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Vikings practiced polygamy..and traded slaves ( with arabs )
https://www.history.com/news/viking-...raids-evidence..
There are also indications that Vikings practiced polygamy, which in their highly stratified society would have meant that poorer unmarried men might have had limited access to women, and would have targeted female slaves as concubines (or even wives).
DNA mapping of the modern Icelandic population found that up to two-thirds of Iceland’s female founding population had Gaelic origins (either Ireland or Scotland) while only one-third had Nordic roots. The reverse was true for the male population, suggesting that many Nordic men in Iceland had children with women who were likely taken in raids from the British Isles.
It’s also possible that in addition to sexual motives, Vikings might have targeted women as slaves because of their specific value as a source of skilled labor. “Quite often in a slaving context, women are taken because in a lot of societies they are traditionally the people who produce high-value goods,” says Raffield. “A lot of people think if you wanted captives for labor, you would take men, but that's not necessarily the case. Textile working in Scandinavia, for example, is strongly associated with women.”
How Vikings treated slaves
Whatever motivated the Vikings to start taking slaves, evidence suggests they were often brutal with those who had the misfortune to be captured. In one study, research Anna Kjellström of Stockholm University examined the skeletal remains of presumed Viking-era slaves found in graves in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and found that they showed signs of abuse and decapitation.
In some cases, the slaves were buried alongside their masters, suggesting they may have ended up as human sacrifices, and included with grave goods to accompany powerful Vikings into the afterlife.
While written sources provide strong evidence of slavery in the Viking world, the slaves themselves—why they were taken, how they were transported, where and how they lived—left little trace on the archaeological record.
Raffield stresses the need to more fully excavate Viking sites where slaves are believed to have lived. Ultimately, there may be limits to how much we’ll ever know about forced labor in the Viking Age, beyond the evidence gleaned from written sources and archaeological digs.
“The thing about studying slavery and captivity is that these groups are often described in the archaeological literature as invisible, or unseen,” Raffield cautions. “Their movements are curtailed, they're denied of possessions, they're not always accorded formal habitation—places to sleep, places to live. They're really hard to identify in the archaeological record.”
By
Sarah Pruitt
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Originally Posted by renaissance12
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