Viking Metal! How metal detecting has rewritten the story of Vikings in England (but not in France)

Vikings composed poetry, but they didn’t write it (or anything else) down when they came to England. We have to rely on other kinds of evidence to track the Viking armies that passed through the landscape and to detect the presence of the Scandinavian immigrants who later settled in the countryside. In recent years, the biggest contribution to our knowledge has come from metal, mainly silver: coins, arm rings, ingots, weights, Thor’s hammers, etc. – some of it buried deliberately, the rest dropped by accident and lost by its owners.

Metal detectorists and archaeologists used not to get along, but now they work together, and the study of the Viking Age in England has been revolutionised by this collaboration. In this talk, Lesley Abrams will outline how the finds made by metal detectorists have completely changed the story of England’s Viking Age, and compare it with France, where metal detecting is illegal.