Ancient Origins never fails to produce timely articles on the medieval Vikings. This article, published on 23 April 2022 is no exception.
With the accelerated pace of climate change and global warming wreaking havoc on the ice sheets of the world, particularly Greenland, new evidence emerges from the ice-capped country. Greenland was a Viking colony from the 10th-15th century. They suddenly abandoned it and scholars are still debating why the Vikings left, with new evidence emerging just last month . Now, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveals Vikings shipped walrus ivory from their settlement in the icy colony all the way to Kyiv, over 4,000 kms away!
“Based on the [walrus] rostra finds reported here, it is reasonable to hypothesize that a Dnieper route may have augmented or replaced pre-existing practices,” write the authors of the study.
The Site in Kyiv: A Medieval Trading Waterfront
Evidence was collected from excavations carried out by archaeologist Natalio Khamaiko of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who’s been persistently digging at a vacant lot at 35 Spaska Street in Kyiv, Ukraine since 2007. This site had notoriously disappointed all of Khamaiko’s predecessors, who had conducted detailed archaeological surveys here in the hope of uncovering gold – after all, Norse merchants used to trade furs for silver minted in the medieval Islamic world, and this waterfront had witnessed an all-around boom in economic activity.