Digging Into the Past: AU excavation team finds history underground

Four people stood with hands on knees, staring intently. They were huddled in a tight circle, their eyes squinted in focus.

The object of their gaze, which captivated them as though it were magic, was resting on the ground. Actually, it was the ground – a slightly discoloured patch of dirt. At a glance, one could mistake it for, well, dirt.

It wasn’t just dirt to them though. In hushed, reverential tones, they dissected what the dirt might mean.

“Oh, look at this animal activity,” one said, extending a forefinger.

“This looks burned,” said another, noting the slightest of colour variations that, apparently, suggest fire.

They talked of “bio-turbulences” and “nicely-shaped building posts,” and every so often one would reach out with a metal tool and scrape away a smidge of dirt, treating it with the same delicate touch one might treat fairy dust.

To the lay eye, everything they talked about looked like dirt, nothing more. Sure, there were a few different shades here or there. But as for the fires and animals and buildings – not so much. It’s like they were kids letting their imaginations run wild, seeing things that no one else can see. Look, here’s gold! Oh, and this is where the castle is!

In a way, that’s true: these people did indeed see things that others didn’t, that others couldn’t. But there was nothing imaginary about their work. They were in the midst of an excavation, an endeavour that sometimes revolves around reading the stories written in dirt.

This particular story took place in Füsing, Germany – about four hours south of Aarhus by car – and was being transcribed by a team of Danes from Aarhus University and Americans from Harvard. AU professor Andres Dobat led the dozen-person excavation effort, comprised of individuals who had decided to put three weeks of their summer toward decoding the past.

The process requires a heavy reading load – not books and articles, but things: glass, beads, bones. And of course dirt.

“Historians read their sources, and we read material culture,” Dobat says. “The great potential with archaeology is that you can create new data. This site was not known six years ago; now we can contribute to the story of this region, to the story of the development of towns, to the social structure, to the changes in religion. Without the site we couldn’t do that, we could only look at what has already been found and already been written.”

Like the meanings hidden in dirt, the site itself is not readily apparent. Before the dig began – before the team brought in ladders and hoses and a giant tent – it was totally hidden from the naked eye, camouflaged by wheat fields, flowers and trees. A few pieces of pottery were found here back in the 1960s, but there were few indications of the buildings and homes that lay buried underneath.

It wasn’t until Dobat took to the skies in a small plane and snapped geomagnetic images that the site revealed itself. After Dobat looked at the images, he could see abnormalities in the sub-soil, the dirt beneath the ground.

The next step was carving shallow trenches, about 1.5 metres wide, into the soil. The trenches – as well as the dirt that was removed – were then analyzed for signs of civilisation. And there were plenty of signs – pottery, clothing, weapons.

“It takes a while to get used to seeing what is cultural activity and what is not,” says Amanda Ellermann Trans, an AU student who is part of the excavation. “You have to learn how to see the difference between, say, animal activity and real human activity. And you have to learn what to look for – you have to know what you’re looking for. Otherwise it’s just soil.”

Turns out that when soil talks, it says a lot. Indeed, the artifacts being culled from the dirt here tell a story of politics and religion and violence, a spate of activity that took place over the span of about 250 years.

Let’s start with that, the timeframe. A variety of things found at the Füsing site are nearly identical to artifacts known to have come from the period from 700 to 950. This includes money, remnants of a sword belt, bits of gold and silver and a variety of other things that have been residing underground for the past millennium.

These artifacts are more or less the text of the story. For instance, back in 700, regular people didn’t have swords and gold. Dobat says there was plenty of silver floating about the region, silver that was plundered from England in the Vikings’ notorious raids. But to find gold and weaponry and, notably, a piece of ore produced  at the Royal Danish Court, means that this wasn’t just any old Viking village.

“This,” Dobat says, “shows a close connection to aristocracy. What they did when they were having political negotiations or meeting with another aristocrats, they would exchange gifts. We know that from early historical sources.”

In addition, the site is ideally situated atop a vast expanse of flat land. Anyone who lived here could see what was happening for kilometres in any direction, including the nearby fjord, which was at the time a major thoroughfare. Any ship floating by, or any army plotting an attack, could be spotted on the horizon.

Alas, this location wasn’t totally immune from attack.

Included among the unearthed items are arrowheads (rocks carved into sharp points and shot from a bow to slice through whatever they may come in contact with) and caltrops (small devices with four points, designed so that one point is always facing upward, ready to pierce through feet).

Back at his office – which, unlike the cozy confines at AU, is little more than a portable shed – Dobat pulls the weapons out of individually marked plastic bags, like what you might expect to see at a crime scene. He doesn’t mince words when describing what they’re for.

“This was designed to kill people,” Dobat says as he holds up an arrowhead.

Pulling the caltrop out of a plastic bag, he says, “This is a nasty device.” 

The weapons, though, are just part of the story. Dobat’s team has also revealed the foundation of a large structure that measures 31 metres long and about 10 metres wide – in other words, a meeting hall. The building has long since eroded, but in its wake are perfectly aligned marks in the soil where the foundation would have been planted.

These “postholes” are scattered all over the site. In a landscape of yellow soil, the postholes have a telltale brown tinge – at least telltale to people who know how to translate the language of dirt.

But the postholes of the meeting hall have a twist: they are the only ones that are infused with black. The black being charcoal, the charcoal meaning fire.

The building, Dobat says, was burned to the ground. Which begs the question – was it an accidental fire, like a torch coming unhinged or a candle toppling over, or something sinister? And that’s where the arrowheads and caltrops come into play: there was a cache of them clumped together at the entrance to the building.

It is possible, in theory, that someone slipped and dropped their bag of deadly, militaristic weapons at the very spot where people walked in and out of the meeting hall – which, again, was the main hall of a location thought to be of political import. And it is possible that the weapons were then covered in dirt, forgotten about and eventually buried. And then the building promptly burned to the ground.

That’s possible, but Dobat isn’t buying it. And with a caltrop in one hand and an arrowhead in the other, he gives his theory:

“People would have set the building on fire and set these things [caltrops] at the entrance,” he says, his voice that of someone reading an adventure novel. “Then these half-burning, half-dead people would have run out and been shot down with arrows like this. This is the story that we may see here. I have difficulties explaining that in a different way, why a bunch of caltrops would be at an entrance post of a burned building.”

It seems that every hypothesis at the Füsing site opens the door a new question. If arson brought down the meeting hall, who did it? And why?

Also, what happened in the second half of the 10^th century that brought about the end of this settlement? That was, after all, the same time when Christianity arrived in Scandinavia. What happened when Viking-age pagans were confronted with Christianity? Did those Christians have a particularly ruthless method of evangelising?

The best way to find out, it seems, is to keep digging.

“Once you put your shovel through one of these features, it exists nowhere else except on our paper record,” says Bryan Herling, from the U.S. “So what we’re essentially doing is transferring the past onto record. Beforehand it only existed underneath a farm, underneath a field. So in a way we’re preserving and learning more about the past, whereas beforehand it was inaccessible.”

Now, as the dirt is removed, it is becoming accessible. At least to Dobat, his team and anyone else willing to engage in a dialogue with the dirt.