Finding Vikings in the Danelaw

Historical, artefactual and place‐name evidence indicates that Scandinavian migrants moved to eastern England in the ninth century AD, settling in the Danelaw. However, only a handful of characteristically Scandinavian burials have been found in the region. One, widely held, explanation is that most of these Scandinavian settlers quickly adopted local Christian burial customs, thus leaving Scandinavians indistinguishable from the Anglo‐Saxon population. We undertook osteological and isotopic analysis to investigate the presence of first‐generation Scandinavian migrants. Burials from Masham were typical of the later Anglo‐Saxon period and included men, women and children. The location and positioning of the four adult burials from Coppergate, however, are unusual for Anglo‐Scandinavian York. None of the skeletons revealed interpersonal violence. Isotopic evidence did not suggest a marine component in the diet of either group, but revealed migration on a regional, and possibly an international, scale. Combined strontium and oxygen isotope analysis should be used to investigate further both regional and Scandinavian migration in the later Anglo‐Saxon period.     

From Friend to Foe: The Portrait of Licinius in Eusebius

The object of this article is to analyse the portrait of emperor Licinius in three important sources of the reign of Constantine the Great: Lactantius' De mortibus persecutorum and, especially, Eusebius' two historical works, the Historia ecclesiastica (HE) and the Vita Constantini (VC). The influence of rhetoric, with the keywords vituperatio/laudatio and progymnasmata, is emphasized in Eusebius' way of depicting Licinius, this great loser in Late Roman History.     

New light on the personal identification of a skeleton of a member of Sir John Franklin’s last expedition to the Arctic, 1845

In 1845, an expedition, commanded by Sir John Franklin, set out to try and discover the north-west passage. All 129 men on this ill-fated voyage perished. Over the years, skeletal remains associated with the final throes of the expedition have been located on and near King William Island, Nunavut, in the Canadian arctic. In general, even a tentative personal identification for these remains has proved impossible. An exception is some skeletal remains that were recovered in 1869 and brought back to England and interred beneath the memorial to the Franklin expedition in Greenwich. In the 19th century, these were tentatively identified as of one of HMS Erebus’s lieutenants, Henry Le Vesconte, a conclusion that has been widely accepted in studies of the Franklin voyage. Renovations to the monument in 2009 provided an opportunity for scientific examination of the remains, and to re-evaluate the personal identification made nearly 140 years before. The current work, which is the first modern scientific analysis of a fairly complete skeleton associated with the Franklin voyage, describes the remains and the artefacts interred with them, discusses the pathological conditions present, and evaluates the personal identification using osteological techniques and isotope geochemistry. Results indicate that the remains are of an adult male of European ancestry. Although some writers have suggested that scurvy or tuberculosis may have been important causes of morbidity and mortality on the Franklin expedition, osteological analysis and, in the case of tuberculosis, DNA analysis, provided no evidence for their presence in these remains. Isotopic studies indicate that the personal identification as Le Vesconte is unlikely to be correct. From the isotopic results and forensic facial reconstruction, HDS Goodsir, an assistant surgeon on the expedition, appears a more likely identification, but the results do not allow a firm conclusion.     

Contribution of strontium to the human diet from querns and millstones: an experiment in digestive strontium isotope uptake

The question of whether rock grit ingested unintentionally from querns, metates or millstones, or deliberately through pica or geophagy, is bioaccessible in the human gut has not been addressed in archaeological strontium (Sr) isotope studies. This study employed the unified bioaccessibility method and determined that ingested rock grit can provide bioaccessible ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr, but that unintentional consumption is unlikely to constitute > 1% of the diet (by mass) and will not significantly change, that is, by > 0.001, human skeletal ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr. The use of locally or non‐locally sourced querns or millstones will not affect the interpretation of archaeological human ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values in Britain.     

Investigating the dietary life histories and mobility of children buried in St Gertrude Church cemetery,Riga, Latvia, 15th–17th centuries ad*

Carbon and nitrogen isotope profiles were obtained from incremental dentine analysis of 19 non-adults from a cemetery in Riga, Latvia. The research compared the life histories and diet between people buried in two mass graves and the general cemetery. The δ¹³C profiles of several children from the mass graves were similar but did not resemble the patterns seen in children from the general cemetery, suggesting that they probably represented a different population group. The rise in δ¹⁵N values towards the end of the life of four individuals from one mass grave suggests they were victims of an historically documented famine.