Article

2010-03-12 Britain

Mass Grave Found With Remains of Illegal Immigrants

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Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-03-12 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11131 views ] Top

#1 Betcha no Viking raids to that place for, at least, a generation.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2010-03-12 03:44|| 2010-03-12 03:44|| Front Page Top

#2 Badly misleading headline, should read
"Defeated Viking warriors killed here"
NOT "IMMIGRANTS".

Posted by Redneck Jim 2010-03-12 05:33|| 2010-03-12 05:33|| Front Page Top

#3 The captives, all well built young men in their late teens and early 20s, were herded to the place of execution. Fifty-four in total, their heads were hacked off and stacked neatly in a pile. The bodies were tossed into a pit where they remained a tangle of limbs and headless torsos until archaeologists following the route of a new road stumbled across the remains last year.

Posted by Icerigger 2010-03-12 06:35|| http://coonlakebeach.com 2010-03-12 06:35|| Front Page Top

#4 So. Did these guys show battle wounds of the type that would leave them incapable of resisting?
Did they show healed battle wounds that would show them having been warriors beforehand?
What does it take to "herd" several dozen well-built young men to a place they don't want to go?
Really don't want to go.
And make them stand still while their buddies are being slaughtered?

Posted by Richard Aubrey 2010-03-12 07:57|| 2010-03-12 07:57|| Front Page Top

#5 ..carbon tests dated the bones to between AD910 and AD1030

Jim, 1066 is the date that the Normans [Norseman Vikings] continued their immigration from already colonized and established fiefs in Northern France on to England. They stayed around a while. In fact other elements of the clan would set up additional branch offices in Sicily and Southern Italy. Had William been defeated at Hastings, I'd bet that diggers would have found another mass grave in the area as well.

Posted by Procopius2k 2010-03-12 08:03|| 2010-03-12 08:03|| Front Page Top

#6 Interestingly, one was north of the Arctic circle, which likely means he was from the Greenland settlements (the whole of Iceland is south of the Arctic circle, as is all except the far northern tip of Scandinavia), supposedly founded around 980 AD. Which means they were exporting surplus manpower within a generation. Further evidence that during the Medieval Warm Period farming prospered in Greenland.

Posted by phil_b 2010-03-12 08:07|| 2010-03-12 08:07|| Front Page Top

#7 Some more background

Posted by tipper 2010-03-12 09:38|| 2010-03-12 09:38|| Front Page Top

#8 Now you're just being silly:

http://www.echelonrana.com/viking.html

Viking kittens swf, to the "Immigrant Song".

Posted by Anonymoose 2010-03-12 09:47|| 2010-03-12 09:47|| Front Page Top

#9 If you can get four dozen professional fighting men to surrender without being severely wounded--if they had been wounded, they wouldn't have been herded off to a place of slaughter--you had a big fight that went on for a long time and killed a lot of guys. That meant these folks were mentally and emotionally destroyed. Otherwise they'd have fought, even if they were to have lost.
Which means that someplace around there was a hell of a battle and some digging there would be interesting.

Posted by Richard Aubrey 2010-03-12 10:49|| 2010-03-12 10:49|| Front Page Top

#10 About that warming period: I think it was a Lonely Planet video on Greenland--either that, or one from National Geographic--that stated that people had raised cattle in the open land of Greenland from the beginning of the Viking settlement around 1000 AD. As the temperature cooled during the Little Ice Age, it became harder and harder to eke out a living, as demonstrated by the skeletons in the Viking graveyards. Archaeologists examined bones from the 1th C and the 14th C. The bones showed that the 14th C people were significantly shorter and dramatically undernourished. The Danes mostly evacuated Greenland after that.

On the subject of William the Conqueror and 1066, Harold The Saxon had just won a bloody victory near present-day York, against the Danes under Harald Hardraada. The Saxons didn't have a chance to rest after this battle; they had a forced march of three days to meet William at Hastings. So they were not in any real condition to fight the Normans.

Given that the Danes were raiding and settling in the British Isles since about 300 AD (it was the Danes who raided Patrick of Ireland's village and sold the teenager into slavery in Ireland), there were probably a lot of battles and a lot of worn-out exhausted soldiers over the next 8 centuries.

Posted by mom 2010-03-12 11:59|| 2010-03-12 11:59|| Front Page Top

#11 An interesting article on palaeoweather, clam-shells and Iceland

Posted by tipper 2010-03-12 17:58|| 2010-03-12 17:58|| Front Page Top

#12 What Medieval Warm period are you talking about? Today's climate is warmer than it has ever been! The science is settled.

Posted by Rambler in Virginia 2010-03-12 19:36|| 2010-03-12 19:36|| Front Page Top

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