As I opined the other day in my post Vikings that eponymous group have a habit of turning up raiding into the Internet just as they did in real life a millennium and more ago. Just when I thought I had seen them off for a while they have beached their boats on another stretch of the blog...
In May The Times had a report about a proposed excavation to rescue the remains of a longship from possibly the late seventh century which has been identified in southern Norway. There is an element of urgency to this as the remains are under attack from an agricultural fungus. The report can be read at Race to unearth rotting Viking longship
For a later period the website Aeon has an interesting piece which ties up with my previous post and evidence for settlement by Scandinavians, however briefly, on the eastern tip of Canada. This new article, by a Yale academic looks at that and how it relates to complex trading patterns within North America around the year 1000, and then proceeds to consider the possibility that some Vikings may have had contact with the Maya in Yucatan. The evidence is slight at present, but intriguing. The scale of trade at the time suggests to the author that one can speak, however cautiously, of globalisation beginning a thousand years and more ago.
The article can be read at Did indigenous Americans and Vikings trade in the year 1000? – Valerie Hansen
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