To ply the waves, you have to be waterproof
VIKINGS conquered Europe thanks to an unexpected technological innovation: they learned how to make tar on an industrial scale and used it to waterproof their longships so they could undertake largescale, lengthy pillaging trips around Europe and across the Atlantic, archaeologists say. It seems Norse raiders were the original Boys from the Blackstuff.
The discovery is the work of Andreas Hennius, of Uppsala University. In the journal Antiquity, he reports finding critical evidence that output from tar pits in Scandinavia increased dramatically just as Vikings began raiding other parts of Europe. These pits could have made up to 300 litres in a single production cycle, enough to waterproof large numbers of ships.
‘‘Tar production . . . developed from a smallscale activity . . . into largescale production that relocated to forested outlands during the Viking period,’’ Hennius says. ‘‘This change . . . resulted from the increasing demand for tar driven by an evolving maritime culture.’’
Vikings were traders and warriors who swept ‘‘with threshing oar’’ from Scandinavia to raid Europe in the 8th century. ‘‘Behold the church of St Cuthbert, spattered with the blood of the priests of God . . . a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples,’’ wrote the monk Alcuin of York, after Vikings ransacked Lindisfarne monastery, in Northumbria, in AD793.
By the 11th century Vikings had become overlords of swaths of Britain, had settled in Iceland, Greenland and America and had raided Spanish ports, where they were known by the Moors as ‘‘heathen wizards’’.
Proposed factors for this dramatic increase include changes in climate that boosted agriculture, triggering a sharp rise in population that in turn drove their ships to new lands. Others say local kings were competing for prestige and funded raids to bring back treasures to prove their power.
Now Hennius has pitched in with his theory. Tar drove Vikings to be the hammer of the gods in Europe. He says tar has been used for millennia to waterproof boats. It was made in pits filled with pine wood, covered with turf and set on fire.
Small domestic tar kilns dating to between AD100 and 400 were found in Sweden in the early 2000s. But much larger pits have been found during road construction and date to between 680 and 900, when the rise of the Vikings began. They were originally thought to have been used for making charcoal, but Hennius’s investigation has revealed they had a different purpose: tar manufacture.
These kilns are not associated with any inhabited settlements and are situated closer to forests of pine, which was their key ingredient. These were industrial sites used solely to massproduce tar, Hennius argues.
‘‘The size of the late Vikingage fleets suggests an extensive and continuous need for the product,’’ he says. — Guardian News and Media