Thanks marshmallow. [high voice] bloody vikings!
Posted on 03/18/2019 6:23:50 PM PDT by marshmallow
Archaeologists and citizen scientists have unearthed what may be the monastery of Princess Aebbe, who was born a pagan but later spread Christianity along the northeastern British coast during the seventh century.
Once the pagan-turned-Christian princess (615-668) became an abbess, she established the monastery at Coldingham, a village in the southeast of Scotland. But the monastery was short-lived; Viking raiders destroyed it it in 870.
Archaeologists have been looking for the remains of this monastery for decades. Excavators have now located a narrow, circular ditch, which is likely the "vallum," or the boundary that surrounded Aebbe's religious settlement, DigVentures, a U.K.-based group led by archaeologists and supported by crowdfunding, announced March 8. Citizen scientists help carry out DigVentures' projects. [In Photos: The UK's Geologic Wonders]
"Vallums weren't necessarily deep, intimidating defensive structures but more like a symbolic marker to show that you were entering a venerated or spiritual place," Maiya Pina-Dacier, the head of community at DigVentures, told Live Science in an email.
Just outside the boundary, the excavation team made another surprising discovery: a giant pile of butchered animal bones, including those from cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, domestic fowl and red deer. These were radiocarbon dated to 664-864, right around the time the monastery would have been up and running.
"This is pretty much exactly when Aebbe's monastery was in existence," Manda Forster, the program manager at DigVentures, said in a statement. "Originally built around A.D. 640, it is said to have burned down shortly after her death but was then rebuilt and thrived until it was destroyed once again by Viking raiders 200 years later."
Previously, other archaeologists searched for the monastery at a cliff-top location in Coldingham, overlooking the sea. But none of these experts could find hard evidence of an extensive, wealthy Anglo-Saxon......
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
But the monastery was short-lived; Viking raiders destroyed it it in 870...
Those Vikings had no social graces!
I still don’t heh.
LOL
200 years isn't a bad run. Our nation isn't much older than that.
Europeans have a different concept of time than Americans do.
Scotland, England, etc. are older than Japan or Korea...
“Scotland, England, etc. are older than Japan or Korea...”
The Japanese has a highly evolved civilization when the Brits were still farting in caves.
L
The Japanese are more civilized than Brits today. But British history predates Japanese. In just old civilizational artifacts more than 1500 years old, Britain blows away Japan...
Those people weren’t British by any stretch.
L
Thanks marshmallow. [high voice] bloody vikings!
Are you conflating 'British' and 'English'?
The Britons arrived in the Isles around 750BC, the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th Century AD.
But they loved them some Spam...
“Those Vikings had no social graces!”
We still don’t.
Fascinating. My wife is a medievalist, so she’ll find this really interesting.
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