Solar flare throws light on ancient trade between the Islamic Middle
East and the Viking Age

Date:
December 22, 2021
Source:
Aarhus University
Summary:
An interdisciplinary Danish team of researchers has used new
astronomical knowledge to establish an exact time anchor for
the arrival of trade flows from the Middle East in Viking-age
Scandinavia. The results are published in the leading international
journal Nature.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Mobility shaped the human world profoundly long before the modern age. But archaeologists often struggle to create a timeline for the speed and
impact of this mobility. An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the
Danish National Research Foundation's Centre for Urban Network Evolutions
at Aarhus University (UrbNet) has now made a breakthrough by applying new astronomical knowledge about the past activity of the sun to establish
an exact time anchor for global links in the year 775 CE.


==========================================================================
In collaboration with the Museum of Southwest Jutland in the Northern
Emporium Project, the team has conducted a major excavation at Ribe,
one of Viking-age Scandinavia's principal trading towns. Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, the dig and the subsequent research project were
able to establish the exact sequence of the arrival of objects from
various corners of the world at the market in Ribe. In this way, they
were able to trace the emergence of the vast network of Viking-age trade connections with regions such as North Atlantic Norway, Frankish Western
Europe and the Middle East. To obtain a chronology for these events,
the team has pioneered a new use of radiocarbon dating.

New use of radiocarbon dating "The applicability of radiocarbon
dating has hitherto been limited due to the broad age ranges of this
method. Recently, however, it has been discovered that solar particle
events, also known as Miyake events, cause sharp spikes in atmospheric radiocarbon for a single year. They are named after the female Japanese researcher Fusa Miyake, who first identified these events in 2012.

When these spikes are identified in detailed records such as tree rings
or in an archaeological sequence, it reduces the uncertainty margins considerably," says lead author Bente Philippsen.

The team applied a new, improved calibration curve, based on annual
samples, to identify a 775 CE Miyake event in one floor layer in
Ribe. This enabled the team to anchor the entire sequence of layers and
140 radiocarbon dates around this single year.

"This result shows that the expansion of Afro-Eurasian trade networks, characterised by the arrival of large numbers of Middle Eastern beads,
can be dated in Ribe with precision to 790+/-10 CE -- coinciding with
the beginning of the Viking Age. However, imports brought by ship from
Norway were arriving as early as 750 CE," says Professor So/ren Sindbaek,
who is also a member of the team.



==========================================================================
This groundbreaking result challenges one of the most widely accepted explanations for maritime expansions in the Viking Age -- that
Scandinavian seafaring took off in response to growing trade with the
Middle East through Russia. Maritime networks and long-distance trade
were already established decades before impulses from the Middle East
caused a further expansion of these networks.

The construction of the new, annual calibration curve is a global effort
to which the researchers from UrbNet and the Aarhus AMS Centre at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University have contributed.

"The construction of a calibration curve is a huge international
effort with contributions from many laboratories around the world. Fusa Miyake's discovery in 2012 has revolutionized our work, so that we now
work with annual time resolution. New calibration curves are recurrently released, most recently in 2020, and Aarhus AMS centre has contributed significantly. The new high- resolution data from the present study will
enter into a future update of the calibration curve and thus contribute
to improve the precision of archaeological dates worldwide. This will
provide better opportunities to understand rapid developments such as
trade flows or environmental change in the past," says Jesper Olsen,
Associate Professor at Aarhus AMS Centre.

The global trends revealed by the study are essential for the archaeology
of trading towns like Ribe. "The new results enable us to date the
influx of new artefacts and far-reaching contacts on a much better
background. This will help us to visualise and describe Viking Age Ribe
in a way that will have great value for scientists, as well as helping
us to present the new insight to the general public," says Claus Feveile, curator of the Museum of Southwest Jutland.

Background facts One of the most spectacular episodes of pre-modern
global connectivity happened in the period c. 750-1000 CE, when trade
with the burgeoning Islamic empire in the Middle East connected virtually
all corners of Afro-Eurasia.

The spread of coins, trade beads and other exotic artefacts provides archaeological evidence of the trade links stretching from Southeast Asia
and Africa to Siberia and the northernmost corners of Scandinavia. In the north, these long-distance connections mark the beginning of the maritime adventures that define the Viking Age. Researchers have even suggested
that it was the arrival of silver and other valuable objects via Eastern
Europe which sparked the first Scandinavian Viking expeditions.

It has proven difficult, however, to establish the time of arrival of
the Middle Eastern beads and coins in relation to other developments in
the Viking world, including the famous raids which shook Western Europe
from c. 790.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Aarhus_University. Original written
by Anja Kjaergaard.

Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Bente Philippsen, Claus Feveile, Jesper Olsen, So/ren M. Sindbaek.

Single-year radiocarbon dating anchors Viking Age trade cycles
in time.

Nature, 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04240-5 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211222153037.htm

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