I have often felt like a fake archaeologist. I did my PhD on the development of the bow and the crossbow in the later Middle Ages and for much of my evidence I used surviving medieval weapons. I took measurements of five-hundred-year-old crossbows in a Swiss castle and examined an early 15th century crossbow in the basement of the Met in New York. This was, by any reasonable measure, an archaeological study. However, I’ve never been to a dig site or participated in any of the usual archaeologist activities most people picture when they hear the word. I kind of regret that I’ve never been hanging around when someone pulled something old and cool out of the ground and I am a little jealous of those who have. I really enjoy archaeology and I’m fascinated to learn what interesting nuggets of information have been dug out of the earth. That is roundabout way of saying that I really enjoyed how deep into the archaeological woods Cat Jarman’s River Kings goes in places and reading it reminded me a lot of my time as a PhD student – where I was surrounded by people doing Viking age archaeology in Ireland.
River Kings is a new history of the Vikings that takes an archaeology heavy focus on its subject. Cat Jarman is a researcher primarily in osteoarchaeology – meaning the study of human remains. With modern scientific tools we can learn a lot about a person’s diet, genetic makeup, possible locations where they lived and grew up, and much more just from their bones. Newer developments in this field have opened up a wide range of avenues for historians and archaeologists to explore when it comes to expanding our understanding of the past. Since the Vikings have left us so little in terms of written records – the most famous Viking accounts, the sagas, were largely written by Christian authors centuries after the Viking age ended making them challenging to work with – these new archaeological tools have been particularly valuable in interpreting the abundant physical evidence they left behind.
I will say here that while I am fascinated by the new insights that we are getting via osteoarchaeology, it does often bring up one of the elements of classic archaeology that I find somewhat distasteful. Many of the bodies that have been dug up in archaeological digs are just kept in boxes in museums or university vaults, waiting for someone to come along and poke and prod them with various testing apparatus. In many cases we have dug up their grave, and we may even be displaying the possessions they were buried with in a museum while they sit in a cardboard box in a basement. We are essentially grave robbers, and I think there are ethical questions here that are not interrogated often enough by the institutions that hold these items. If you exhume bodies in a mass grave, victims of a massacre perhaps, that is one matter – you can’t exactly make the case that they were buried as they desired and wished to be left undisturbed for the rest of time. However, digging up purposeful graves and keeping the individual unburied – not returning them to any sort of final rest but instead keeping their bones for our own purposes – has always struck me as an act of disrespect. Since River Kings contains so much discussion of skeletal remains, including descriptions of where they are now held, I couldn’t stop thinking about this while reading it. I don’t mean this strictly as a criticism of River Kings, Cat Jarman has fairly minimal control over these burial remains, but it is a topic I would love to have seen discussed within its pages. I know it is an area of debate among archaeologists, but I think it is something worth bringing to light and sharing in more public theatres of discussion.
River Kings begins with an examination of Viking remains in England, starting with a mass grave near Repton. What it does from there, however, is what makes it such an interesting book. Slowly River Kings pushes further east as the book progresses – starting in England but eventually ending near Baghdad (with a short epilogue in India). It does an amazing job of showing the scope of Viking travel and the wide networks of Viking trade and relationships that followed. In modern terms we might call it a Viking diaspora. The focus is often on Vikings as traders, moving material and people throughout Europe and parts of the Middle East – but Jarman never lets their role as raider completely disappear from the narrative. We are reminded that conflict was never far away in the Middle Ages and the Vikings never seemed to be afraid of switching to violence when it suited them. It also contains fascinating discussions of how we conceive of Viking identity and the problems with linking cultural identity to genetic evidence
I must confess that I preferred the parts of the book focused on the Baltic and further east – in part because I was less familiar with it but also because it felt like that was where Jarman was offering a lot of excellent new insight. The sections covering England and other parts of western Europe were not without insight, the new evidence Jarman brings to bear is very interesting, but it often felt like it was providing a more solid foundation to what we had kind of already thought might be the case. This may be reflecting my own background, though. As someone who spent quite a lot of time around archaeologists studying the Vikings in and around Ireland, I may have just already known a lot of this material and thus it was less exciting for me to hear Jarman reiterate it with yet more compelling evidence.
As an introduction to the use of archaeology to increase our understanding of Viking history this is an amazing book. As an introduction to the Vikings in general, for most people I think it is still excellent, but some people may be a little disappointed with it. Jarman is not trying to provide a chronological history of the Vikings, nor is it really a narrative history – there is something of a narrative to the book, but it is hardly what you might call a standard historical account (and that is something I like about it!) If you want to greatly expand your understanding of who the Vikings were and what their impact on history was, then this is an excellent book. If what you want is an account of what the Vikings did between X and Y year and descriptions of their great leaders, raids, and battles then you had best look elsewhere. River Kings will at times cross into that area, there is quite a lot of discussion around the movements of the Great Heathen Army for example, but warfare, tactics, and political history are not really the purpose of the book. On the whole I really like River Kings and I would recommend it if you have an interest in the Vikings or in early medieval archaeology – I do kind of wish it had a bit more Irish history in it though!