Stone Age Herbalist is a dissident archaeologist, twitter personality and substack blogger. In this Jive Talk he describes the ancient origins of archaeology as a discipline, how it rose to a more rigorous practice in the modern era and then degenerated into modern woke archaeology. We discuss gay cavemen, transgender vikings, the migrations and invasions of Anglo-Saxons, Beaker folk, Yamnaya and others and finally end with a chat about anthropology in general.
'The Anglo-Saxon migration and the
formation of the early English gene pool' by Joscha Gretzinger and colleagues (2022) has answered some of the much debated and controversial questions concerning the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England which began in the 5th century AD. The study finds that as much as 75% of the ancestry of skeletons from England in the cemeteries from that time comes from Germanic migrants from Germany and Denmark. In this video I break down and summarise the findings.
Stone ship settings or Skeppssättning are amongst the most remarkable Viking age monuments in Scandinavia, but what were they for? They were built over a period of 2000 years from the Nordic bronze age until the end of the Viking age, mainly in grave fields but they weren’t just associated with burials and cremations as they were also used for a kind of meeting called a ‘Thing’. This video explains how the stone ships may relate first to a Bronze age cult of the sun in Gotland, and later to a Viking belief that the dead would need a vehicle for a journey to and from the underworld. The stone ship settings included in this film are Tjelvars grave in Gotland, Anundshög in Västmanland, Åsa domaresäte in Södermanland, Ängakåsen and Ale’s stones in Scania and the Jelling stone ship in Denmark.
Art
Original works created for this video
Robert Molyneaux - CGI reconstruction of the Jelling stone ship in Denmark
Jackson, E. “Not Simply Lists”: An Eddic Perspective on Short-Item Lists in Old English Poems. Speculum, 73(2), 338–371. (1998)
Shenk, Peter, To Valhalla by Horseback? Horse Burial in Scandinavia during the Viking Age, (Oslo: The Centre for Viking and Medieval Studies, University of Oslo, 2002).
Skoglund, P., ‘Stone ships: continuity and change in Scandinavian prehistory, World Archaeology, 40:3, 390-406, (2008)
