Gone Medieval - Vikings: What Does Their Hair Tell Us?

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

If you've watched a film or TV show about vikings recently, you may well have noticed a distinctive hairstyle featuring an undercut and a ponytail. But is this actually a realistic depiction? And, do we really know much about viking hair at all?Luckily, we certainly know a lot about viking grooming, not least because Norsemen were said to be popular with Anglo-Saxon women thanks to their (relative) cleanliness! What we know about viking hair, hygiene and grooming can actually tell us a lot about the Viking age as a whole. Alas in this episode, Cat sits down with Dr Steve Ashby, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of York, to find out more about this hairy subject.Don’t forget to leave us a rating and review while you're here!For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to the Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman. Now, if you've watched a film or a TV show about Vikings in recent years, you may well have noticed quite distinctive hairstyle, but is that actually a realistic depiction? And do we really know much about it at all? We certainly know quite a lot about the Vikings' attitude. to appearance and personal grooming.

And in fact, what we know about this can tell us about not just things like social relationships, but also something quite different like international trade, even contacts across the North Sea and how the Viking Age started. And I'm going to get to all of that in this episode because I'm very excited to have as my guest today, somebody who specialises in all of this. I've got Dr. Steve Ashby here today. Steve is a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. So welcome to Gone Medieval, Steve. No problem. Nice to meet you again.

So, okay, we need to talk about this with hair. And we do just need to start with this sort of stereotype that I think a lot of people now in 2022, if they imagine a Viking in their mind, they may well have this image that we get from our TV screens of if it's a woman, She might have elaborate platts in long hair. A man might have her sort of undercut or shaved side and possibly also a ponytail or a platt or something like that. A view that really has come from TV,

especially the Vikings, Michael Hurst's Vikings TV show. But is that actually based on real evidence? It's an interesting question. It's something that I get asked quite a lot now and didn't used to get asked very much. And I think it is the impact of TV. I think the idea of what a Viking look like has changed quite a lot in the light of that kind of media.

And we do have a certain amount of evidence. We have iconographic evidence from things like these little things called Gulgubber, these little gold foils, which have illustrations of both male and female figures on them. We have illustrations from tapestries. We have famous carvings from Ozerberg, which show things like women with kind of long plats and pointy little beards on the men. And some of the sort of things we think of as kind of stereotypical Viking hair, their representations, of course. We don't have skeletons of Vikings in the grave with a hair salon.

Now, there are occasional grave findings which have hair in there, but most of our evidence comes from these representations and how much they actually represent what was really going on in the everyday we don't really know, how much they represent a kind of idealisation we don't know. And to be honest, I don't really care very much. It surprises people sometimes, but for all that, spend a lot of time working on hair. I think one of the least interesting questions you can ask about Vikings is kind of what their hair looked like, really. It was important to them, and I think that's a far better starting point to think about kind of why hair matter to them and in what ways it might have been significant in society.

But actually correcting the fact whether or not they had undercuts or not. I'm quite willing to let the TV shares have a bit of artistic licence with that. Yeah, that's absolutely fair enough. So, OK, so we've got some vague ideas, really. But there's a slightly bigger topic here, isn't there? Not just about hair and appearance as such, but more about grooming and the sort of personal care and that sort of thing. And is that really what is more interesting to study?

Yeah, to me, I think that's really interesting. I mean, I think if you look at a lot of, well, society is really cross-time. Appearance is always important. It's always one of the ways that people separate to have some that have-nots. It's a way of marking out identity, whether that's gender or status or ethnicity, in-group and out-group relations, you know, kind of locals and foreigners. All those things are marked out in appearance, whether that's brooches or elaborate dress or whether it's something like hair.

And I think that if you look at early medieval societies in particular, they're all sorts of reason from documentary references to demonstrate that in early medieval societies right across Europe, that hair had all these kind of weird significances we don't necessarily think of, laws enacted in some societies to code the way in which you could treat your hair. It seemed like it was a kind of clear marker of identity and status and yet quite often codified. And we don't know that much about that in the Viking world. We do have references from Ibn Fadlan, the famous sort of Arabic reference to the vulgarus, in which there are references to washing your hair in the mornings. Then there are references from Anglo-Saxon scholars and slightly later

medieval references, referring back to the Viking Age, that talk about the ways that the Scandinavians looked after their appearance and used that to exploit the affections of Anglo-Saxon women. Now, all these have to be taken with a pinch of salt, of course, but it suggests at least that there's an interest in hair there, and my interest has always been really in kind of working out what that might be. If you look across ethnographic work, look at a whole range of societies in the modern world, in the modern non-Western world, you find all sorts of references to hair in things like magic, things like association between the soul and emotions and the self. The fact that hair is alive when it's on your head and it's dead when it's off your head,

those things seem to be important. And I think all these things are kind of key in. The thing is that we don't know that all those things matter in any one particular society as of actually kind of getting into the Viking mind and really understanding exactly what's going on is quite difficult. But what you can do is you can start to think about the ways in which thinking about hair and thinking about appearance might have been structuring society, the ways which it might have been used as some sort of signifier in how people, you know, read their day-to-day existence, really.

That's a really good point. And I think the issue then is, as you said, we've got a few depictions. We don't really have descriptions on a daily level. But we can get to some of this, though, can't we? Archaeologically, we're sort of almost by proxy. We haven't got the hair. But what you've been studying for a lot of your career is actually looking at combs. So looking at the sort of paraphernalia, I suppose, are the objects that relate directly to it.

Is that how we can get to those sort of answers? Yeah, I mean, to me, that's the biggest marker. So we can make extrapolations from what we read from documentary references, both directly to the Viking world and from elsewhere in sort of early medieval Europe. But the one thing that we have is really tangible for the Viking age are combs. And quite often when I say to people that I work on combs, they either mishear me or they don't really understand that. So that's an object you can really study.

You might be familiar with the idea of brooches or swords, but combs seems as something new. If you go to any kind of museum that's got a Viking collection, go to the Viking Centre here in York, go to any collection that's got in Scandinavia, does bucket loads of cones. They're really, really common fire, particularly from urban sites. They're investing a lot of effort and expense and labor in making these objects. And it's not a uniquely Viking phenomenon. You have them from about the third or fourth century, really,

across sort of Germanic Europe right through in the medieval period. but they do seem to have been a particularly significant thing in the Viking Age. And they're a weird object. I mean, the kind of object that you have in the Viking Age, this is not a rough piece of bone that someone has quickly cut a few teeth into. They're a complicated object made of lots of small pieces of antler. They use deer antler rather than just any old bone they get laying around from the butcher. They use a specialist toolkit, the kind of toolkit which is sort of used by a carpenter or a woodworker,

very similar to that kind of toolkit, which involves specialist skills. And it's taking them probably a couple of days to make these up. So they're not throw away at all. And so the question becomes why? Why they investing two days of a specialist cross person's life in making something to comb your hair and presumably paying a certain amount of money for that or getting it through gift exchange. But in either way, these are not throw away items. There's something which mean things to people. And also relating to that, I think the fact that they weren't just perfectly private objects, were they? I mean, my hairbrush is in my drawer, in my bedroom. Nobody ever sees my hairbrush. I don't have any.

you sort of need to show that off to anyone. But that's actually different, isn't it? So combs, they're not just entirely private. They are presumably, because we find them in places like graves, don't we? It's sort of on display. So you are essentially using it to sort of show off that craftsmanship and that work as well, don't you? Yeah, absolutely. And I think graves are interesting because you get them in graves in two different ways.

There are some graves where you have them placed alongside the body and sometimes with multiple combs, two or three combs placed in a grave, in the same way that you might feel. find the kind of items that we think are put in a grave as grave goods, whether that's weaponry or spinning equipment and that kind of thing. But then we also find them, and I think this is more telling, actually on the body quite often. And when they are on the body, they're quite often in the waste sort of area, suggesting that they're actually associated with dress, and that perhaps they're hung from a belt or something like that. And that's quite interesting. That just suggests that these are functional items, but they're also kind of display items, which kind of explains

why there's so much effort goes into decorating them. Some of have really, especially in Scandinavia, really a beautiful kind of intricate carving on them. And I think that's kind of important to see that, to see them in the grave gives us an idea that they are going beyond the home. It's, of course, still quite possible that they're being kept at home on a mantel piece or something, by the heart perhaps. They seem to be personal objects. And I think that kind of decoration on them does mean that they've got a sort of element in sort of personal display and perhaps communication. Sort of that you can only actually see if you get fairly up close to someone. And interesting, some of them, particularly when you go outside of Scandinavia, one of the traditional ways we've

identified what we call a Frisian combs, who are a comb from the sort of the low countries area, they've always traditionally been identified by the fact that they have decoration on one side, but not on the other. So they clearly have a display side, so that that role in people seeing them is very clear. Now, whether the ethnic attribution of those is, as Frisian is really legitimate or not, is another question. But the fact that some of these combs have a clear side that they're supposed to be seen from, but it tells us something quite interesting about the way in which are being used. So if there's so much variety then, does that seem to go across social boundaries in terms of status and wealth as well? I mean, do we see that every part of society would have

access to homes or are they just these really pricey, expensive, show-off things? So I think that changes over time. I don't think they're just top end. My impression is that fairly early on the Viking agent before that, they might well be exchanging hands by gift exchange being made to commission. There's a certain amount of variety and almost uniqueness in the some of the very early combs, particularly if you go come outside of the immediately Viking world and you look at places like Pictish Scotland, so northern Scotland and Western Scotland, those kind of areas you tend to find combs which are very, they're one-offs, basically, and the impressions that are being made by the elite, for the elite, by the people working for them.

And as time goes on through the Viking Age, that becomes less the case. And you start to see combs being more sort of standard, more uniform, almost sort of mass-produced, but still to a high standard. So I think they become sort of aspirational, and it becomes the sort of thing you can buy at a market. And then once you come outside of the Scandinavian sort of homelands, if you like, and you come to places like England, go to Coppergate in York, the combs being made there are a sort of imitation of the sort of things you see back in Scandinavia, but they're not on anything like the same level of artistic sort of talent.

They're still well-made combs. They're perfectly functional. They're nicely decorated, but they're not symmetrical in the same way. They use slightly different materials. They use different methods of technology to produce them slightly. So I think their purpose does change over time. I suspect as well that by the time you get into the end of the Viking Age, most free people have a comb and presumably slaves have a way of doing something with their hair, that there might

not be these same sort of combs. And I think that's the clue really that it's not just that only the elite care about their hair, but the further up you go on the social scale, the more they're investing in this. And to invest in something, what seems to us a bit frivolous as your hair suggests that you have a certain amount of social capital to waste, if you like, to be able to pay someone for a comb which took them two days to make is not something that everyone can afford to do. And that's probably part of the point, I think. The fact that you can invest in this

and that it's directly associated with your appearance, which is itself a direct kind of indicator of status. All those things are sort of tied up, I think. Calling all ancient history fans, this is the ancients, the podcast dedicated to all things ancient history. From tours of stunning archaeological sites... You will not see a fountain in a Roman fort.

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Now, one of the things I want to talk to you about, because I know that you've just talked about quite a lot of how this changes over time, especially, and you've talked about some of these contacts. But actually, one of the quite remarkable things that you've done in your work is looking at trade. So looking at how these have moved across different places. So actually what is being moved from Scandinavia and elsewhere, you just talked about these sort of English examples being almost like copies or emulating something else. But I think it's really interesting to see how the combs can be a marker of trade and contact. So can you tell us, I mean, how can we find out, if we find a comb in a

grave in England, for example, how can we find out where that came from and what sort of trading links that would tell us about. Okay, so it's a really good question. It's something I wrestled with and found different ways of doing it for the last 20 years, really. So when I first came into the subject, the general consensus was that all combs in the Viking world are the same, basically. And you always see that sentence written down, whether you're looking in Ireland or Iceland, whether you're looking in sort of Western Russia, they're the same. And that was my starting point, really. I didn't really believe that. There is certainly, within particular, types, a certain amount of uniformity that you get across the, across the world. So if you see this

particular form of ninth century comb, this comb which appears right across the kind of Scandinavian area of contact, yes, there's similarities. But actually, there are small differences in decoration. I spent quite a long time trying to make sense of those, not with a lot of success, to be honest. I think there's a kind of a limited repertoire of decorative forms. They use complex interlaced designs. They use ring and dot patterns. They use kind of arrangements of kind of straight incised lines. you cut with a saw quite often. But what those mean is still a little bit of a mystery, and what they tell us about contacts is still a little bit unclear.

They probably tell us more about date than anything, I think. And there are a different range of designs to what you see on metal work. So there are very distinctive animal forms of ornament that we get on metal work in the Viking Age that we can use to date objects reasonably precisely. And we just don't see that same design on combs. They can do it on bone work because we find pieces of bone with these kind of designs on, but they don't put it on combs. So it's not seen as an appropriate medium for that kind of design, I guess.

So having given up on decoration, I started looking at other things. And one of the things which I think had really been overlooked was technology, the ways in which things are made. This is something which really over the last probably 10 years, more and more people are thinking about in Viking Age objects, is the fact that if you actually look beyond what we would call the type, the overall form, the shape of it, and beyond the kind of decoration, and actually look at how things are made. sometimes you find differences in the way that things are made, even within objects we've looked the same, whether they're using slightly different tools, whether they're doing things in a slightly different order, or, for example, in combs,

one of the key differences I've found is that the combs are made up of lots of small pieces of deer anabar that are all kind of riveted together using little pegs, little rivets. And you find variations through time and space in the type of rivets that are used, but also in the way that the rivets are used, where they're placed along the comb.

You'd think that once you'd found a way to hold the comb together so it didn't fall apart using the minimum number of pieces of metal, then you would stick with that. And that does seem to be the case. But the solution they find in, let's say, southern Scandinavia is very different to what they found further in northern Norway and Sweden. And then what you see in England is different again.

So that gives you some kind of way into being able to track movement and contact a little bit beyond looking at overall form. But the real kind of key for me, the kind of breakthrough came when I started looking at raw materials, the materials from which the objects are made. And as I said, they're made of deer antler in Viking age. Prior to the Viking age, in England in particular, you do find a lot of combs made out of what we call post-cranial bones.

So the bone from leg bones and that sort of thing from sheep and horse and cattle. But in the Scandinavia and in the Scandinavian world from about 9th into the 11th century, the only seem to really be interested in making combs out of deer antler. And there are all sorts of kind of physical reasons for that, which you don't really need to get into. But it does make stronger, more robust combs. And that's nice because antler only comes from a limited range of species. So if you can work out which species you're looking at,

that can tell you probably where, at least where the material came from. And unless the material is travelling around as a raw material, it can also tell you probably where the combs themselves are coming from. And so I started off doing this back when I was doing my PhD and trying to identify by eye and using a microscope differences between red deer and reindeer and elk as well. And to see if you can see what the differences were in the antler when you found it in a comb. You've got a whole red deer antler and a whole reindeer antler and a whole elk antler, it doesn't take very long to tell the difference between them.

But if you've got a piece which has been cut into small pieces and then has been polished within an inch of its life in an effort to hide any bits which are a bit ugly, which happened to be the bits that I'm looking for to identify it, it can be very difficult. So I tried, I did blind testing and all sorts of things for that for probably three or four years and got to the point where actually I was fairly confident that I could say, this is probably reindeer antler or this is probably red deer antler but I still wasn't really clear on it

and basically within I think certainly months of me finishing the PhD I got a call from somebody I've been working with earlier on in the progress to say oh we found a scientific way of doing this now we found a biomolecular way of doing this that was quite stunning actually that method that must have been yeah quite a moment

yeah it was nice so we tried it earlier on and we thought it was going to work and it just didn't and the trick is you might be thinking well what do you just use DNA Ancient DNA is the way to go with us. Because of course, ancient DNA will be able to distinguish between red deer and reindeer and elk. It will actually take us a lot further than that as well. So where some work has been done has been able to distinguish between different populations of reindeer.

So we could even say whether this is from a certain part of Norway or another part of Norway. The problem is that DNA is sort of unpredictable in terms of when you get results. You can't look at a comb and say, I'm going to get good DNA out of that. And it's expensive and it takes relatively large samples. So go into a museum curator and saying, I want to drill a hole in this really pretty object. you've got here. I can't tell you this can get a result or not, but I want to have a go. It's not always a very successful conversation. So what we need was a technique which allowed us to do something a bit similar, but was cheaper, quicker, use smaller sample sizes and would give us a better

guarantee of getting a result. And so what we use is a technique called Zooms. We stand to Zoo Archaeology by mass spectrometry. And it is basically a sort of a low resolution DNA really. It works on protein. So any object which has protein in it, it will work on. And in particular, it uses collagen. You can do a similar technique. using other other proteins, but what we've used is collagen, and it identifies quite crude differences between collagen sequences, which allow us to distinguish between groups of animals. And you need a fingerprint from each of these different animals to match your sample against. So if I put a single bone fragment into zooms, it gives me a spectrum, and then I could, from that, then try and work out

what it was. But I'd be looking at an enormous range of species that could be. If I already know that what I'm dealing with is antler, there's a limited range of species that can be. So I only have distinguish between the three things we really really crop up in our area, reindeer, red deer and elk. You do also get roe deer, but that's so small, it's quite hard to make combs out of. So they're the things that I'm usually dealing with. And it's particularly good at distinguishing

between reindeer and red deer. And if you find reindeer, you know, straight away, you recognise a spectrum. That's either reindeer or sometimes it can be goat, but so far I've never found a goat that's got antlers, so it makes things a little bit easier. And yes, that's taken a long time for the scientists to develop and really kind of get to the point where it's really kind of effective, but it really is now. And in some

ways, combs are the perfect kind of test material for this. It's usually also on things like where we found small fragments of bone in a midden, you can run enormous numbers of bone samples through zooms and be able to identify the human bone in there, for instance, where you couldn't tell morphologically because the fragments are too small. You can never do that with DNA because it would cost too much and there's too many samples to run. But you can run two or three, if you've got a bit of money, two or three hundred samples of zooms and it doesn't break bank and you get some good results. So we can do this with combs and we can do it with little fragments of comb working waste as well and allows us to kind of get an idea of exactly what a material is rather than me just looking on it by

eye and saying, I think that's probably reindeer. And you don't actually need a very big sample, do you? So you don't have that same problem of going to that curator and say, can I just snap off half of your comb? But you can actually do it with quite a small piece. That's right. And we're always investigating and trying to find new ways of doing it. So there are a number of ways you can sample. We've experimented with things like traditional way of doing it is getting a little Dremel drill and drilling a sample from it. But we're talking about tiny samples, and there are a few milligrams, basically a speck on the end of your finger.

Sometimes what I do is I get a scalpel, or just I find a bit on the reverse of the cone where there's a bit of soft spongy material that will come away easily. And I just scrape that off. You don't even notice it's gone. Other things you can do, we tested things like using a pencil eraser. This is something they've done quite successfully on parchment. So parchment has collagen in it as well.

And you can actually rub a pencil eraser on the parchment and then test the rubber shavings that come off because they soak up the collagen, believe it or not. We tried things like testing the plastic bags that we keep the objects in because collagen soaks into them, believe it or not, as well. The danger then, of course, you've got to be absolutely sure that nothing else has ever been in that bag, which is not something I'm willing to bank on every time, really. So a number of different ways we can get it, but we do try and be as minimally destructive as we can. This is, I mean, this is just such an exciting development, but let's talk about some of the results and some of the sort of things that you've discovered,

because some of those are actually quite spectacular and especially looking at that contact because you can then look at where the materials or the combs that have been traded, you can say quite a lot about it. And one of those was looking in early contact between Scandinavia and Scotland, which I know that is something that you've studied.

Can you tell me something about that? Yes, that was actually how I first got into combs in the first place. Back when I was doing a master's degree, we had a discussion about this, an old debate which goes back to the early 90s, about whether there was contact between Scandinavia and Britain and Ireland before the Viking Age. So did the Viking Age begin with this big bang of Scandinavian raiders appearing over the horizon? Your instinct tells you it wasn't quite a sudden as that.

Or was there more of a long period, an extended period of contact, perhaps being more peaceful, perhaps involving trade, before something went wrong and it became a bit more violent. And so the first references to this in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and documents like that are recording a change in the nature of the relations rather the opening of new relations, if you like. And that's always been, I think my instinct is that there must have been this longer period of contact. But try as you mind, most of the forms of evidence that we look for to try to find this tend to just fall away. And any time we think we've got a smoking gun, it just falls apart. There was a really influential paper by a guy called Bjorn Mera in the early

90s, which looked a lot of these kind of forms of evidence. And by the time I was getting interested in this in the sort of early 2000s, most of these forms of evidence had to drive. dropped away. And the only one which was really left to work with was the idea that there are a number of combs in Pictish Scotland, so pre-viking Scotland, that were of a clear non-viking design, pre-viking design and form and ornaments, but which were made of reindeer antler. That meant that someone in pre-viking Scotland had been in contact with somebody in Scandinavia. Now, on the face of it, that's not quite as unlikely as it seems, because in round about this time, and we talk about Northern Scotland, and the islands of Orkney and Shetland in particular,

around about this time, there is a very, very small red deer population. It's quite hard to get hands on local antler. You either probably had to go to mainland Scotland or you had to go across to Norway to get reindeer. And if you're in Shetland in particular, you're more or less halfway to Norway anyway. So it's not that unlikely, perhaps. The problem was that the method to identify the reindeer,

reindeer antler in these camps, had not really been very well explained in terms of methodology. And so that created a lot of skepticism and people didn't really believe this idea that these pre-viking cones were actually made as Scandinavian materials. So I started looking at it, and that's how I got into the idea

of looking at raw materials by eye, trying to do these blind testing, trying to identify, could you really tell them between species under a microscope? And doing it that way, what I found was that I found it quite hard to actually definitively say that anything that was clearly of pre-viking date

was made of reindeer animal, because there was a complicated situation here that a lot of these objects weren't very well dated, went from good stratigraphic sequences. So we were dating them based on what they looked like. And they looked like a non-viking object. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they came from before the Viking Age. It's not like everyone came in from Scandinavia and either killed everybody in Scotland

or made everyone in Scotland throw their combs away. This is the comb we're using now. We know that that's not how society works. They probably had bigger priorities, they imagine. So what I found was the only combs that I thought might be reindeer antwer weren't clearly pre-viking. So that was a bit of a step forward. But then I was say, as I finished the PhD,

this new method came along, and this was the perfect place to try that. So we got a group of combs, many of which have been in these original tests, identified as reindeer antler, and we tested them to see whether they were reindeer or red deer, or if we could tell. And we did DNA as well, just to back it up. And what we found was that basically everything that we, that was of pre-viking type or Pictish type, came back as red deer. And everything that we tested that was clearly Scandinavian type,

a very traditional Viking form, came back as reindeer, emma. And we did genetics on those, well, we did ancient DNA. We didn't get results on all of them. But where we did get results, it backed up the Zoom result as well. So the combs, at least the ones we looked at, which was a good sample, clearly didn't show any evidence of there being Scandinavians in Scotland prior to the Viking age. So that was a big step forward, really. It put a line through one of the last remaining pieces of evidence for that early contact.

So I don't really know where we are now, really. of us instinctively still think that's true, but we can't find it one way or another. That's quite a good result, though, because at least we have the evidence, even though if he wasn't necessarily saying what we were hoping it might, but you have some more evidence. And I know in other parts of the world in Scandinavia, and especially that early stage, which is actually one of the big topics that we're all trying to guess at at the moment, isn't it? Why and how did it start and what contact was there? And you have more evidence using combs, haven't you, looking across Scandinavia,

from places like inland Norway and down to Denmark. You've got some sort of similar studies, haven't you, of looking at connections there with reindeer as well? Yeah, I love the early Viking ages where I think all the exciting stuff is, really. And one of the things that we realize, as working with the colleagues Surin Simbek in Denmark, we realized together really that this technique

allowed us to track contact between northern Scandinavia and southern Scandinavia. So you don't get reindeer as a species living in Denmark. So if we're finding objects which are made of reindeer outlaw in these kind of towns in southern Scandinavia, that indicates contact with somewhere else. and most likely probably with the Auckland areas of Norway, which we might for shorthand called the Arctic,

a long way from Denmark. And the way that that contact is probably being made is overseas. If you're making contact between sort of Auckland, Norway and Southern Scandinavia, you probably need shipping to do it. So it suggests some kind of evidence of kind of maritime technology. So what we thought was, well, why don't we have a look and see we can identify the point at which you get reindeer appearing in Southern Scandinavia? because we know we get it later on, by the time we get into the medieval period,

there's a lot of combs being made out of a reindeer antler. And that kind of suggests that it's this kind of big industry. But we wanted to know at what point this started. And so the really kind of nice phenomenon we got to use here was the fact that at a site called Riba, which is one of my favorite Viking sites, really, is the earliest town in Denmark. And the findings are some of the kind of objects that I found there. It allows you to date the sequence to, sometimes within 10 or 20 years, rather than the 50 or 100 years, which we normally used to.

So I thought, well, let's have a look at this and see if we can find the point at which we start to get reindeer appearing. And what we did was went right back to start of the 8th century. And we found that reindeer antler started to appear in the small numbers in finished combs in the early 8th century. So well before the start of the Viking Age, somebody who had a comb that was probably made in somewhere like Upland, Norway, or used materials that came from Upland, Norway, found themselves in this place in Denmark, which was later to become something like a town. So fairly early on, they're aware of this place. There's a kind of emerging kind of understanding of travel, of the need to go to towns, of what has become to be known as an urban network. It's starting to form already about.

And if nothing else, what it shows is there's travel between these places. So there's shipping going on well before the Vikehaeg has become. But then what we found is that that kind of slow trickle just persists. But really takes off in a decade when we haven't any surprised to anybody, the sort of 790s. Around about that point, you start to see. reindeer antler appearing not just in finished combs, but in manufacturing waste. Someone's importing reindeer antler to make combs out of in southern Scandinavia. So it looks like there's a extended

period of maritime connection and travel and transport and trade, but then it spikes just when everything else spikes. When we hear about the other reading in the Anglosan Chronicle, when we start to see changes in the movement of silver around the Viking Age, where we start to see references in the Frankish annals. And we start to see the movements of beads changing, all those things you know about about as well, it's looking more and more like this is a kind of key moment. What's interesting is that the contact with

Auckland Norway or the Arctic is keyed into that just as much as those more exotic connections to the east they're keyed in. So it does seem to be a kind of key moment of change. But it also suggests that there is this trickle of contact before them. So while we couldn't find this contact with Scandinavia and Scotland

back into the early 8th century, they are certainly travelling around Scandinavia by boat at that point. So it does looked like there was movement, there was contact, there was trade, that expanded and changed at some point during the late 8th century, rather than beginning at that point from nothing, really. That's such a brilliant conclusion to be able to get to from something like Combs. One other question that I have, which is a, I'm not sure you can really answer, but it's a bit of a chicken or egg sort of question, really, in terms of seeing all this new, the new reindeer,

the material, especially, and the sort of the use of that in Combs, is that to do with a cultural thing? And do you think, is it more sort of whatever roles they have in society? Is that becoming more important? Or is it the fact that suddenly it's possible for these materials to move around? And so people can access because you have much more transport and networks and all of that. Is it sort of because they need the materials? Or is it because that they are accessible, do you think? I think, yeah, I think it's a bit of both.

Certainly, it must have been about the network opening up. So somebody who's getting hold of reindeer antler is aware that they can ship this to somewhere, that somebody else wants it somewhere else. That has to be important. It's not that it's necessarily a kind of culturally ascribed material that it kind of means something. Now, that might well be there, but there are particular things about reindeer which make it desirable. If anyone knows what a reindeer antler looks like, it's got big flat plates on it, much as elk has. You don't see that in red deer antlers as much.

So red deer antlers tends to be, it's kind of cylindrical. And that's probably one of the reasons why the combs you see in places like England are not quite so pretty. It's a harder material to work in a kind of symmetrical sort of way. But I think the key thing is that reindeer grouped together in large herds, huge herds, thousands and thousands of deer, completely nothing like you see for red deer or for elk. So if you want large numbers of antlers, then reindeer is the place to go. Lots of this material seems to be what we call cast or shed. It's not butchered.

It's not been taken from animals that have been hunted. It's been collected from the ground. And the easiest way to do that is if you've got a large number of animals together. So I think that's the reason that it becomes kind of desirable outside of the immediate area of where the animals live. It's because it allows you to bring in large numbers. I think it probably suggests expanding scale of production and the need to supplement what you've got locally

with material from outside. It's really clear that all these new methods and especially these new scientific methods are probably going to give us a lot more answers in the future. And, you know, one day, DNA may well also be easier, cheaper and all of that, so we can add that to it as well. So clearly there's a lot that we're going to be able to learn about all that contact.

But in terms of the future and the way ahead, head, that's obviously one big part. Do you think we're going to get any closer by looking at things like that to what we talked about at the start? So these sort of social importance is, and do you think it's going to really help bring that forwards as well? I think, I mean, it's not a direct connection between those things, but I think all these things together kind of, you know, kind of work coherently and hopefully that will. I mean, we're starting to work with genetics already, actually. I think when you've got a particular question you can ask, then the DNA might help. So we're looking at things like Combs in Iceland and Greenland.

I've been working with a PhD student of mine, Marianna Munoz Rodriguez. With her, we've been looking at combs in Iceland and Greenland and using genetics and see we can identify a difference between, let's say, reindeer and caribou. We can do the same sort of thing in Scandinavia to identify discrete populations as well. And I think that will tell us more about communication between places. In Iceland and Greenland, it would be really interesting to know, for instance, whether the material has been made locally or whether they're bringing combs in back from that homeland, what that means in terms of kind of the persistence of contact between these places,

the idea of diaspora. You know, is this constant movement back and forth, or have people moved out of Scandinavian and gone to Iceland, and now they're a new community, and they're a friend of themselves with new materials and new objects. So they all tie in together. Another thing which has been speculated by looking at the combs in terms of form and ornament

is that some of the combs you see in Iceland have greater similarities with somewhere like Britain and Ireland than they do with Scandinavia. And so that's been, of course, used to support the idea that a certain number of people in Iceland have actually come via Britain and Ireland rather than directly from Scandinavia. And the Royal Materials will key into that as well.

So that, again, it kind of all puts together that kind of bigger picture of sort of identity and the way you show who you are. That's absolutely brilliant, and that's quite a good place to end, actually, to sort of taking us from hair to combs, to trades, to science, to what that tells us about people and identities. Steve, thank you so much for joining me today.

That was absolutely brilliant. Thank you. It's been great fun. That brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Don't forget that if you were, would like more medieval information in your life, you can subscribe to our newsletter. Just look at the episode notes wherever you're getting this podcast. Join us again for the next episode. My co-host,

Matt Lewis will be back on Saturday and I will be back again next Tuesday. Thank you so much listening and I hope to catch you again soon.