Two Studies Shed Light on Ancient Cultural Shifts

If you study Viking history you have been told that the Vikings were the first people to settle the Faroe Islands. Now scientists have found evidence of an earlier culture that predates the Vikings’ arrival by as much as 3-500 years. The settlers — whose identity is unknown — possessed the technology to reach the islands at a time when Britain was threatened by decreased Roman security and Anglo-Saxon incursions.

Roman Britons possessed sailing technology because their ancestors (the Celts of Britain and nearby Gaul and Amorica) possessed ships and because the Romans used ships. Picts, who lived in the north of Britain (in what is now Scotland) were not a sea-faring people, so it seems unlikely that the first Faroese were Pictish in origin.

The Germans who invaded Britain were originally recruited as mercenaries to defend the Britons against the Picts and Scots (who came over from Ireland). So the Germans were also seafarers. Hence, there is plenty of reason to leave the identity of the early Faroese in doubt.

Britain was a relatively loyal province up until 403 CE; Stilicho, the Magister Militum for the western emperor Honorius, called up all the legions of western Europe to defend Italy against Alaric and his Goths. When the soldiers returned to Britain a few years later they elected 3 new emperors of their own (killing the first two after very brief “reigns”). The third, Constantine, led a revolt and took all the soldiers back to Europe.

Roman soldiers never returned to Britain. Honorius formally ceded control of Britain to its native princes in 410 CE and they were, for a time, successful in raising their own armies for defense against the Picts and Scots. But they also fought among each other and by 443 CE one prince — whom tradition names as Vortigern — recruited a small band of Saxon mercenaries to increase his power. The Germans brought over some of their friends and relatives and within a few years began seizing land and setting up their own communities.

Whomever settled the Faroe Islands could have been fleeing the constant warfare or just trying to expand into new territory. All we know for sure is that when the Vikings arrived a few hundred years later they seized the islands and made them completely their own — eventually spreading north to Iceland and Greenland and then from there making a failed attempt to settle in North America (L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland).

The first Faroese could have been Britons, Scots, or Saxons for all we know. I favor the Saxon hypothesis but there is so far no evidence to support any.

In another new study, researchers have confirmed that the upheavals in the eastern Mediterranean region around 1200 BCE were almost completely due to climate change, which disrupted agriculture and perhaps also water supplies. As tribes moved around looking for new resources they clashed with coastal peoples, launching a wave of sea-borne invasions and raids that changed everything for pre-classical civilizations.

This research matches evidence that suggests there was a 1200-year cycle of climate change that drove periodic upheavals in Neolithic Europe. Such a model confirms the drastic upheavals that occurred between 120 BCE and 40 CE, when German tribes clashed with the Romans; and again the late medieval changes that began occurring around 1200-1300 CE, leading to the Renaissance period. Each subsequent wave of changes was ameliorated by larger populations and better agricultural technology, however the mid-1300s were marked by the Black Death.

What these studies show us is that dramatic change in one area can produce consequences in lands far away. A domino-effect is triggered when conditions are right, where large groups of people are driven by the instinct for survival to escape from a new threat. That threat may be invasion or climate change, but climate change seems to be closely associated with the trigger events. We don’t know exactly why the Black Death spread so quickly and far but it happened around a time when the climate was cooling and peoples were probably starting to move around the landscape to adjust to new survival strategies. Sadly, one of those groups sparked a wave of plague-infestations that killed millions of people.