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Why Is This Persian Silver Hoard Buried in Yorkshire?
Why Is This Persian Silver Hoard Buried in Yorkshire?
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Subtitles (166)
0:00
If you associate anything with the Vikings,
0:02
it’s probably the raiding.
0:04
Vikings were notorious for sailing up and down the coastlines
0:07
of England and Western Europe
0:09
and taking–like, everything they could get their hands on.
0:12
But while Vikings are known for having a taste for shiny stuff in general,
0:16
they especially liked silver, and were known to steal silver specifically.
0:20
Which is why hoards of Viking silver keep popping up everywhere.
0:24
And a particular hoard of Viking silver from northern England
0:27
seems to have been a long way from home.
0:31
Some of it, researchers say, was mined as far away as Iran.
0:35
Which is kind of changing everything we know about Viking trade and expansion.
0:39
So let’s see what it was doing there.
0:42
[intro]
0:45
If you’re a history nerd, or a fan of any of the Norse-inspired media
0:49
that’s been out in recent years, you probably know that around the 9th century,
0:53
Vikings did a lot of raiding in England and western Europe and Ireland,
0:58
don’t leave out Ireland.
0:59
And also they sometimes did normal trading, as well.
1:02
They wouldn’t have called themselves Vikings,
1:04
by the way – it’s more of a verb that means
1:07
“to go out killing and stealing and stuff when you have the time”.
1:11
You know… fun family stuff
1:13
But while they were after a lot of things,
1:15
Vikings were specifically chasing after silver.
1:18
See, under Scandinavian law, land and livestock
1:21
were passed down according to strict inheritance rules,
1:24
so if you weren’t one of the generational “haves”,
1:28
you were one of the have-nots.
1:29
The Vikings figured out that they could skirt those traditional rules
1:33
by trading for or straight up stealing loads of stuff,
1:37
creating a sort of nouveau riche warrior class.
1:40
They still couldn’t use it to buy land in Scandinavia,
1:43
because the strict inheritance laws locked outsiders out of the system
1:47
no matter how well they could pay.
1:49
They could trade that stuff, though, creating a sort of status symbol,
1:53
which enriched them in other ways.
1:55
Now, Vikings are also known for their hoards,
1:58
basically piles of buried treasure turning up anywhere you had Vikings.
2:02
And while the idea of digging up buried treasure is lots of fun,
2:06
it does raise a few like some questions.
2:08
Why were Vikings always burying their treasure in the first place?
2:12
Well, the easiest answer is that Vikings hid their hoards to keep them from being found by others,
2:17
maybe because they were in danger and needed to flee.
2:20
They probably hoped they could come back for their treasure later.
2:23
Historians do think this explanation worked for a lot of hoards,
2:27
but there are a few more interesting reasons
2:29
why Vikings might have hidden their treasure.
2:32
Some sources say that Vikings buried treasure for religious reasons,
2:36
believing that a man would be able to use whatever treasure he buried
2:39
once he made it to the afterlife.
2:41
But since this particular bit of lore was written down after the Christianization of Scandinavia,
2:46
it’s worth treating with a grain of salt.
2:48
Another possibility is that hoarding had to do with the display of wealth and power.
2:53
Basically, if a leader wanted to appear generous and successful,
2:57
he needed to show off a huge pile of money,
3:00
one he was willing to hand out to his followers as well.
3:03
That would mean stockpiling silver,
3:06
and keeping it hidden so that it would stay safe until it was ready to give out.
3:10
and get in this, we’ll get back to talking about one hoard in particular,
3:14
but first, here’s a quick break.
3:16
Thanks for watching SciShow for the last 14 years!
3:19
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3:22
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3:23
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3:27
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3:31
If 2 in every 10,000 supported us, we could afford to make SciShow for years to come!
3:36
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3:37
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3:40
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3:45
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3:52
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3:55
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3:58
Thank you!
3:59
Whatever the reasons,
4:00
Vikings left a lot of hoards behind, and one of those hoards,
4:04
the Bedale Hoard, was found using metal detectors in Yorkshire in 2012.
4:09
It was probably buried somewhere around the year 900, maybe earlier.
4:13
The hoard contained several silver pieces, including an elaborate neck ring, some jewelry,
4:18
and ingots that would have been used for exchange.
4:21
To find out where the items came from, researchers turned to science.
4:25
Specifically, chemistry.
4:26
They decided to look into the impurities in the silver.
4:29
They looked at three elements: gold, bismuth, and lead.
4:33
Gold and bismuth impurities tend to get stuck in the silver, even after it's refined.
4:38
Bismuth is difficult to remove without destroying the silver,
4:42
so most refining processes leave it in.
4:44
And gold? Well, it’s a noble metal, so it just doesn’t go anywhere at all.
4:49
Since the amount of gold and bismuth that naturally occurs in silver varies
4:53
depending on where the silver comes from or when it was mined,
4:56
taking a look at these elements can tell us about where the silver originally came from.
5:01
Lead also tells an interesting story,
5:03
because its isotopes can really narrow down where in the world an ore comes from.
5:08
And just to review real quick,
5:09
isotopes are atoms of the same element
5:12
with a slightly different number of neutrons,
5:14
making them a tiny bit lighter or heavier.
5:17
Some of them are stable,
5:18
which means they don’t decay with time,
5:20
and others are radioactive,
5:22
which means they do decay.
5:23
Now, lead isotope analysis has been used to determine the provenance of metals
5:28
since the 1960s, so it’s a very old technique.
5:30
People from 1960s, sorry for calling you very old.
5:34
It Now this works because there are traces of lead in just about everything.
5:38
And lead is a bit of an odd duck, isotopically speaking.
5:42
Other metals usually have the same isotope ratio wherever they naturally occur,
5:46
which means they always have about the same amount of heavier atoms
5:50
compared to lighter atoms.
5:51
But isotopic proportions of lead differ depending on where it comes from.
5:56
Why? Well, that’s because of radioactive decay.
5:59
Earth’s crust is full of radioactive materials
6:01
like uranium, thorium, and actinium,
6:04
which are always decaying, shedding energy and transforming into other elements.
6:08
And a lot of these decay chains eventually end in lead.
6:12
We have an episode about it.
6:14
it did really well you should check it out
6:16
But the isotope at the end of each chain differs.
6:19
So the uranium decay chain ends in Lead-206,
6:22
the isotope of lead with 206 proton and neutrons.
6:25
The actinium decay chain ends in Lead-207,
6:28
and the thorium decay chain ends in Lead-208.
6:31
That means that the final isotopic makeup of lead
6:34
is highly dependent on the radioactive elements in the area around it,
6:38
and since there are enough different possible combinations
6:41
to make these distinct,
6:43
lead isotopes can tell you a lot about where something is from.
6:47
And since, by nature, isotopes all have different masses,
6:50
a mass spectrometer can easily tell them apart from each other.
6:54
So armed with traces of gold and bismuth, and their isotope analysis, of lead
6:58
the researchers set to work on determining the origins of the Bedale hoard,
7:03
but what they found surprised them.
7:05
While a lot of the silver did come from European sources,
7:08
which is what they expected,
7:10
about a third of the hoard came from Baghdad and Tehran.
7:14
That’s really surprising, because you don’t hear many
7:17
stories of Vikings raiding the Abbasid Caliphate.
7:20
But while the group we now know of as “the Vikings” didn’t have any contact
7:23
with modern day Iraq and Iran,
7:25
another group of Scandinavians did - the Rus.
7:28
The Rus also left Scandinavia during the Viking Age.
7:31
But while the Vikings went westward, the Rus went east,
7:35
into modern day Russia and Ukraine.
7:37
The Rus frequently met with merchants from the Islamic Empires on the River Volga,
7:41
trading furs and enslaved people in exchange for Islamic silver dirhams.
7:46
We know that eventually,
7:47
dirhams from the Rus made it back to Scandinavia,
7:50
but that was thought to happen much later,
7:52
a full century after the Bedale Hoard was buried.
7:56
And the discovery of silver in the Bedale Hoard, a Viking hoard,
7:59
suggests that trade between the eastern and western arms
8:02
of this Scandinavian expansion
8:04
was a lot more extensive than previously thought.
8:06
Now, eventually, both the Vikings’ and the Rus’ activities stopped.
8:10
In the East, Central Asia’s silver mines dried up around 950,
8:14
making trade with the Islamic empire far less appealing for the Rus.
8:18
And in the West, the Vikings gradually eased off the murder
8:22
in favor of regular, murder-free trade,
8:25
although it did take them another century or so after that.
8:28
But the Bedale hoard remains an unexpected example
8:31
of just how far the Vikings spread,
8:33
and we only know about it thanks
8:35
to the powers of geochemistry and science.
8:39
[ OUTRO ]
