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From: "Peter Langley" <>
Subject: [DNA] Viking slave trade in Ireland
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:43:12 +0100


The following is a brief extract, containing salient points, from an article published in the Irish edition of the London Sunday Times. Based on a lecture given by Linzi Simpson director of a dig undertaken by Margaret Gowen and Company in Dublin in 2003 and delivered to University College Dublin last week.

The bodies of four Vikings were unearthed. Isotope analysis undertaken at Bradford University, focusing on the warriors dental remains, show that two of them came form Scandinavia, but that the other two grew up most probably in the Hebridean Islands off Scotland. Carbon dating showed they died about 841AD, this is almost 100 years before it had been believed the Vikings first visited Ireland.
The area of the dig showed it had been a large settlement with probably 3,000 to 5,000 people living there before it was cleared in 902.

In a previous dig near by in the late 1990s, the remains of a pre Viking house was found. It was neither Irish or Viking but probably Anglo Saxon in origin suggesting that settlers from England had already been living on the site before the Vikings came.

At the end of her lecture, Linzi goes on:
However a darker picture is also emerging of a Dublin established on slavery. "The common picture is of Vikings coming in search of booty and silver, but in the case of the Dublin Vikings, their biggest enterprise was almost certainly as slavers.
"And we're talking about raids that took 300 to 400 people at a time and then shipped them off to be sold in other locations. The Irish people they captured could have ended up as far afield as Russia."

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