Dan Snow's History Hit - The Origins Of Scotland

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

The Medieval period saw the advancement of many countries, evolving to the provinces in Europe that we know today; Scotland is no different. In this episode, Cat Jarman from the Gone Medieval podcast is joined by Dr. Adrian Maldonado, an Archeologist and Glenmorangie Research Fellow at National Museums Scotland. With the birth of kingdoms such as Alba, Strathclyde, Galloway, and the Norse Earldom of Orkney, what can the artefacts and materials tell us about the emergence of Scotland? Adrian Maldonado is the author of 'Crucible of Nations: Scotland from Viking-age to Medieval kingdom', published by NMSE - Publishing Ltd.Please vote for us! Dan Snow's History Hit has been nominated for a Podbible award in the 'informative' category: https://bit.ly/3pykkdsIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit, Scotland. Scotland is important, it matters a lot, it's one of the best countries on planet Earth. Where did it come from? Like so many things that exist today, it looks immutable. It looks like it was always supposed to be there, destined to be. And yet Scotland, folks, is as transitory and random as any other polity around Europe. Scotland was almost not Scotland, as we're about to hear in this wonderful podcast. In this podcast, one of our sibling podcasts, Gone Medieval with Kat Jarman, the legend that is Dr Kat Jarman. She's going to talk about the

origins of Scotland. Where did it come from? And she's joined by a friend of the pod, Adrian Maldonado, the archaeologist and Glenn Morangy research fellow at the National Museums of Scotland. Glenn Morangy, by the way way is my favorite whiskey brand just saying that i'm not being paid that's for real that one's for free lads send me some uh send me some portwood finish 15 years old anyway so adrian maldonado absolute legend he's going to talk us through the bursts of kingdoms like alba galloway strathclyde of course the norse earldom of Orkney. It's such a great story, this. It is totally brilliant. He's written a wonderful book on the subject. You're going to love it. Kat Jarman does a great job. Go and check out Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to watch Kat Jarman and I go on a road trip, the greatest and best road trip in the history of the Isles, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. It's a video on demand channel, a TV channel on the internet, the world's best history channel. It's been described as by me. And on that channel, Kat Jarman and I go across England from East Anglia to the West Country or well, almost the West Country on the trail of the great heathen army of the late ninth century. It's one of the most high-performing documentaries on History Hit TV. We've got loads of early medieval stuff on there. It does surprisingly well. It gives the life to mainstream media, saying you

can't do early medieval in the mainstream media. Nonsense. On History Hit TV, it works fine. You can subscribe to History Hit right now, and it's actually the best time for you to do so, because we've got the Boxing Day sale on. If you follow the link in the description to this podcast, you just scroll down a bit from what you're listening to it now. Just scroll down a bit with your thumb, right down. Hit that link. Hit the link. And you will be taken to a place where if you type in the code BOXINGDAY, you get the

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I'm really delighted to be joined today by Dr. Adrian Maldonado. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Kat. I'm genuinely excited to be here. Fantastic. Now, just before we started recording, we talked a little bit about your job and about the actual full title and who sponsored that. And I think our listeners do really need to know that because it sounds like a very Scottish thing to me. Be happy to. So the official job title was Glenmorangie Research Fellow, and that is Glenmorangie the Distiller. They're a Scottish whiskey company, but they've always had a sort of close link to the early medieval past in that this great big stone, Pictish carved stone, that presents itself to you when you walk into early

people in the National Museum is the Hilton of Cadbolstone. And that happens to be on the Glenmorangie estate near Tane. And around the time of the excavations at the Monastery of Port Mahomic, not far away, there was more interest in the Pictish heritage of that area. The local community commissioned a replica of the Hilton of Cadbolstone in its original fine spot. And in 2008, when the Glenmorangie Company was rebranding, they chose a panel of this Pictish stone as their logo or their signet. And at the same time, they decided to sponsor research onto the Pictish period and the early medieval period at the National Museum, founding the Glenmorangie Research Project. So my project was actually the fourth phase of that since 2008.

That's absolutely fantastic. So we'd love more of that, wouldn't we? That's really great. Now, I just want to ask, first of all, so your book, you're talking about this period's formation of Scotland, and you've called it the Crucible of Nations. Can you explain that title a little bit? Sure, sure. We can sort of go backstage a little bit, see how the sausage is made. When the project began, it was called Creating a Nation, singular. And as soon as you start looking into Scotland, the entity at this period, the 9th to the 12th centuries, you realize very quickly Scotland the entity didn't exist at the beginning of that period. And by the end of that, in the 12th century, Scotland was just one of several kingdoms in Northern Britain in what

we now call the modern nation of Scotland. North of the border where it is now, you had fragments of the kingdom of man and the isles, which would become the lordship of the isles later on. You have Murray, which is actually a separate kingdom in the north of Scotland, who were occasionally enemies with the kings of Scots themselves. Galloway in the southwest is also this entity that is separate. And then, of course, you have Norway. You have the Orkney Earldom and all of the lands that belong to the Kingdom of Norway, which is a lot of northern and western Scotland as it is today. So even by the 12th century, you couldn't tell a single story of the creation of one nation through the objects in our museum. All you can do is talk about the different nations that took shape in this period.

And I found that to be so much more stimulating. It seems to have many more stories that you could spin out. So I thought that was more of a sort of guiding metaphor for the project. And of course, a lot of our evidence is bound up in these bronze, gold and silver objects, which are not forged, but cast using crucibles. There you are, crucible of nations. Now you know. Yeah, I like that. I like that sort of metaphor and direct relation to the objects. We're going to get back to some of these objects and some of these things later on. But can you just say,

so if we don't have a Scotland as we now know it, by the end of the time that you write about, what sort of point in time would we recognise that entity, sort of today's Scotland? How late does that really come in? Yeah, so the word Scotland is an English word, or I should say an Old English or Anglo-Saxon word. And that word appears in Anglo-Saxon sources as early as the 10th century. But at that point, it means the land of the Scots, which in this case is people who speak the Scottish, i.e. the Gaelic language. By the 10th century, that's only part of Scotland. Generally the West, but increasingly the Eastern Midlands as well are speaking Gaelic. So at that point, it just means the land of the Gaelic speakers, if you like. By the 12th century, there is a kingdom that is being referred to externally as Scotland, the Kingdom of Scotland. And increasingly from the 12th century,

the kings of Scots and sources within Scotland begin to use that term as well. In other words, they pick up the English word for their kingdom because Scots is an offshoot of the English language and that is one of these languages that is increasingly being used in the 12th century. So it's definitely not an easy answer to that question, which is fair enough. But I wanted to go back a little bit more to the beginning, really, just to start in that earliest part that you write about, and that sort of early part of the medieval period. If we go back to the 8th century, for example, what's the political situation? I mean, you mentioned quite a lot of groupings here already. What really is the political situation at that point in time? That's right. So at that point in the early

medieval period, you have these regional kingdoms. In the documentary sources, they're defined by the main language group, or if you like, the ethnic group that lives in that area. So the largest entity is the kingdom of the Picts. The Pictish people are a group that is first attested in Roman sources. They're enemies of Rome at that point, but they're kind of an amorphous body. By the 7th, 8th, 9th century, they are a big player in the North. They're one of the biggest kingdoms and they're expanding out. They're a group of people who speak the Pictish language, which is closely related to the British language or an ancestor of modern day Welsh. into Scotland or looked at a map, it's very rocky and there's lots of inlets in the west coast.

It's actually much easier to get by sea. And so they're actually in closer contact across the water with Ireland than they are with their neighbours geographically, the Picts. And so they have been speaking Gaelic, just like they are in Ireland. So they're called the Scots in the sources. In the rest of Scotland, in the southeast, you have Anglo-Saxon speaking areas, the Kingdom of Northumbria, which extends in various times up to around where Edinburgh is today, and even further at some points. And then in the west, you have the Britons, and they are, again, British speaking people. the Britons. And they are, again, British speaking people. They are speaking a language that is close to Old Welsh. Okay, so we really do have this quite complex picture right at the beginning, and you can see how that develops, can't you? But in terms of what you've been looking at, you've been looking at the objects in the museum, especially. And are these identities also clear

in the artefact material? or is it more written source that gives us that information? That's the interesting thing. Right off the bat, you see some things that are tied to certain areas, but in actual fact, the Picts, the Scots, and sometimes the Britons are using the same kinds of brooches, you know? So there are some categories of evidence which cross over these language boundaries and these political boundaries and then there's some things like Pictish stones which I've mentioned already and Pictish symbols which are usually found carved on those stones which are specific to certain kingdoms, you know. So there are things that are locally specific,

specific to one area and there's things that cross over these boundaries. It's just never as clear as you'd like. No, it's always the case, isn't it? Wherever you go, you have these very straightforward written sources and then the material on the ground is quite a lot more sort of blurry. But talking then, if we're in the 8th century, of course, I have to ask you about the Vikings and the Viking raids and attacks. So this really begins then. The raids started in the late 8th century and Scotland was quite, I'm using obviously the modern term today, it was quite heavily targeted by the Scandinavians. Can you say a little bit about what that looks like for Scotland in that very sort of early period of raiding activity? in that very sort of early period of raiding activity.

Absolutely. So the book kind of opens with this sort of a survey of these names and places. And it basically says we need to turn to the archaeology. You look at the archaeology and you have these great big Pictish stones. And the thing that kind of opens the Kingdom of Scots gallery in the museum is the Forteviate Arch, this great big monolithic stone with a large figure of a man in a toga with his lovely curled hair, huge mustache, you know, dramatic. And there's three lesser figures and a cross in the middle. This seems to be the arch for a large stone church, maybe a palace. And we know it was found at Forteviat, where there is a mention of a palace in the 9th century. So Forteviat is this very important place. It's the residence of the

kings of the Picts. And this stone and the other carved stones around it, you look at them and you say, these are people who are definitely on top of their game, you know. But then what happens? In 793, the raid on Lindisfarne, so they're going straight to the center of the church in Northumbria. And two years later, 795, there's a raid on Iona, the most important monastery for both the Scottish and the Pictish kingdom by this point. So they're going straight to the heart. They're going right to where it hurts. It means that the Vikings kind of know what's up. They know where to go. They have informants. And there's a sense that they're not just some sort of uncontacted alien race, that they are doing something that is political from the start. You could say, maybe they've gone to these places because they've heard that's where

the most money is. But I think it's a little bit more than that. I think it's that they're going to these places because that is where it'll have the most impact. And certainly within a couple of generations, you know, the kings of the Picts are struggling to hold on to power. At the beginning of the Viking Age, they held territory all across much of what is Scotland now. And by the middle of the 9th century, they're struggling to hold on to their bit of power in the northeast of Scotland. There are now Viking settlements, at least in the Hebrides, in the Northern Isles as well. And the Scots are losing grip on their power as well. So within the first 50 years of those Viking raids, it looks like politically,

Scotland is up for grabs. So that's basically a very effective strategy, I suppose, to go for those targets. We're not just looking at those sort of hit and run raids, getting something valuable and taking it back, which I think it's often pictured as. But the one thing I wanted to ask about that is, what really do we have as evidence apart from those written sources that we have those attacks are known about because they're written down but sort of on the ground in the archaeology do we have much evidence for attacks on monasteries and churches? That's right so we have this great seam of indirect evidence which is so obvious when you look at it all together. And that's the evidence of relics, reliquaries, shrines that are chopped up into fragments, ripped apart sometimes,

and remade into things like brooches and pins. And we find them in Viking graves. We find them in Viking graves in Scotland and Ireland, as well as back in the homelands, if you like, in Scandinavia. And there's hundreds of them. So there is the sense that a lot of sacred material was being chopped up and reused in this fashion. So that seems to be clear evidence for raids. On the ground in Scotland, there's been several monasteries and several of these monasteries with recorded raids that have been excavated pretty well over the last few decades. And only at one, at Port Mahomac in the northeast of Scotland, in the Pictish kingdom, is there any evidence for a catastrophic burning event and two skulls with blade wounds, all of it radiocarbon dated to this period. In fact, it was such a great sort of archaeological project over 20 years, led by Martin Carver, formerly of the University of York, that they were able to refine their

radiocarbon dates to a single generation for this burning event. It was around 780 to 810 or 820, so they can narrow it down to the very beginning of the Viking Age. And Port Mahomac was never documented. It doesn't show up in any of the Irish sources. So we only know that there was a catastrophic burning event there from the archaeology. But it's an outlier because it's the only one of these monasteries, documented or otherwise, that has anything like that clear evidence for a big burning event. Now, that doesn't mean that it was a Viking raid, of course. Other people were committing violence and atrocities, even against monasteries. We have that well documented in Ireland from the late 8th century, especially, and I'm sure Scotland is no exception.

But in terms of the archaeology of a raid, Port Mahomic seems to be it. So there's a question there about what was the usual way that a monastery was attacked? Are you always expecting a burning lair or is it something different? So on Iona, there's not any evidence of that burning or any of that catastrophic activity that you see at Port Mahomic, but you have historical references saying there was a raid in 795, there was one in 802, there was one in 806 and 825, multiple people killed and some of those at least. And so the more realistic sense to me is a Viking raid usually consists of a bit of violence, but mostly the threat of violence, taking people away and expecting some payment for ransom, selling people off into slavery.

But you don't destroy the monastery because that's the golden goose. You want to be able to come back and do it again. And that seems to be what happens on Iona. And so there's an expectation of a Viking raid looking a certain way, but maybe we've got it all wrong. Yeah, that's such a good point, isn't it? And also, it sort of demonstrates how many of them that we haven't got information about. So I think that timeline, creating it just based on the written sources is actually, it can be quite misleading, which I think why, as your book so nicely demonstrates, we need to look at all the other evidence that we've got. So moving on a little bit then about all

these kingdoms are forming, what sort of happens next after that? What new kingdoms start to emerge in this period? So, I mean, for me, there were certain periods of time where the historical sources get really problematic for Scotland. You know, they're not really hugely abundant to begin with in the early medieval period, but there's enough recording of where Pictish kings are and where kings of Scots are in the 8th and 9th century that you can kind of track their movements a little bit. But in the late 9th century, things kind of blink out for almost a generation. You know, we almost get no events recorded in Scotland. And when they come back in the year 900 and they begin to report events, they're no longer referring to the Picts or the kingdom of the Picts, the kingdom of Fort True, which was their main kingdom. That word doesn't get used anymore after about 900, 904, I believe is the last mention of either one. And instead, you get this mention of a new entity called Alba.

And Alba is a Gaelic word. It's the Irish word. It just means Britain, or it just used to mean Britain. But from 900 or so, Alba means specifically this kingdom of Gaelic speakers in what used to be Pictland, the northeast of Scotland. So something has happened in that generation or two in between the 870s and 900. The Picts disappear, it seems, and they're replaced by this new kingdom speaking a different language called Alba. And for me, as an archaeologist, that's where you want to go. Where the sources blink out, this is where we might step in and figure things out. So I really looked at the evidence in the museum that anything that dated to the late 9th century. And what you have is lots of material actually coming in, not from Viking Scandinavia in northeast Scotland, but you have a lot of Anglo-Saxon

material. You get Anglo-Saxon coins, Mercian coins, coins of Wessex that are miles away from where they would have normally circulated. You get pins that you don't usually get, and balance scales for weighing small amounts of silver or other precious metals. And you just don't get these kinds of things. They seem to be something brought in externally, but not from Norway and not from Dublin where the Vikings are. They're coming from somewhere else. As you well know, and as listeners to this podcast well know, in the 860s and 870s is the time of the Viking Great Army that are rampaging through England and knocking out kings. They're going straight to the seats of power, extracting money. And if they don't have enough money to pay,

well, things go south. And there are knock-on effects to that that I've been able to see thanks to the work of people like yourself, Kat. Don Hadley and Julian Richards' work on the Great Army and their footprint, the archaeological signature, is something that you are now beginning to see in Scotland to a certain extent. Those coins seem to be a marker of Great Army warbands, or at least people who are trading with the great army. And that is what you're getting on the ground in the 860s and 70s in hordes. You're beginning to get sort of echoes. Rather than the archaeological footprint of the great army, you're getting sort of hints of people interacting with them. So rather than Viking, as in Norse Scandinavian activity in Northeast Scotland, the archaeology tells us that the Vikings we know are raiding in this area are those that are linked to what becomes the Dane law. And there's a lot of work

still to be done about who we actually mean when we talk about the Vikings, especially in Scotland. It's all a bit messy, but I think that's what's exciting about it. You listened to Dan Snow's history hit. We're talking about the birth of Scotland with the Gone Medieval team. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, More coming up. rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What you're talking about with all this with the Great great army that stuff that happens in the 870s

there's that point where that great army sort of stops as an entity isn't it and then these people who are associated with it we don't quite know what happens to them and we're talking you know thousands of people and we know some of them settle some of them go north some of them go all over the place and so to trace that with the objects and the artifacts I think is absolutely brilliant so I was so happy to see that and I also have to point out I did spot in your book a bead a very particular carnelian bead and as you might know I've looked at one of those associated with the great army they're very rare in Britain I think there's only about four possibly five from the whole of Britain and in my book River Kings I trace that back and that's very strictly associated I think with this group so the fact that you've got one too I believe is quite a nice little link. Yeah that was almost my favourite object in the whole

time that I spent in the museum. When I first came to the museum you know you kind of have the entire collection these are thousands of objects to play with really and you know, you kind of have the entire collection. These are thousands of objects to play with, really. And, you know, so you kind of get shown around the collections and say, well, these are well-known assemblages. These haven't really been registered yet, but we've had them for a while. So you could probably look at those. And it was one of those latter ones that I opened up first. This was an assemblage from excavations led at Coldingham Priory. Now, Coldingham is in the Scottish borders, and it's mentioned in Bede in the 8th century. So it goes back quite a long way. There's been a Northumbrian monastery and a double house, that means monks and nuns, at Coldingham since at least the 7th century, certainly into the 8th century. So it's no surprise that there's early medieval stuff there. Metal detecting activity has also found lots of Northumbrian strap ends, which might date to the 9th century. So the picture of Caldingham in this period has been building up slowly for a long time. So I thought, let me have a look at this old excavation assemblage and see if there's anything there. Well, there was mostly sort of modern bits and

pieces, later medieval bits and pieces, you know, a bit of iron work. You always get that nails and things like that. Things that are not really diagnostic of any time period, but are still important and still need to be sort of looked at. One thing jumped out immediately, and it was that little bead. And it was marked on the paper, carnelian bead, but nothing else. And I had to go back to the interim reports, which were luckily published in a local journal. And they did kind of mention the seasons of excavation where they were. They're

around the priory. They're in structures, which are 12th century buildings, but they're getting underneath them at this point. So there's no surprise to find something early medieval there. Well, I thought that was interesting. I put it away and I didn't come back to it. A few years later, River Kings comes out by a famous person you may have heard of, Cat Yarmul. And the issue of this Carnelian bead, the importance of that Carnelian bead and all of the international links that it sort of carries within it from maybe as far as India or the Indian Ocean area, it tells us that the trade routes in this area are not just expanding out to the North Atlantic and into Britain and Ireland, but very crucially and probably,

more importantly, expanding out east where the silver eventually is coming from, which is such an iconic part of the Viking Age. And so this Carnelian bead potentially, if it comes from that time, it's effectively unstratified, unfortunately. But as you said, it's one of only five known from anywhere in Britain. And all of the other sites that they have been found are associated with Viking settlements or Viking activity. So at Coldingham, there, potentially, you have an unrecorded, maybe a stopover or some link with that great army. And if you go back to episode one, I believe, of this very podcast, there's this great update on fieldwork, finding more and more evidence of the great army pushing further inland up those river systems. So I think

there's a lot more work to be done in the Scottish borders. There's more Viking Age there than people have ever realized. I think that's so absolutely fantastic. And I just love the fact that we can have all these objects, these things that have been lying around for decades in some cases. And actually, it's now that we can put them together and actually answer some of these blanks that you were saying earlier on that this period really is a big blank, and we don't know from the sources what's happening. So it just shows how important the archaeology is really just to pick up on something you said there about these international connections and you mentioned earlier as well this idea that really is the water routes and it's that transport

around to Ireland and the Irish Sea region is really really important and I think especially for those of us who are based down in southwest England and you know we sort of feel like this is the north is very very remote and very inaccessible but that's really not the case is it I mean this is very connected to so many places it's actually a bit like a sort of central hub in some ways isn't it? That's absolutely right I mean the more you look at the archaeology the more that you see that everything is linked together over great distances and never more than in the Viking Age. In the Roman period, you wouldn't bat an eye to see things from Algeria showing up in Scotland because they have these roads and these shipping lanes and all of

the infrastructure to take these things across great distances. No problem. But for hundreds of years in Scotland, you don't get anything close to that. You get the occasional exotic imports, but nothing along those lines of sort of regular trade, if you like, or regular shipments of material coming in from far off lands. Only in very short blips of time do you get that in Scotland. In the Viking Age, you begin to get very exotic things. That carnelian bead from Coldingham is just one example. The most iconic example is, of course, these coins minted in the Islamic caliphates. And we have these Durham silver coins in Scotland that are minted as far as modern-day Uzbekistan in Central Asia, making their way across these riverine routes up through the Baltic and via Scandinavia,

eventually coming to Scotland. To get a coin like that intact all the way from Uzbekistan to the Isle of Skye, where one of these is found in one of the Hebridean islands on the west coast of Scotland, is a mind-blowing thing. But we have several of these Durham coins now from the, But we have several of these Durham coins now from the, almost invariably, the northern and western seaways. So these are where those international shipments of material are being brought to Scotland. If you live on the water and you have a good harbour at this time, you are kind of on top of the world. And in this couple of hundred years, the islands of Orkney, the islands of Shetland, and the Hebrides on the West Coast, and even the islands of the Clyde Firth inland, close to Glasgow, these places begin to show a kind of wealth that they haven't experienced at

that point in history for a very long time. They become central rather than peripheral. If you are on the coastline on a good harbor in Orkney, you are at the center, certainly by the 10th century, you're at the center of an international sort of motorway system that stretches to the Baltic and to Central Asia in one direction, to Scandinavia, to the North Atlantic, which is now being colonized and settled by the Scandinavians by that time, off to the north and to the New World. And then down south to the Irish Sea, where the silver coins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom and the silver arm rings being minted by the Kingdom of Dublin are all swimming together. So if you live on one of these Scottish islands, you're actually at the center rather than at the periphery of these major transnational routeways.

I think that's such a powerful image and just sort of shifting that attention is fantastic. Now, I know that you and I could talk about this particular point in time for hours, probably, but I think we have to just move on a little bit. So I wanted to go more towards the end of this period then to what happens later on. If we go to the 11th century, now the Viking Age, looking at England, we have this very nice and convenient end point 1066, Norman invasion, Viking Age ends into the next stage. Now I think the situation isn't quite as simple as that if we look at Scotland. What's happening there then in the 11th century and at that same sort of point in time? I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

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This was, for me, one of the most exciting parts of the research. One of the things I started looking at almost right away, because again, as an archaeologist, I was actually drawn to these periods where there are fewer historical sources, or less reliable historical sources. And the 11th century has been called by very good archaeologists, the darkest of the dark ages. For Scotland, the sources that we have are quite unreliable. They're a little bit late and they cover this time period, but they were written later on by the winners. And so a lot is left out and a lot

is tidied up in those sources. So the 11th century seems to be forgotten. Meanwhile, in the Earldom of Orkney, people who work on Scandinavian archaeology in Scotland are in their element. In the Norse Earldoms, my goodness, they are building churches of mortared stone, you know, cut stone, lovely towers. The first in Scotland, probably one of the earliest tower bells in Scotland comes from a place called Cullivoe in Shetland, you know. And so the Norse earldom is on top of its game. They are commissioning these great works. Big palaces are mentioned in the sagas.

And we have the foundations of those structures that we can still walk on today. St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, the first and best surviving complete Romanesque building, really, in Scotland. Other cathedrals survived from this period, but they've been done up and changed over the years, whereas St. Magnus is a 12th century sort of time capsule. So you see, and they're sponsoring Scaldic poetry. They're reading these tales and these sagas in their halls, and they're getting written down for the first time. So if you study Scandinavian Scotland, great, loads of material. And for everyone else, it's really the case of, well, there's the Norman conquest going on further south, and that kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room. There's this great volume called the

Archaeology of the 11th Century, and every chapter is about the Norman conquest, you know, and there's one chapter about Scotland specifically, which is great. But there is a sense that the 11th century is kind of forgotten about by archaeologists. Historians have been working through those sources in amazing ways, and they've created these great new insights. The important thing is that there is a period here in the 11th century where there's a lot of new stories to be told archaeologically. And you begin to get the sense of, especially in Eastern Scotland, a reappearance of archaeology in a way. We didn't have burials in the 9th and 10th centuries in Eastern Scotland in the area of the Picts. We

don't have settlements. We don't have hill forts and halls, or at least very few of them compared to what was there before. So there's a sense of a gap. But in the 11th century, you begin to get more carved stone crosses. And these carved stones, these high crosses, have biblical imagery, and they look very similar to the high crosses that are being cut in Ireland at this time. And of course, Alba is an Irish speaking, I should say Gaelic speaking. So Gaeldom as a whole extends into Ireland and Scotland at this point. So there's no surprise that they're carving Irish looking crosses. But we tend not to really study them because people who study carved stones tend to study these Pictish carved stones, which are more famous and more abundant. And the later ones are kind of difficult to date and problematic.

So they've been understudied. You begin to get the first coin hordes. in the Galloway hoard around 900, the scale hoard in Orkney, the heaviest by silver weight hoard in Scotland and almost anywhere is deposited in Orkney in the middle of the 10th century. In Alaba, in Eastern Scotland, there's none of that activity. There's no silver hoards. And so the 10th century is kind of a blip archaeologically there. In the 11th century, you begin to get the first silver hoards again. And what do they consist of? Coins of Canute, minted probably in London. So you're getting these coins of Canute in some places, and you're getting coins now

minted in Dublin, in other places. And sometimes they're cheek by jowl. Sometimes you get coins of both in the same area, for instance. And so you get a sense of these people in Alaba and Eastern Scotland kind of in a position now to play both sides. They are cultivating relationships with the Orkney Earldoms. The Kings of Scots are cultivating relationships with the Orkney Earldoms at the same time as they are sort of cultivating relationships with their co-language speakers in Ireland, as well as playing, sometimes invading, sometimes accepting exiles of the Anglo-Saxon

and increasingly the Anglo-Danish kingdoms down south. So you get a sense of Alba kind of biding its time and becoming more powerful by kind of playing both sides or all three sides, really. And I think there's a lot more interesting stories to tell there. But the 11th century has more to say artifactually than people realized before. I think that brings it back quite nicely to what you were saying about the beginning, actually, as well about the title for the book, this idea of a crucible, things sort of happening and this as a sort of melting pot. So you have so many different elements sort of all coming together and all those contacts and networks.

I think that sort of illustrates that really beautifully, doesn't it? But we're going to have to sort of finish off a bit. But what's missing now? What, you know, obviously you've got to the end of that project, you've written the book, but that's never the end of it, is there? What else is there? If you were going to be given, you know, if some other distillery was going to come along and give you another three years worth what is the next step what else should

we find out about there's so many ways you could go one thing that i'm really interested in that i've been pursuing for a couple of years now is well i've looked at the artifacts and the artifacts have all this evidence of blending of influences you know know, of coming together of Irish and Scandinavian motifs into one object, and that kind of thing. And you have all these hyphenated terms for this period. You have Hiberno-Norse objects, you have Anglo-Scandinavian objects, but none of those terms actually includes Scotland, if you think about it. Hiberno and Norse, Irish and Scandinavian, characterizes much of what is now Scotland. Anglo-Danish, Anglo-Scandinavian, again, kind of doesn't leave any evidence, any space for that big chunk in

between. So the artifactual things, they take you to a certain point where you see a lot of influences coming together, but the movement of people is what's really going to bring that home. And there's been only very few isotope analysis done on Viking burials, to the 12th centuries with grave goods or not, and subject them to the same kind of techniques. We tend to focus on very few and very special and different burials when we test them for DNA and isotopes, because we assume that those probably have good evidence of being migrants. And so let's see if they have evidence of being migrants. So we test them, but we don't often test everybody else. So how would you know who lived there before and who stayed there after? I would hope that more DNA and more isotope analysis was done across the board. And then we can truly begin to map out who is moving and where, and where that has been done. The evidence is so

interesting. So you have clear evidence of people coming in, according to isotopes, from Scandinavia. A lot of your work has focused on this, of course. And in addition to that, we have a lot of evidence for people of non-Scandinavian descent, or at least according to their isotopes, not born and raised in Scandinavia, who ended up being buried in Viking fashion. And invariably in Scotland so far, it's been women or people buried as women in the female costume of the time that have had isotopes whose signal is insular, that is British, Scottish, Irish, English. Basically, there are women who are insular, dressed as Vikings, and men who are probably

from Scandinavia in these early Viking Age cemeteries. Is that a pattern that holds up throughout the entire Viking Age? Are we getting a sense of men moving around more than women? Are we getting a sense of men moving around more than women? Not really. The women who have been tested so far are insular, but they are not local. They're moving around as well. So they're buried on Orkney and Lewis, the people who have been tested so far, but they are not from Orkney or Lewis. So everyone's moving around at this time.

So I'd like to find out more about how many people are moving, what are the population dynamics, is there internal migration between eastern and western Scotland, those kinds of dynamics. And until we figure that out, we're not going to be able to tell a real clear story about migration at this time. And it's such a relevant issue now that I think it really behooves us to pursue this further. That sounds fantastic. And I really hope that that's something that can go ahead, because I completely agree. That's absolutely what's going to help us answer some of those stories. Adrian, that's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. And I would highly recommend

people check out your book, The Crucible of Nations Scotland from Viking Age to Medieval Kingdom. And where can people buy it? Is it going to be available from any shops? Yes, it's going to be available wherever you buy books. But right now you can pre-order it on the National Museum Scotland website. Just go to the shop link and the link to pre-order the book is live now. Fantastic. And I can guarantee you that's going to want to travel up to the museum and actually look at the objects themselves as well. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening. And thanks again, Adrian, for joining me. Thanks, everyone. That was an episode of Gone Medieval.

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