the ninth, but in the 7-8 centuries, and accumulated there for many decades. On the other hand, the fragments of artifacts and weapons were of the “correct” age, corresponding to the time of the campaign of the “Great Army”. This gave rise to a lot of controversy among scientists, many of which continue to this day.
Aging diet
Jarman and her colleagues have re-dated the remains, noting that their predecessors were unaware of one important relationship between people's diet and the isotopic composition of their bones and other body tissues.
“If we eat only fish or other seafood, then a large amount of carbon gets into our body, whose 'age' is much higher than carbon from land food. This distorts the dating and forces us to consider how much sea food the owner of these or those remains could have eaten,”explains Jarman.
Such an adjustment showed that all two hundred people were buried in the grave virtually at the same time, around 872-885 AD, which is quite consistent with the time of the campaign and wintering of the "Great Army" of the Vikings.
As scientists suggest, the burial at Repton was not necessarily a simple mass grave of the Vikings killed during the battles with the Anglo-Saxon army. For example, archaeologists drew attention to the fact that the perimeter of the grave was "decorated" with the jaw of a sheep, rune gravestones, and the remains of children were located in an unusual way relative to each other, which indicates the ritual nature of the burial.
It is possible that in a similar way the soldiers of the "Great Army" decided to honor the memory of the leader who died in the battle, whose mutilated body was buried separately from all other Vikings, along with his weapon and amulet in the form of Thor's silver hammer.
In the near future, Jarman and her colleagues plan to double-check the age of other mass graves from the early Middle Ages found in the east of England. Among them, scientists hope, there may be other traces of the "Great Army" and other groups of Vikings, the existence of which scientists now do not even suspect.
