I’m really enjoying the MOOC I’m following on Shipwrecks and submerged worlds… the title really doesn’t do the course justice as it covers so much more than I had imagined. I had taken it pretty literally and thought there would be lots of fascinating stuff looking at ships and boats on the bottom of the sea, and maybe at places such as Dunwich in Norfolk which had fallen into the sea as the land eroded. Yes, we have seen a few ships and boats on the bottom of the sea, and yes we have seen stuff about the archaeology beneath the waves, beside the waves, in bays and banks and by water.
But, my goodness, I’m learning so much more; perceptions and ideas are being continually challenged and I’m seeing archaeology in a very different way. Archaeology isn’t just about looking at people and their lives in the past, it is thinking about how we see things, what we accept which is incorrect and what we disbelieve which is actually true.
I have just been looking at a unit about the Vikings. Included in it were links to articles, videos, museum sites, (as well as helpful things such as glossaries of nautical and maritime terms!) We here in Britain have an island history because obviously we are a collection of islands. This means that we travel out from our land base, but others travel to it, and come here for different reasons. In school our history lessons teach us that the Vikings were violent rapacious raiders, ruthless and fearsome, who would stop at nothing to take what they wanted, burning and killing.
However, there is another perspective; Vikings were farmers and traders, they were seafarers and explorers. They did not only travel to European coastlines, they voyaged across the north Atlantic, establishing colonies in the islands they discovered, and on Greenland, Iceland and mainland America. They established trade routes and trading posts around the Mediterranean including North Africa, they became imperial guards in Constantinople, and travelled deep into Russia. They established towns and settlements in Britain and Ireland, trading, farming, skilled in gold and silver work, weapon making…
We see the Vikings one way, but they can be viewed from a very different perspective.
Lois Elsden 