"African Viking?" Topic

"The aim of the following brief note is to direct attention to a burial from a late ninth- to early eleventh-century cemetery in York. The burials here were originally excavated in 1989–90, but an osteological analysis in 2015 suggested that one of the people buried here was a man of possible African or mixed ancestry…."

Main page

link

Amicalement
Armand

Could have been a slave ?

Well, that's interesting. I had a friend in college who insisted Vikings liked black women (they would have been exotic, after all), but I'd never come across anything supporting that. I'd never really looked, either. My assumption would have been they were slaves, but there may well have been wanderers who ended up in Viking lands.
I have some Vikings on order just now. Perhaps I should paint a couple with the skin colors normally reserved for my ancient Egyptians. They would be different, anyway.

Grelber

I would say be careful of the terms, at one point the Vandals were technically African at one point.

Glad you enjoyed it my friend!.

Amicalement
Armand

Yes, be careful. I would find it plausible that a traveler or slave could have wound up in Anglo-Saxon England, even an apparent East Asian skeleton ended up in Roman Italy at one point. His must have been an interesting story. One telling point is there is a lot of "possibles" in this article, and without DNA evidence there is next to nothing. And what do the author's mean by "mixed?" A mulatto? What about a mixed Sub-Saharan Berber that arrived via the Andalusian slave trade? There are many possibilities, and none of them are Vikings by any stretch of the imagination!

I would not recommend repainting your figures yet.

Of course there were.
Haven't you seen 13th Warrior ?
And there were even a few episodes of the series "Vikings" where they were in North Africa.

It's gotta be true. I saw it on TV.

Since I have over 400 Viking warriors painted in normal, North European skin tones, adding one or two wanderers or descendants of slaves in darker skin colors will hardly be noticed. Maybe they will be special characters, like Sir Palomides, Othello, the Moor of Venice, or the 13th Warrior. I'll leave the rest of my Vikings in their current suntanned, but pale, color.

Grelber

I have absolutely no difficulty, bearing in mind the amazing range that Vikings managed to cover that an African person would be living in early medieval Britain.

The only difficulty that people have is that this clashes with the tradition perception that this wasn't the case.

The great thing about archaeology is that our findings aren't lead or influenced by research objectives, so we aren't necessarily actively seeking out evidence for certain concepts, like early medieval multiculturalism but these things often appear in the course of scientific analysis.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Problem here is the old "mount out of a mole hill". The article actually suggested that this person had some sub-Saharan heritage it does not say he had been of one of the Bantu peoples. This is completely believable as Kiev and Dublin were found has markets for slaves. We know Berbers and Moors traded in slaves. Further, DNA analysis has shown that Icelandic females tend to have higher amounts of Celtic heritage and males Scandinavian. So yes we know that Viking and seemly Moors were doing more with their slaves then just selling them.
"The great thing about archaeology is that our findings aren't lead or influenced by research objectives, so we aren't necessarily actively seeking out evidence for certain concepts, like early medieval multiculturalism but these things often appear in the course of scientific analysis."
Of course the subjective piece is in "what" the archaeologist chooses to study. And then there is how the popular press in their desire to tell something in a way that not bog down in technical details. So yes you can now paint one or two of your Dark age northern Europeans with Dark Hair

Disappointing that the general assumption is that any non-white person in medieval Europe must be a slave. There were many traders travelling around Europe from many parts of the world at this time.

This could have been someone whose ancestors came over with the Romans as slaves, or followed them as traders.

Sandinista the viking were the first venture Capitalist LOL