“Our understanding of the chronology of the early Viking Age is really patchy because our best accounts are sometimes written 100 years later.”
, starting around the year 700. In clay floors of houses that had functioned as both residences and workshops, the Aarhus team found glass beads, including a kaleidoscopic array of colorful Middle Eastern beads, embedded among debris from prolific metalworking, hide preparation, weaving and bone carving. These were all telltale remains of a Viking Age trading town, where a variety of people met, mingled and hawked their wares.
Digging down through the centuries, there were many generations of workshops. Twenty shop floors strewn with artifacts. Two hundred years of continuous manufacturing activity compressed into 2½ vertical meters. But the amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere — and thus taken up by plants during photosynthesis and then by the animals that eat them — fluctuates over time, so scientists must calibrate their measurements to estimate a true calendar date. Tree rings are handy for this purpose; each one records the atmospheric radiocarbon content in the year it formed.
Typically, 99 percent of atmospheric carbon is carbon-12, which has six protons and six neutrons. Only one in a trillion atoms of the remaining 1 percent is carbon-14; the rest is carbon-13. But these ratios vary ever-so-slightly over time due to carbon-14’s unstable nature. In 775, the solar storm created 1.2 percent more carbon-14 than usual. That ratio of carbon isotopes became imprinted on any organisms alive at the time.
Of all the startling finds in Ribe, the site’s trash held the most potential to shed light on the origins of Viking Age trade. Twigs, rye, barley, oats, nutshells and other refuse still lying around more than 1,000 years later possibly bore the time stamp of the supermassive flare. Given the similar timing, the possibility that the raids somehow relate to Middle Eastern trade goods just then finding their way into northern Europe raises important questions.
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