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Vikings didn't find Faroes first (they were 500 years late)
The Faroe Islands could have been
inhabited 500 years earlier than was previously thought, according to a startling archaeological discovery.
The islands had been thought to be
originally colonised by the Vikings in the 9th century AD. However, dating of
peat ash and barley grains has revealed that humans had actually settled there
somewhere between the 4th and 6th centuries AD.
The Faroes were the first stepping
stone beyond Shetland for the dispersal of European people across the North Atlantic . The findings
therefore allow speculation as to whether Iceland , Greenland , and even North America were colonised
earlier than previously thought.
Mike Church from the University of Durham said he and his
research partner, Símun V Arge from the National Museum of the Faroe Islands , had not expected
to find such evidence.
“Símun and myself sampled the site
in 2006 to take scientific samples for environmental archaeological analysis
from the medieval Viking settlement,“ he said.
“We uncovered some burnt peat ash
containing barley grains under the Viking longhouse. It was not until we had it
dated that we realised what we had found.”
It was a common practise across the
North Atlantic for peat to be burnt for warmth, before
being spread on fields and grasslands to improve soil stability and fertility.
Barley is not indigenous to the Faroes and so must have been either grown or
brought to the islands by humans. Their findings are therefore conclusive
evidence that the Faroes were colonised in pre-Viking times.
Archaeologists revealing the wall of a Viking longhouse. University of Durham
Andrew Jennings, a Nordic historian
at the University of the Highlands and Islands , said the theory
of pre-Viking settlement was not new. “Christian Matras, for example, was
convinced there were pre-Viking settlers in the 1950’s. He believed there were
old field systems that didn’t seem to tie into later settlements. But he had no
evidence.”
It is unknown, as yet, whether these
mysterious settlers hailed from the British Isles or Scandinavia .
“There is evidence
of Irish hermits sailing into the North Atlantic islands in a
passage by an Irish Monk called Dicuil in 825AD,” Church
said.
The passage from Dicuil’s
geographical book describes islands that don’t turn up in any other writing of
the time:
Many other islands lie in the northerly British Ocean . One reaches them
from the northerly islands of Britain , by sailing directly for two days and two nights with a full sail in a
favourable wind the whole time … Most of these islands are small, they are
separated by narrow channels, and for nearly a hundred years hermits lived
there, coming from our land, Ireland , by boat.
However, Church stressed that their
findings are not necessarily tied to these voyaging Irish monks. “Our findings
indicate even earlier colonisation, and more research is needed before any
conclusions as to the origin of these settlers can be drawn. We would need to
find evidence of the type of settlement to compare to those we know about in
that period before forming any opinions on this matter.”
An Irish model of a boat, c. 100 AD Ardfern
The uncovering of this further
evidence, however, may be a way off. The evidence is “very ephemeral, and very
hard to find,” said Church. This means that future research in the area will be
time-consuming and difficult. There are only a few places that allow settlement
in the Faroe Islands and when the Vikings did settle there,
they destroyed any structural evidence that there may have been.
Despite this, Jennings is confident that
the settlers derived from the British Isles . “I personally
would think that any pre-Viking settlers in the Faroes would have come from the
Hebrides or Shetland rather than Norway ,” he said.
“The civilisation
in Shetland at the time was Pictish, and had boats. There is also good evidence
that they had sails: there is a model boat from Ireland that dates from about 100 BC that has a mast,
which could be a model for Celtic boats more generally.”
“There is not so
much evidence of sails in Norway until as late as
700 AD. It is therefore more likely that these early Faroese settlers came from
the British Isles .”