 Well, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Kathy Swift, her second talk during Genetic Genialogy Ireland 2015. Kathy runs the Irish Studies Teaching Programme in Mary, an academic college at the University of Limerick. She is an M-Phil in Archaeology at the University of Durham, a second M-Phil in Old Irish Language and Culture from Trinity College Dublin, and her D-Phil was an Oxford and examined the history of the Culver Centre Patrick. She is taught in many universities, served 10 years as organising secretary of the Irish Conference of Medievalists, and runs summer schools in Old Irish in Limerick, when she's not off gallivanting across Europe, with her Pilgrim staff packed the knapsack and tent. And she's going to talk to us today about mice and viking men. So, ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Dr. Kathy Swift. Thank you very much, and we've now agreed that I'll just hold this yoke, which is easier I think for everybody, so everybody can hear me, yeah? Yeah, okay. Right. On the question of the mice, this was an article on the Philogeography of British and Irish house mice that was published in 2009, and they looked at the DNA of roughly speaking 400 mice, okay? And they discovered that essentially there is a southern mouse, which is essentially a continental mouse, and then there is a northern mouse, which is, well, this is the pattern of the distribution. And you can see that there's a very heavy concentration in the Orkney Islands. They exist in the Azure Hebrides. They exist on Isla, and then my geography colleagues would hate this map because the dots are too big, but you can see it's distributed over roughly speaking the northern half of Ireland, okay? And particularly interesting, there is actually no archaeological traces, so the authors of this article tell us, of mice in Orkney in pre-viking contexts. And what they concluded was that for the house mouse, sorry? No, no, right, okay. For the house mouse, the Orkney mitochondrial DNA of house mice represents a marker for Norwegian Viking influence, okay? So that the idea is the mouse creeps onto the longship, the longship's then dock, the mice creeps off, and the mouse breeds with other mice, and therefore you can pattern human migration on the basis of the mouse migration, okay? So that map is an interesting map and corresponds to the distribution of early Viking activity or the analysis of early Viking migration to Ireland, okay? We have generally, the archaeological discussion has primarily focused on Norwegian influence coming around Scotland and into Ireland, okay? This is different from Vikings in England, where they come across from Denmark and across the North Sea, but Irish Vikings initially come from Norway and around Scotland. And we're very privileged at the moment, the National Museum of Ireland has just published this mammoth volume in their series on, this is a series of volumes which essentially started off as the wood key excavation reports, okay? But this one is called Viking Graves and Gravegoods in Ireland. It's the product of about 15 years of research by a wonderful scholar called Stephen Harrison and Reiner Loflein, who's now the director of the National Museum, and it came out earlier this year. And what it's doing is publishing the pagan Graves, the pagan Viking Graves in Ireland. Pagan because these are the graves in which people are buried with Gravegoods, okay? Many of these, most of these were found in the 19th century. The records, this is one of the reasons why the project took so long, the records are not particularly good. A lot of them coincided with the Antiquarian boom around the time of the famine. People were selling the goods on the, well I was going to say the black market, but certainly there do be circumstances along the time and the records aren't great. So there was a lot of chasing material through archives, etc. But what we've ended up with is graves which are 9th century in date. Okay, these pagan graves are generally, as far as we can date, many times they're only collections of artifacts. We don't have skeletons. We don't have carbon 14 dating, but we think that graves are 9th century in date for the most part. There's 107 of them. 78 are male containing one or more weapons. 13 are female containing one or more oval brooches, which is a particular type of a brooch associated with Scandinavia. And the others are gender neutral in that people couldn't work out, in the absence of the skeleton people couldn't work out whether they were male or female graves. And the really interesting thing is the extent to which these are focused on Dublin. So 81 are in the Dublin region. 81 out of 107. Okay, so this map is actually slightly confusing in that it does give you an impression that there are Vikings all over the place. Yes, there are Vikings all over the place, particularly around the coast, but there is a very, very heavy concentration on Dublin. But if you wanted to sort of extend it from beyond Dublin, there is also, you can probably see a focus on the eastern half of the island. Okay? Now, to some extent, that may be a bias in the record. There's been more excavation on the eastern half of the island. There's been more development on the eastern half. But this is an archaeological set of data going back 200 years. So, for example, we have very little Viking limerick, but we had no development in the boom in the center of limerick so that we probably should have Viking limerick if only we dug it up. So there are modern biases, but the length of time we're dealing with here probably suggests that the bias is relatively small. And certainly, when you compare that pattern of Viking graves with the pattern of earlier Viking raids on Irish churches described in the channels, obviously, for pagan grave, there is some element of, you know, some element of settlement or continuity at a location, whereas a raid can obviously be a temporary seasonal thing. But again, you see a pattern which is predominantly east coast for the raids. Okay? This is only half the 9th century, but the pattern doesn't change much when you move into the second half of the 9th century. As I say, the consensus is that these Vikings, these 9th century Vikings, our first Vikings, come from Norway. And this map over here is an older map done in the 1980s, and it represents grave goods with Irish-style art found in Norwegian graves. And you can see they're predominantly here on the southwest coast of Norway. And again, that has been updated in the last year. This is an article by Dagfin Scrae, the man who dug it in Kaupang, which is a big trading center down here. That's that dot there. And he has argued that you can see three areas associated with the Irish sea in Scandinavia. The west coast, essentially where our grave goods are, the area around Kaupang, down in the south, and then various areas in Denmark. But he agrees that the earliest raids in Ireland are probably to be connected with the west coast, and that it's only after the development of early towns, and this word long for it means a protected ship place, the development of those into proto towns and towns, he reckons that's related to the trading networks, which are further south in Denmark and in southern Norway. So there we have our first Viking migration, our first Viking age coming to us from Norway. One of the reasons why early Irish history is one of the glories of European civilization is because of our records in the annals. We have very detailed annals in a way that other countries don't have. And we have in those annals we have a second Viking age, beginning in the 10th century, early 10th century, when we get a number of references to large fleets possibly organized by royalty, coming into various points in Ireland. And here we see, unlike the concentration solely on Dublin, which we had in the 9th century, in the 10th century, we have the fleets coming into Waterford Harbour. So in 914 a great new fleet of the pagans arrive in. The fleet of Limerick in 921. And then in the, we can start seeing competition. These Vikings are not all working together. So we have competition and fights between the different Viking leaders in Waterford, Dublin and Limerick. So in 923 the Dubliners get a bit cranky. The Limerick Vikings are doing very well and they're raiding up the Shannon and getting a lot of loot on Loughbury and Clombeck Noise. And alone, behold, Dublin sort of moves in and tries to take over. But they fail on that occasion. So that's the historical evidence for the second Viking age. The archaeological evidence for the second Viking age is probably best looked at through the distribution of coins and silver. Okay. You probably know that one of the things that Scandinavians did in terms of European history is that they encouraged a great flow of silver from the Near East, from places like Iran and Iraq and Persia. Coming up through the eastern half of Europe, through the rivers that the Swedes were sailing down and landing up in southern Scandinavia. And from there they then distributed that silver through Western Europe. And if you look at the pattern for the hordes from Ireland, you can see that there's some evidence for silver coming in in the ninth century, but it's relatively small. And then you get this sudden boom from about 950 on. Okay. And that's a very interesting pattern because after all, Brinebrew dies in 1014. And one of the reasons Brinebrew manages to have the career he does is because there's an awful lot of money. We're just coming out of a big boom. And that's probably why political events work the way they did. At least. It's a contributing factor. Now this silver is divided into different types. There's silver, which is simply silver used for brooches and for ornament and for armlets. And then there is silver, which is used for coinage. And then you have what's a mixed horde, where you get both, or you also get the jewelry cut up into what's called hack silver. And John Sheehan is the great expert on this. He's UCC in cork. And he has divided the silver hordes into different categories. So you have class one silver hordes are whole ornaments, mainly arm rings. And that's 39% of all hordes, 40% and most of those are found on Irish ring forts. Okay. And then you have the class two hordes, which are complete ingots and complete ornaments. And then you have the class four hordes, which are hack silver, where you have complete ingots, complete ornaments, and torn up bits of things. Okay. And what you find is a lot of, in a number of occasions, you find weights that they would actually measure scales for measuring the hack silver. And therefore, when you wanted, you know, dinner, or to buy a slave, you went down and you said, Well, I'm throwing the arm ring or a bit of my arm ring onto the scales. And I want four slaves and a cow. Thank you very much. But this, this kind of hack silver, where the silver is being used in effect as a form of coinage, okay, for exchange. This typically is found on crano sites, especially in the center of Ireland around Loch Anil. And these are, as I've already mentioned, 10th century. Okay. And this pattern, so ring fort owners using silver for personal adornment. And crano goners trading in silver and using it as a form of commerce. This dip, these patterns differ from the coin hordes. The coin hordes tend to be found on church sites. Okay. And the coins involved tend to be Anglo Saxon. So that's a third pattern. And those, those Anglo Saxon coins can be used as again, like the mice to signify where we see most of our Vikings coming from in the second Viking Age, which seems to be coming through Britain. And I'll talk about that in a minute. But I just want to give you some examples of the, what the ornament that the kind of ornaments we're talking about look like. People, most people have probably heard of the Arda Chalice. Yeah. Famous as an icon of early Christian Ireland. The silver involved in making the Chalice is actually Roman silver. It's a pre Viking Chalice. But it was found in a large ring fort in West Limerick. Actually inside the horde, very few people talk about this, but inside the horde were a number of brooches. And the brooches were later in date from the Chalice and indeed Viking period. So we have one brooch of a famous, you know, our most illustrious pre Viking style brooch, similar to Tara in Ireland, the Tara brooch in Ireland, or the Hunterston brooch in Scotland. And we have an Ardach brooch of that type. Okay, you can see heavily ornamented with silver gilt and chip carving. So that's a pre Viking style. But we also get these silver brooches entirely silver. The other ones, the previous one is copper with a silver gilt overlay. The silver brooches of Arda type are pure silver. And these we find two in the in the Arda horde. And then we have other ones from Kahakamon, which is the other side of the Shannon estuary in County Clare. And these will be Viking period in date, 9th to early 10th centuries. And then the latest one, again, and you can see the weight of the silver is increasing. This is what's called a thistle brooch. And again, in North Monster, we have at least six of these. But we also have them, they're very prominent in Dublin. And again, you find them a lot in Scotland as well. Okay, if you beat, if anybody has a chance to go to the National Museum, you'll find examples of thistle brooches, which are absolutely enormous. And it's a really intriguing question as to how people actually wore them. And one period they actually wore them on their back, because if you wear them in the front, yeah, well, particularly for women, it's going to be extremely uncomfortable. Or we start looking at for Viking DNA. I've gone through the archaeological and historical evidence in some detail, because it's important, I think, to establish the contemporary evidence for the Viking footprint, as it were in Ireland. And there is a problem that Vikings are good box office, everybody likes Vikings. And this particular map, for example, is based on this map here is based on 19th century place names, which refer to Vikings, and just names like Danesport. But I don't really, I don't really think you can use it as evidence for the original Vikings. This is after Vikings have become popular in the romantic period and so forth. Yeah. And similarly, the map on the other side is a map of based on 17th century census data for a particular surname called Doyle. The Devgal etymology of that is debated by historians. And anyway, it's 17th century. And it doesn't really tell you about the Viking period in origin. So just to be careful about trying to look for contemporary evidence for Vikings as opposed to the proviking evidence of later periods. The patterns, Norwegian mice, Norwegian origins in the 9th century, British origins for our British heavily British influence Vikings coming in in the 10th. How does that compare with the DNA studies? Well, in 2006, Dan Bradley, who spoke to us yesterday, his lab did an article on the scale and nature of Viking settlement in Ireland. And that's been summarized in popular discourse as saying Vikings contribute relatively little to Irish population. And there was no Scandinavian DNA legacy to speak of. Okay. Now, for archaeologists and historians, particularly of my generation who were brought up with the woodpea finds, that was a bit of a shock. And we were slightly stunned by that. The idea was that although we have quite a lot of Viking artifacts, what they are doing is simply Irish people using, you know, importing as it were the equivalent of Italian leather couches and porches, and sort of going around saying aren't we trendy, but actually not large numbers of Vikings as such moving and settling in Ireland. Okay. But of course, the problem is, this is a 2006 article. And as Dan Bradley was saying yesterday, the methodologies that was used to produce that article are now no longer, you know, they're a bit outdated. So can the conclusions still stand? Because one of the interesting things about that article is that it does contrast with other admixture and DNA studies that were done in other parts of the British Isles, namely this one by Sarah Goodacre, which argued heavily for it was an both white chromosome in mitochondrial DNA study. And it said that in the Northern Isles, you get both people moving in, sorry, both males and females moving in. But as you get further and further away from the homeland into Iceland, what you get essentially are Scandinavian males and Irish or or Hebrides and females. That was the pattern that they identified. Okay, so the research backdrop to the 2006 study was first of all, it was part of it, but as you probably know, a very big study of approximately 1,700 people, I think, in total. But what they did was to pick out the Viking influence, they looked at surnames with which had Norse personal names or nicknames. Okay. Although they did say not every putative norse surname was necessarily founded by a Norse male. Okay, and bear that in mind, because we'll come back to that. And this is the list of the Norse surnames that they identified. Arthur's Burns, Lies, Bolans, etc. Because they were relying on a collection by Edward McLeisit, they didn't go through the etymology of these names or why they identified them as Norse, they just relied on McLeisit. Unfortunately, McLeisit, in turn, is writing very much a summary of different families. And he doesn't give you the evidence either. Okay. And there are certain problems with this list. When you go through it in detail. And one of the interesting things is there's no McAuliffe there, although we do know that Olaf or Auliffe in the Irish Spellings is a very common name, particularly among the Dublin Norse leadership. And McAuliffe is still a very common name, particularly in North Cork. The other thing that they argued was that their assumptions had to be required that the personal names from where these surnames came from should be largely restricted to the big Hibernon Norse settlements, namely Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, and then lesser ones in Wexford and Carlingford, and so forth. Okay. In other words, they said very clearly, well, this is the approach we're taking. But it may be flawed, because the names which are putatively Norse in origin may in fact have been given to genetically native Irish. And so far, you can use the word native, but genetically non Scandinavian. So when you go through the list in detail, the name Loughlin, for example, that's a classic example of this, because Loughlin was taken over by the Irish as a personal name. And if you look, Jared showed the McFurbish book of genealogies earlier on, if you go through that list of that material, you get Loughlin turning up as a personal name in the Conoclov rune, which is South Roscommon and Galway, a North Galway, the Arila and County Armagh, the Chilir, were distributed across the country, but very specifically the Corcomodruid of Burrum in Clare. The name turns up among the Dalgosh, among the Northern Inale, among the people of Conomara, among the Evania and Central Ireland, among the Ogannachtal Castle, among the Lesterman. In other words, the name is found all over the place. And therefore, somebody descended from Loughlin has no obvious connection with Dublin, Nimeric, or Waterford. A second case is the Macauliffe name, which I mentioned before. In a Scottish context, this name becomes Macauliffe. They end up pronouncing the double F that we pronounce. And that can be spelled, you're probably more used to the spelling as Macauliffe in that spelling there. And a guy called Alistair Moffesh did a study of a friend Macauliffe. And he's working very much of, if you have an old Loughlin ancestor, then he must be a Scandinavian of some kind. And he produces this fantastic story about how the ancestor of his sample was bought by a Viking lord from the Hebrides, who was probably called Olaf. And he bought a slave from Monster in the slave market in Dublin. And they sailed back to the Hebrides. And at some stage on the journey, they stopped off. I presume they didn't do this on the ship. They stopped off. And the slaves snuck away with a Macauliffe woman, with Olaf's woman. And suddenly we have an insinuation of monster DNA into the profile. Well, as I say, it's a great story, but it is baloney as far as I'm concerned. I'm sorry, I can't think of another way of quoting it. Because again, Auliffe becomes a very common name among the Irish in the post-viking period. The 61st most common personal name, in fact, in Macfurbish's genealogies. And not only that, but we have a 15th century account of a leading dynasty of Macauliffe who come from Monster, exactly the area where he had his DNA sample in Duhallo in County Cork. So I have to say, in this case, I don't think Macauliffe are showing the Scandinavian DNA for a very good reason that they were never Scandinavian. They simply adopted the name. Okay, so I've been negative about two. Can I be positive about a third? Harold, the name Harold that was included as a surname in that list. There was a Harold who was grandson of Ivar, and he was king of Limerick in the mid 10th century, and he died fighting the Conuchta in the West. But there are also, Harold is a very common name in this period. There is also the sons of Harold who are active in Waterford in 984 towards the end of the 10th century. And then we have a Harold belonging to the Dublin dynasty who dies at the Battle of Glen Mama. This is the first attack by Brian Baroo on Dublin in 999, and he dies, he's a son of the then king of Dublin, the Harold. Okay, so we have Harold in our three high-burno north big settlements, Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford in the 10th century. When we look for later surnames we have in the Dublin Guild Merchant Rolled we have Harold who are merchants of Dublin in 1232 and 1253. At least two of these come from Chester near to the world, south of Liverpool. Okay, and again when you come look at Limerick you have Harold certainly from the end of the 13th century, and there seems to be enough of them at the end of the 13th century that they don't belong to a single family. Okay, there's more than one family of Harold's at that stage. I haven't found them in Waterford yet but I'm still hunting. Okay, so we have Harold in our high-burno north settlement, but in fact does that necessarily mean they are original 10th century Vikings or could they have come in in the 11th or indeed the 12th century? One of the interesting things is when you look for at the Dublin Guild Merchant Rolled, which is a fantastic roll, it's equivalent to the material you get from Leicester in England, a very early list of citizens of Dublin, but when you look at at that it's got about 1600 names and you're hunting for Norse names. The interesting thing is you have some guys here like Torston the Outlaw in North, that's fine. You've got Erin Finn, a son of Gilleth, that's fine, perfectly plausible, but then over here we have Torcal of Cardiff. Okay, so a nice Norse name but associated with Cardiff. We have Swine, again a nice Norse name from Cardiff, and we have Ivar, a nice Norse name from Cardiff. So again you've got to wonder just because you have Norse names has you know the history of the Viking settlement in Britain and Ireland is that by the time we get the records of people in detail Norse personal names have spread throughout the population as a whole in both Britain and Ireland. So I'm a bit dubious about my Haralds. Another approach is to look at names which the TCD study didn't look at. Okay, and here I go back to Devletook McPherson. Devletook McPherson is a collector. He puts together not one account but numerous accounts of genealogies and he's also in contact with other experts who are putting together genealogies and at one point he says okay there are many names and some surnames which are reckoned as originating in the Viking conquest of Ireland. Most of these are now closely identified with English surnames and the same names also used to be found with the Vikings or Saxons. So it's very not easy at all to discover their true origins because the country that is England has never been anything other than a corridor for invaders. Okay this is this is Devletook's approach to life and we have Albany and Britons and Chrisney and Gwale and Scots and Saxons and Vikings and Danes and it just shows you different perspectives perhaps on the history we're normally told. But he then goes on to say very difficult to distinguish therefore Norse names from English names but he cites this guy called Richard Verstegen who suggests that color names were typical in the 17th century when Devletook is writing. Richard was suggesting that color surnames were particularly common among the Vikings. And then Devletook says well I'm not sure I believe that but here are a whole list of color names and he gives he gives them in Irish for the most part. But again if we go back to our Dublin Guild merchant role with names we're not quite sure when it begins but these are names prior to AD 1222 and we suddenly find we have a large numbers of people who with the nicknames albus meaning white or Finn okay which means white and Irish. We have nine of them who seem to have the word black. We have five with the word brown. We have another eleven or so with the word with various forms of the word red and then we have other nicknames like long nine longs two what seems to be small and then people who are called younger okay and these are nicknames. But the interesting thing is that all of these nicknames become surnames and all of these surnames are traceable in the 13th century records of the Ando-Norman colony in Ireland. They're obviously typical of names that you get in England as well but I'm only interested in the Irish evidence. And I'm particularly interested in the whites the very heavy predominance of whites. It makes perfect sense that for an Irish people looking at Scandinavians or indeed English people they are struck by the percentage of lawns in their in the population. And it is clear that in Norse nomenclature white is both a personal name and used as it becomes a surname okay this is Gillian Fellows Jensen writing about the personal names of from Lincolnshire and Yorkshire where the Vikings were particularly settled in particularly large numbers and here we have the Norse word which is white. And we not only have these large numbers of whites in Dublin we have large numbers of whites in Limerick as well and not only whites but we also have lawns in various spellings and we also have the Irish equivalent called Finn and here's a very interesting reference Walter DiCapola Walter Chapel who was a hibernicus he was an Irishman and he found that he wasn't getting on well within the city of Limerick but because he was he didn't have legal status he was originally an old Finn a white but he renamed himself as Walter DiCapola in order to make his life as a merchant in Limerick easier okay and again the old Finns and Finn surnames you can trace in Waterford in Limerick I haven't got them in Dublin but again you're seeing a focus around the big hibernonore settlements and this is just the later history of whites in medieval Ireland you can see there's a bunch of them in Dublin you can also find them in Bunratty in Kilkenny in Rathowson County Meath in Carlingford in Thurlis in Carlo so we have whites essentially all over the Ando-Norman colony but one interesting factor of their distribution is that this is a map of all the Viking style artifacts from Limerick essentially all of which have turned up east of the River Deal and that is also the distribution of the pre-Norman whites where we can locate them in Limerick so what does this tell us well if you look at the family tree DNA site for whites obviously for obvious reasons most of the whites involved seem to be having the ancestry or British ancestry but one of the interesting things is that one of their signatures a large not a large percentage of them but as there's a substantial group who have I am 253 which according to ISOC has the highest frequency in Scandinavia Iceland and northwest Europe they still can't distinguish between Viking ancestry and Ando-Saxon ancestry but given as I say that from the 10th century on most of our Vikings seem to come to Ireland through Britain I'm going to discard that as a problem in a lordly sort of ever-vescent sort of way and where the map again the dots are too large to be really diagnostic but I think with a with an optimistic eye you can see a concentration of whites with this I am 253 signature turning up around Dublin around Warford around Limerick and then you also get them on the northeast coast and unexpectedly you get them in Connacht but it seems to me that the methodology that was used by Trinity in assuming that simply because a surname which was after all invented long after the Viking settled has Norse language elements in it it automatically meant Norse original Norse settlers that methodology is flawed um and I just want to compare this I use this slide a lot it was given to me by Christina Lee of Nottingham based on a study that was done in the Whirl um in 2000 published in 2008 and the Vikings of the Whirl actually come to Britain from anybody know from Ireland okay and we have an account of this I'm not sure I have a slide of it but we have a detailed account of how that they migrated during the interregnum as it were between the first Viking age and the second Viking age the Vikings of Ireland seems to have settled in this in West Lancashire in the Whirl what they did what happened in this particular study was the Whirl is quite close to Liverpool and when they studied people sort of random Whirl people on a random basis they ended up with one signature as it were but when they then looked at people whose names were tested in the medieval period surnames from medieval Whirl they got a rather different signature and they were very happy because they felt there was more evidence for Scandinavian migration among people with medievally attested surnames now the names they used if you look at them um these are the names they used from the 16th and 14th centuries but I want to draw your attention to the word young in the first list the word brown in the second list the word cook which I didn't talk about which is well attested again in our Angonoman records in Ireland sergeant Walsh which is the very common in the Angonoman colony used to describe people who are Welsh and here we have names which you can find in other words in both Ireland and England and given our heralds of Chester who came over from Dublin and given our Dublin Vikings who settled in the Whirl and this comes back to what we were talking about yesterday in the paper we have a lot of fragments of evidence here which show people moving backwards and forwards across the Irish sea in this period okay we also have records of trade the Irish sold of pine martins pine martin skins to in Chester they where they made cloaks of them and they gave them to the kings and queens of Scotland and so forth um this is the account of the settlement of the Whirl it comes from a text known as the fragments the three fragments um and it talks about the expulsion of the Norse host from Ireland according to this author it was it was put together by an Eau Clairey and therefore interested in in sort of the power of the church to move these things he said they were expelled not by the fighting Irish but by the prayers and fasting of a particular Cayley Day and they departed from Ireland and their name their leader was Ingemond and they went to Queen Eddelfreda of the Saxons and she gave him lands near Chester and then they had at various battles because the Chester folk weren't terribly happy about this but in the end he ended up occupying Chester and possessing it with his lands and wells so my conclusions therefore are we have archaeological historical and probably genetic evidence which suggests that there are Norwegian settlers in Ireland in the ninth century okay and that is as it were the traditional picture of Viking activity in Ireland but that ninth century settlement seems to be predominantly so far east coast and absolutely predominantly focused on Dublin as far as we can tell and then in the 10th century and later we have people arriving into Ireland with Norse names but they also have strong connections to Britain and indeed one of the big mysteries for Irish archaeologists is if you say Vikings come to Ireland and they start Viking towns why is it that you don't have large numbers of towns in Scandinavia and one of the theories that Pat Wallace always used to say was because they learned about towns in Britain before they came to Ireland so the second Viking wave is as it were whatever term if we talk about hibernon Norse we have to talk about British Viking or some some term like that okay it's not straight from Scandinavia as far as we can tell and the third point is that looking at the surnames that were chosen for the 2006 TCD study suggests that their methodology which they themselves pointed out was problematic is even more problematic with further investigation and you cannot assume that the surnames they tested are necessarily people of Viking ancestry and so when they said that only 10 percent of the Irish population ended up as were Vikings that conclusion has more or less as far as I can say as far as I know when there are people here who are more expert than I am as far as I know the eye signature in terms of modern DNA testing is still relatively small and still might be of the order of 10 percent but the methodology by which TCD got to that figure is now in my view outdated and has to be abandoned and I'd also say and again this fits in with what other papers have been saying it's going to be very very difficult given the history both of the Viking period and the subsequent history of Britain and Ireland to distinguish between Vikings who arrived as it were as monolingual Norse speakers untainted by British exposure and Vikings who come having been settled in Britain for a number of years and then arrive in Ireland whether in the 10th century the 12th century is the Anglo-Norman period the 15th century in the Elizabethan period the 17th century in the Cromwellian period you're going to get people with Viking ancestry coming into Ireland as indeed you get people with both Irish and Viking ancestry migrating back to Britain and I think that's just a feature of the history of our islands and there's really not a lot we're going to be able to do with it long term I would feel that would be where I'd stand anyway thank you very much we have a question here from Don Preston very much Kathy that was very interesting can I sort of rewind back to the McColds because I'm a member of that same sort of monster clade okay and the like so it's it's characterized by a particular marker found in McColds in eastern Irish it's also found in westerns in Scandinavia with people with Scandinavian surnames so since you weren't much impressed with Alastair Moth's fairy story which is speculates as to how these monster Irish genetically ended up in Lewis and Harris and then potentially in western Norway and in Denmark okay um well uh the the trouble with when I come to these conferences I'm always very conscious that I come from the genetics I read tend to be old papers essentially and you have this snip avalanche going on and I'm always behind the behind the curve as it were and you always know a lot more about than I do about where the where what's happening with the snips the there is clear evidence that one of the things that the Vikings do in in Ireland is that they they trade in slaves and the Irish have find this absolutely wonderful because they go to war with their local enemies they defeat their local enemies now in the old days they would take a percentage of them as hostages and they would hold them for ransom but in the Viking period there's an even better solution you go down the road and and you sell your enemies to the Viking lords which gives you silver and and you a diminish the power of your enemies and b you make a profit I mean brilliant solution um and as a result of that pattern um we have very clear evidence that from a variety of sources that um there is a trading market going on between Bristol and Ireland there's slightly less evidence but I still I think is still interesting evidence suggesting a trading network between Ireland and Cordoba in the south of Spain um but there's also evidence clear evidence for a lot of trafficking up the Hebridean coast um and I'm not essentially you know just like the snips this is a matter of baby steps um and my point about uh the Macauliffe name is I'm not saying that there are no Macauliffe's who don't have Scandinavian ancestry or Scandinavian connections but what I'm saying is you have to bear in mind that it was certainly used of um a lot of people who in our records are Irish but again we may discover that's wrong longer term I mean one of the things that the whole Brian Ruse celebrations have started focused on or turned up is the number of Scandinavians who whose names are translated into Irish in the 10th century and then for we just see them as Irish but in fact when you think about it they're probably Scandinavians in an Irish dress so for example cutters I think I said this yesterday cutters and Macauliffe are seen as from the north name Otter but suddenly at the time of the Battle of Clontarf you suddenly get this personal name Davahul turning up and that's the Irish word for Otter and you've got to wonder is that actually simply a translation then of the uh of the north name so again essentially I'm going for model okay I'm not going for a clear solution to any of these problems I'm going for a lot of people moving around in a lot of different directions and all our records by using different disciplines we can try and minimize the problems but all our records are suggesting that in fact people had of this was a time of expansion people were moving around a lot the ships facilitated communication and from the point of view of this conference I'm I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think you're going to get from this early period very clear signatures which are one surname one ancestry um because that's not the picture I'm seeing in the documents or in the archaeology doesn't matter how many we have we've been uh snip tested four or five of the people who live around Elphin Jamestown his surnames that be the IR and the other all DF-5s I don't think DF-5 is found much in Norway at all they seem to be most closely related to the canes of Galway uh well that makes an awful lot of sense because in fact if you look at um Kuno Meyer's work about the etymology the name Brian the day of the early there's an early group of the conector for the e-ruin okay and that's um that's b-r-i-o-n okay um and in terms of b-r-i-u-i-n okay and what Kuno Meyer talks about this is is to what extent is that the name that becomes Brian down in in in Clare and he has a long argument which I'm looking into but there is absolutely clear that in the 10th and 11th century that the spending Brian and Brian was going backwards and forward and people were spending at the same time so I think it's much more likely the e-ruin were in in in North Galway and in South South Scotland and it seems to be much more likely your burns are related to them than the Spanish and English and we have a question from no anybody else any other questions okay um where are we going to be with all of this in five years time it's my favorite question yeah okay um well I don't think the archaeology is going to change much okay um the National Museum has just done this major major study that they've been investing in on the graves for a number of years uh Pat Wallace um Ryan O'Fline is as Viking as it were in his interest as Pat Wallace are almost as Viking but he is going to be take there's not much money in the in the National Museum coffers at the moment and they're being pressurized about 1916 so I don't think there'll be much work being done on Viking archaeology through the museum in the near future and the it's really the National Museum who've driven Viking archaeology in this country because of Pat Wallace's excavations at Wiki so what's been what they will probably do is that they have started this pattern of inviting particularly British PhD students who are funded to do reports and studies of particular types of artifacts from the excavations in Dublin and that will probably continue so we will see the but this is isn't going to change the picture much I don't think because it's it's like studies of barrels studies of scabbards studies of of shoe leather and it's not really going to change the overall pattern of migration I don't think in terms of the history uh well one of the things about 1014 and the celebrations last year is that it crept up on a number of we were a very small bunch of early Irish historians but to some extent it clearly crept up on people and what was noticeable this year was a number of new studies last year a lot of what happened last year was actually more or less a repetition of what we already knew but it started people asking questions and now this year on the conference circuit there were a number of new papers looking at new approaches so I think that will continue there be a sort of a shadow effect of the 2014 celebrations so the history will is likely to have new material coming out on the DNA there are people here much more qualified than I am and I don't know that I can talk about this in detail but just to say that um what I'm hoping I'm doing a project in Limerick which is on Limerick surnames in general but we have a lot of old English surnames in in in in Limerick and we have a lot of Anglo-Norman records of surnames in Limerick and unlike say the monster project we then spend a lot of our time thinking about those people and those names and I think one of the problems in DNA studies in up until now has in terms of the overall interpretation has been the people have tended to focus in on diagnostically linguistic Irish names or diagnostically linguistic whatever names and I think my understanding is that surnames actually happen after all the great invasions happen and they're required for a variety of reasons um and there's it seems to me a lot more influence by of the English system of surname formation on the certain on the formation of Irish surnames than has previously been identified and there's a lot more overlap and even as far as I mean the Irvings in the last paper and you had the Oculicon surname in Limerick on one of his slides and the changeover seemed to happen coming up to the famine well again that's a pattern we haven't really looked at a lot of Irish families because they were migrating and because of the you know no Irish need apply and and the pejorative attitudes of some of the host countries to Irish language speakers a lot of them took their Irish name and woke up the following morning and said we're going to call ourselves Bowen or Clark or Monoclart doesn't count but Bowen or Morgan or Irving or some name that sounds terribly worthy and and non-native Irish non-Irish speaker and we can see that pattern in the 19th century in the in the periods coming up to the famine and after the famine but again we haven't studied that and I think again according to the the slide when when James was talking about the the different ways in which people could have a non-paternity event there's a specific set of non-paternity events that happen in Ireland because of our status as a colony which needs to be looked at and again we need as I keep saying we need more research on this so that's as far as I can go right well I know that you're doing some research in Limerick and that study probably will run for quite a few years but hopefully you can come back at some stage and give us an update on the current status we'd much appreciate it.