Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Scandinavian Heritage of North- West England (original) (raw)

2014, In Search of Vikings

A wide variety of approaches based on historical, archaeological, place-name, linguistic, physical, and genetic tools can collectively provide a detailed understanding of the Vikings in peace and in war. This chapter and the rest of the book that follows focuses on one particularly exciting area of the Viking world, namely the northwest of England, an area where we now know them to have settled in large numbers. We take an overview of the technologies and approaches available and describe how new technologies are helping us to better understand what the Vikings left behind in terms of language, culture, archaeology, place-names, and genetic profiles of the people living there today. FIGURE 1.1 Northwest England: Viking Age sites and political territories in their regional context. (Courtesy of Michael Athanson, University of Oxford.) * www.nottingham.ac.uk/-sczsteve/ survey.htm * The 'xR1' following the notation for haplogroup K means 'excluding' the large haplogroup within it known as R1; see, for example, Bowden et al. (2008) and King (Chapter 11). † The resolution of the method is becoming increasingly more powerful as new SNPs continue to be discovered.