Lead Isotope Analysis of Tooth Enamel from a Viking Age Mass Grave in Southern Britain and the Constraints it Places on the Origin of the Individuals

Evans, Jane; Pashley, Vanessa; Chenery, Carolyn; Loe, Louise; Chenery, Simon

doi:10.1111/arcm.12361

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In Britain, most individuals recovered from the late Viking Age sites of Ridgway Hill, Dorset, and St. John’s College, Oxford 13 show ancestries typical of those seen in Viking Age southern Scandinavia, suggesting that those executed could have been predominantly migrants or members of Viking raiding parties from Scandinavia (Figure 4g). In agreement with these genetic ancestry profiles, strontium and oxygen analyses of the individuals from Ridgway Hill and St. John’s College have suggested childhood origins outside of Britain, and potentially in peninsular Scandinavia, particularly the island of Öland 63,64 , or parts of northern continental Europe 65 . Notably, VK166 (SK 1891) from St. John’s College is a slight outlier in terms of both genetic ancestry, which is best explained by groups from Iron Age Austria, France, and Germany and Sarmatian-related populations from Russia, and the stable isotope analysis, where the oxygen results are suggest a more continental origin and the strontium suggests he spent his childhood on more radiogenic geology.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 62%

High-resolution genomic ancestry reveals mobility in early medieval Europe

Speidel,

Silva,

Booth

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Ancient DNA has unlocked new genetic histories and shed light on archaeological and historical questions, but many known and unknown historical events have remained below detection thresholds because subtle ancestry changes are challenging to reconstruct. Methods based on sharing of haplotypes and rare variants can improve power, but are not explicitly temporal and have not been adopted in unbiased ancestry models. Here, we develop Twigstats, a new approach of time-stratified ancestry analysis that can improve statistical power by an order of magnitude by focusing on coalescences in recent times, while remaining unbiased by population-specific drift. We apply this framework to 1,151 available ancient genomes, focussing on northern and central Europe in the historical period, and show that it allows modelling of individual-level ancestry using preceding genomes and provides previously unavailable resolution to detect broader ancestry transformations. In the first half of the first millennium ~1-500 CE (Common Era), we observe an expansion of Scandinavian-related ancestry across western, central, and southern Europe. However, in the second half of the millennium ~500-1000 CE, ancestry patterns suggest the regional disappearance or substantial admixture of these ancestries in multiple regions. Within Scandinavia itself, we document a major ancestry influx by ~800 CE, when a large proportion of Viking Age individuals carried ancestry from groups related to continental Europe. This primarily affected southern Scandinavia, and was differentially represented in the western and eastern directions of the wider Viking world. We infer detailed ancestry portraits integrated with historical, archaeological, and stable isotope evidence, documenting mobility at an individual level. Overall, our results are consistent with substantial mobility in Europe in the early historical period, and suggest that time-stratified ancestry analysis can provide a new lens for genetic history.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 62%

High-resolution genomic ancestry reveals mobility in early medieval Europe

Speidel,

Silva,

Booth

et al. 2024

Preprint

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“…[ 47 – 53 ]. The values exhibited by both populations also contrast with those recorded in enamel from individuals who had migrated to temperate locations from regions with a cold climate, such as the migrant individuals of Early Medieval date excavated in Dorset, England or Dublin, Ireland ( figure 2 ) [ 48 – 51 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a consequence of the above factors, oxygen isotope analysis of enamel from human populations is useful for making broader scale distinctions, for differentiating individuals who originate from regions of much colder climate and have very low δ 18 O carbonate values, (<24.5‰, or δ 18 O phosphate VSMOW values < 15.5‰) from those who sourced their childhood dietary resources from temperate locations e.g. [47][48][49][50][51][52][53].…”

Section: δ 18 O Carbonate and δ 13 C Carbonate Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Provenancing antiquarian museum collections using multi-isotope analysis

et al. 2023

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Many of the most significant archaeological sites in Europe were excavated by antiquarians over one hundred years ago. Modern museum collections therefore frequently contain human remains that were recovered during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here we apply multi-isotope analysis ( 87 Sr/ 86 Sr, δ 18 O, δ 13 C, δ 15 N) and 14 C dating to evaluate the provenance of human remains within a collection that is thought to have been recovered from one of the most important archaeological sites in Britain. Excavated in 1910, the site of Coldrum in Kent is a megalithic burial monument that may be one of the earliest sites associated with the transition to farming in Britain. The interpretation of this site is therefore key to understanding how agriculture began. Using isotope analysis we show that although the human skeletal collections attributed to Coldrum do contain some of the earliest dated Neolithic human remains in Britain, they also contain the remains of individuals of fifth to seventh centuries AD date. We evaluate subsistence and mobility patterns of early Neolithic populations and provide new information about the origins of those individuals in the collection that date to the fifth to seventh centuries AD. We demonstrate the utility of employing isotope analysis to provide direct and independent information about the provenance of human remains in museum collections.

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“…The regional designations in Figure 1 were created to limit the use of current political boundaries and the problematic use of ethnic identifiers for past geo-political zones, while also incorporating some of the environmental and geological variation across Europe. The zonation resulted from plotting the sites to look for spatial clustering and adjusting these with δ 18 O and 87/86 Sr isoscapes (Evans et al, 2010, 2012, 2018; Bataille et al, 2020), as well as cultural factors such as grave good styles and linguistic aspects (for details see Leggett et al, 2021).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Hierarchical Meta-Analytical Approach to Western European Dietary Transitions in the First Millennium AD

Leggett

2022

Eur. j. archaeol

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During the first millennium ad, Europe saw much socio-environmental change, which is reflected in the archaeological and palaeoecological evidence. Using published and new isotope data from across western Europe, the author examines changing resource use from c.ad 350 to 1200. The geographical limits of millet and substantial marine consumption are identified and comparisons between childhood and adult diets made across regions. Cross-cultural interaction at a broad scale is emphasized and patterns within early medieval England form the subject of an in-depth case study. While doubt is cast onto the uptake of marine resource consumption in England following the Fish Event Horizon, changes in agricultural practices, the impact of Christianization, and the role of freshwater fish in diets are explored. The author's hierarchical meta-analytical approach enables identification of human–environment interactions, with significant implications for changing foodways in Europe during the first millennium ad.

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Lead Isotope Analysis of Tooth Enamel from a Viking Age Mass Grave in Southern Britain and the Constraints it Places on the Origin of the Individuals

Cited by 10 publications

References 31 publications

High-resolution genomic ancestry reveals mobility in early medieval Europe

High-resolution genomic ancestry reveals mobility in early medieval Europe

Provenancing antiquarian museum collections using multi-isotope analysis

A Hierarchical Meta-Analytical Approach to Western European Dietary Transitions in the First Millennium AD

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