If you associate anything with the Vikings, it’s probably the raiding.

Vikings were notorious for  sailing up and down the coastlines of England and Western Europe and taking–like, everything  they could get their hands on. But while Vikings are known for having  a taste for shiny stuff in general, they especially liked silver, and were  known to steal silver specifically.

Which is why hoards of Viking  silver keep popping up everywhere. And a particular hoard of Viking  silver from northern England seems to have been a long way from home. Some of it, researchers say,  was mined as far away as Iran.

Which is kind of changing everything we  know about Viking trade and expansion. So let’s see what it was doing there. [intro] If you’re a history nerd, or a fan  of any of the Norse-inspired media that’s been out in recent years, you  probably know that around the 9th century, Vikings did a lot of raiding in  England and western Europe and Ireland, don’t leave out Ireland. And also they sometimes did  normal trading, as well.

They wouldn’t have called themselves Vikings, by the way – it’s more of a verb that means “to go out killing and stealing  and stuff when you have the time”. You know… fun family stuff But while they were after a lot of things, Vikings were specifically chasing after silver. See, under Scandinavian law, land and livestock were passed down according  to strict inheritance rules, so if you weren’t one of the generational “haves”, you were one of the have-nots.

The Vikings figured out that they  could skirt those traditional rules by trading for or straight  up stealing loads of stuff, creating a sort of nouveau riche warrior class. They still couldn’t use it  to buy land in Scandinavia, because the strict inheritance laws  locked outsiders out of the system no matter how well they could pay. They could trade that stuff, though,  creating a sort of status symbol, which enriched them in other ways.

Now, Vikings are also known for their hoards, basically piles of buried treasure  turning up anywhere you had Vikings. And while the idea of digging up  buried treasure is lots of fun, it does raise a few like some questions. Why were Vikings always burying  their treasure in the first place?

Well, the easiest answer is that Vikings hid their  hoards to keep them from being found by others, maybe because they were in  danger and needed to flee. They probably hoped they could  come back for their treasure later. Historians do think this explanation  worked for a lot of hoards, but there are a few more interesting reasons why Vikings might have hidden their treasure.

Some sources say that Vikings buried  treasure for religious reasons, believing that a man would be able  to use whatever treasure he buried once he made it to the afterlife. But since this particular bit of lore was written  down after the Christianization of Scandinavia, it’s worth treating with a grain of salt. Another possibility is that hoarding had  to do with the display of wealth and power.

Basically, if a leader wanted to  appear generous and successful, he needed to show off a huge pile of money, one he was willing to hand  out to his followers as well. That would mean stockpiling silver, and keeping it hidden so that it would  stay safe until it was ready to give out. and get in this, we’ll get back to  talking about one hoard in particular, but first, here’s a quick break. Thanks for watching SciShow for the last 14 years!

If you want to see us make it to the big one-five, here’s one thing you can do. Pause the video and go to  complexly.org/supportscishow Right now, 1 in every 10,000 people who  watch our videos support us on Patreon. If 2 in every 10,000 supported us, we could  afford to make SciShow for years to come!

We want to keep SciShow going, and you are a vital part of that equation. So if you need a little more incentive, we have more to offer from  March 13th through 27th! If you donate in that window, you can  get a postcard and other special treats, like a steel x-ray crystal spinner.

See, now you have to go and  find out about what that means. They’re at complexly.org/supportscishow. Thank you!

Whatever the reasons, Vikings left a lot of hoards  behind, and one of those hoards, the Bedale Hoard, was found using  metal detectors in Yorkshire in 2012. It was probably buried somewhere  around the year 900, maybe earlier. The hoard contained several silver pieces,  including an elaborate neck ring, some jewelry, and ingots that would have been used for exchange.

To find out where the items came  from, researchers turned to science. Specifically, chemistry. They decided to look into  the impurities in the silver.

They looked at three elements:  gold, bismuth, and lead. Gold and bismuth impurities tend to get  stuck in the silver, even after it's refined. Bismuth is difficult to remove  without destroying the silver, so most refining processes leave it in.

And gold? Well, it’s a noble metal,  so it just doesn’t go anywhere at all. Since the amount of gold and bismuth  that naturally occurs in silver varies depending on where the silver  comes from or when it was mined, taking a look at these elements can tell us  about where the silver originally came from.

Lead also tells an interesting story, because its isotopes can really narrow  down where in the world an ore comes from. And just to review real quick, isotopes are atoms of the same element with a slightly different number of neutrons, making them a tiny bit lighter or heavier. Some of them are stable, which means they don’t decay with time, and others are radioactive, which means they do decay.

Now, lead isotope analysis has been used  to determine the provenance of metals since the 1960s, so it’s a very old technique. People from 1960s, sorry for calling you very old. It Now this works because there are  traces of lead in just about everything.

And lead is a bit of an odd  duck, isotopically speaking. Other metals usually have the same isotope  ratio wherever they naturally occur, which means they always have about  the same amount of heavier atoms compared to lighter atoms. But isotopic proportions of lead differ  depending on where it comes from.

Why? Well, that’s because of radioactive decay. Earth’s crust is full of radioactive materials like uranium, thorium, and actinium, which are always decaying, shedding energy  and transforming into other elements.

And a lot of these decay  chains eventually end in lead. We have an episode about it. it did really well you should check it out But the isotope at the end of each chain differs. So the uranium decay chain ends in Lead-206, the isotope of lead with 206 proton and neutrons.

The actinium decay chain ends in Lead-207, and the thorium decay chain ends in Lead-208. That means that the final isotopic makeup of lead is highly dependent on the radioactive  elements in the area around it, and since there are enough  different possible combinations to make these distinct, lead isotopes can tell you a lot  about where something is from. And since, by nature, isotopes  all have different masses, a mass spectrometer can easily  tell them apart from each other.

So armed with traces of gold and  bismuth, and their isotope analysis, of lead the researchers set to work on determining  the origins of the Bedale hoard, but what they found surprised them. While a lot of the silver did  come from European sources, which is what they expected, about a third of the hoard  came from Baghdad and Tehran. That’s really surprising,  because you don’t hear many   stories of Vikings raiding the Abbasid Caliphate.

But while the group we now know of as  “the Vikings” didn’t have any contact with modern day Iraq and Iran, another group of Scandinavians did - the Rus. The Rus also left Scandinavia  during the Viking Age. But while the Vikings went  westward, the Rus went east, into modern day Russia and Ukraine.

The Rus frequently met with merchants from  the Islamic Empires on the River Volga, trading furs and enslaved people in  exchange for Islamic silver dirhams. We know that eventually, dirhams from the Rus made it back to Scandinavia, but that was thought to happen much later, a full century after the Bedale Hoard was buried. And the discovery of silver in  the Bedale Hoard, a Viking hoard, suggests that trade between  the eastern and western arms of this Scandinavian expansion was a lot more extensive than previously thought.

Now, eventually, both the Vikings’  and the Rus’ activities stopped. In the East, Central Asia’s  silver mines dried up around 950, making trade with the Islamic empire  far less appealing for the Rus. And in the West, the Vikings  gradually eased off the murder in favor of regular, murder-free trade, although it did take them  another century or so after that.

But the Bedale hoard remains an unexpected example of just how far the Vikings spread, and we only know about it thanks to the powers of geochemistry and science. [ OUTRO ]