 Those we just move on to the next speaker and the next one is Ezek Guardewa. I'll let you stay in the Baltic with the next speaker. Ezek will direct our attention to furnished burials in the Viking Age of Poland, in which traditionally are interpreted as Scandinavian or rather Misinterpretation. He maintains that instead a West Slavic interpretation must be considered, Yn ddweud y dwy'n gyntaf isch yn gwych wedi ei wneud eich rhad bwrth ymlaen yn y gymdeithasio'n cyhoedd eich arfer? Dwyser. Thank you so much for the nice introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, in my today's talk I would like to take a new look at some of the most iconic Viking age cemeteries discovered in Poland in the early 20th century. For a long time in Polish and occasionally international scholarship, rydych chi'n gweld yn y cemifetau efallai ymdweud yw'r cyd-dynaf cymaint. Rydyn ni'n gweld yn y pomeinion o'ch gwzbwyr a'r gwrs Pais yn ymdweud ddweud, Denmark, a Rus. Ieb amdano'r rhain yw'r cyd-dynaf yw'r piais. Gwbodaeth newydd yn gweithio ar hyn ac mae'r collegau i'r cyd-dynaf, yn ychydigrwydd Caerdydd Caerdydd Cymru, mae'r cyd-dynaf yw'r cyd-dynaf ond ni'n ddwy'n ffordd i'r bydd angen, o'r ffordd i'r ffordd o'r rhaglen, a'r bydd yn hynny'n ddysgrif iawn i ddweud o rhefnod o'r llwyddaeth Llyfrgell West Slavic. Felly, i ddwy'n gweithio'r bobl, wedi bod yn ddysgu'r bach gyda'r newydd, i ddweud o'r cyfnod, fydd y cyfnodau'n sgwmp i'r bach, i'r ffordd i'r ffordd o'r eu ddweud o ffai'ch byw. I will begin with a map for those of you who are not familiar with with Polish Geography, so this map shows Poland within its current political borders, and the sites I will discuss are underlined in yellow and include places like Cepwer in Pomerania, Luban in Greater Poland and Lutomiesk in Central Poland. I will begin with the northernmost site known as Cepwer or in German Warenhof. This cemetery was discovered in the year 1900 during construction work and unfortunately it was rather poorly documented and then during the Second World War most of the finds disappeared. All we have today from this initial excavations are those images. From the start one grave which you can see in the slide drew increased scholarly attention. You can see that the contents are very elaborate, extremely rich. It was an inhumation grave with a lavishly decorated sword belonging to Jan Patterson's type Z. Equally elaborate stirrups with silver and copper inlay, horse bits and other equipment. Since the moment of its discovery Polish and international scholars have been really battling over the ethnic identity of the deceased individual and some regarded this person as a West Slavic rider. Others in the majority considered this grave as that of a Scandinavian Viking, and until very recently the view that this was the grave of a Scandinavian Viking dominated in Polish academic literature. But I think anyone who actually knows a thing or two about Viking-age art and Scandinavian art of the time will immediately notice that there's actually nothing ostensibly Nordic in the designs of these weapons and riding equipment. The second site is the cemetery at Lubon near Poznan, which was also discovered by accident by physical workers in 1937. And this site was also in the 1990s hailed by some Polish scholars as the resting place of Scandinavian warriors, who again in the opinion of those scholars had served the Piast dynasty as mercenaries. This view was predominantly based on the military equipment these people were buried with, and in particular axes. So this T-shaped axe and this M-type axe that you can see in the slide. We know very well today that T-shaped or long-bladed axes as they are sometimes called, are actually not Scandinavian products and that they are quite characteristic for the West Slavic areas, especially greater Poland and Poabia. And they're actually extremely rare in Scandinavia, although they do occur in very interesting locations, for example in Denmark and Sweden, as you will see later on. So actually again, there is nothing ostensibly Scandinavian here, which does not stop some scholars to still continue maintaining this narrative about Scandinavian mercenaries in greater Poland. Now, the third case, which is very close to my heart and I'm totally fascinated by this site, is the cemetery at Lutomiersk in central Poland. The history of this site is quite intriguing and dark occasionally. It was discovered in the year 1940 during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and from the start German archaeologists desperately wanted this site to be a Viking cemetery. And despite their intensive efforts to find more proof for that other than the sword that they found, there was actually nothing that could sustain this idea. So completely upset with their excavations, they abandoned the dig. They only excavated about 15 graves and abandoned the excavation. After the war, Polish archaeologists re-excavated the site under the leadership of Professor Konrad Jaszewski. Jaszewski wanted to prove the Germans wrong and to show that the site was actually a Slavic place and he even invited the famous Swedish archaeologist Holger Arman to come and see the excavation and to prove there is nothing Germanic about it. And indeed, Arman came in 1949 and he said that this is true, there is actually nothing Germanic here. However, in the same year in 1949, the discoveries of two lavishly furnished graves labeled five and ten, and you can see them in the centre of the cemetery, caused a bit of an interpretational puzzle. They contained riding gear which looked very exotic to the scholars of the time. And because there were no parallels to those finds in Poland, it was immediately suggested that the finds had originated from Eastern Europe, from the Rus area, or even from farther away. Some people said that even as far away as the Urals actually. And therefore, with this Eastern Rus link, a link with Scandinavia was also created. You can see the contents of grave five in this slide, especially those really nice strap distributors and other riding gear and weaponry. Excuse me. And here you can see the finds from grave ten, as well as a reconstruction of this grave. And this was an inhumation grave. Both graves, as I mentioned, included beautifully decorated bridles. Here in the reconstruction you can see what they may have looked like originally. In looking at the historiography of the Lutomirsk cemetery, you can see that there has been a serious identity crisis for the Lutomirsk warriors. Based on the grave goods these people were laid to rest with over the years. They have been labelled as Scandinavian Vikings, as Rus, as Varangians, as Pechenegs, all kinds of different nomads, essentially anything but locals, anything but Western Slavs, which is very interesting. The wind of change began to blow in the early 2000s when modern and meticulous re-excavations at the cemetery of Cepua were conducted by Zdyslawa Ratayczyk, anarcheologist from the Archaeological Museum in Gdansk. These have provided extremely important data that has allowed us to cast new light on the material culture and identity of warrior elites on the southern coast of the Baltic. The site has not been fully published yet, but we are working on a comprehensive publication of all the finds from this site, including specialist analysis of some of the equipment. Particularly groundbreaking was the discovery of grave 42, which contained high-quality military equipment and an elaborate set of riding gear. What is most interesting is that on the feet of this deceased person there was a complete set of Zawmorphic copper alloy spurs, identical to those found at Lutomirsk in those two graves five and ten. This is what the spurs looked like after conservation, and this is the latest replica that I commissioned from a Polish artist. Unfortunately, I don't have it with me today. It's difficult to travel with these kinds of things, but I hope this image speaks to the imagination. In a series of recent studies together with my colleagues, with Kamil Kaikovsky and Zdyslawa Ratayczyk and also Swedish friend Ben Cedderberi, we have argued that spurs of this type are of West Slavic design and that they convey important details about Slavic pagan worldviews. Essentially, we believe that the spur is a model of the Slavic cosmos. Unfortunately, I cannot go into detail here, but I'm happy to discuss this during the break, and I can also give you some of the literature we've published recently on this topic. Establishing the West Slavic origin of the spurs and deciphering some of their meanings has helped us to identify some of the diagnostic material markers. Ben is an expert on that of West Slavic elites. We can now say with confidence that in Slavic artwork, the Western Slavs used ornaments referring to animals like snakes, horses, cattle and birds. The snake, however, sometimes with additional wings, was probably one of the most important creatures for the Slavs and perhaps served as a kind of emblem of a very particular group of people, a family, a clan, maybe even a dynasty. So what impact can all this have on the international field of Viking status? I believe that this new work on West Slavic elite culture can substantially nuance our perception of cross-cultural interactions around the Baltic Sea and beyond, and we can now finally better identify West Slavic warriors using both archaeological methods based on material culture, and we can trace and see their mobility across a large geographical area. So here are just a few examples. Over the last years, metal detecting activities in Sweden and Denmark have brought to light a number of objects of exactly the same type as those from the area of Poland, especially from the area of the Piast state. The new investigations of West Slavic art, such as those that I've quickly summarised, are also helping us to reinterpret some of the old finds and demonstrate that they have been misinterpreted by some Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian scholars. This is just one example of new research together with my colleagues. We have recently published an article about a new copper alloy goat of the Lutomierschepw type that was recently discovered in Skogria in Skona in southern Sweden, and the presence of such a high status object, something that to my mind must have travelled with its owner, its original owner, close to Harold Lutwf's fortress, has very interesting implications, and this suggests to us close interactions between West Slavic and Scandinavian elites in this area. This is something we have not had before. Of course interactions are well known through the presence of pottery, certain types of objects, but this is something that's of extremely high status. Recent re-excavations of a well-known chamber grave at Birka have also revealed typically West Slavic T-shaped axe in an axe to this grave, suggesting perhaps that there are some West Slavic links there, or that Western Slavs of very high status were buried at Birka, or at least that their material culture of this high status was buried there. Now, a new look at the well-known grave from Velds, which you can see in the exhibition in Copenhagen, and a new look at the stirrups and comparing them with some of the finds from Poland leads to the, I think, unequivocal conclusion that their decoration refers to West Slavic pre-Christian ideas. You can see the two intertwined snakes on the stirrup and an analogous motif on a haptorgasol and emblematic West Slavic object from Biscoping, and there are many, many more examples. Other things in this grave and the decoration of other things in this grave also suggest that this actually is West Slavic and not Anglo-Saxon equipment, as some scholars have previously thought. So, to sum this up, I will just show a few slides from the well-known fortress in Cemetery at Treleborg. Already a decade ago, Danish archaeologist Anders Dobbat argued for a strong presence of Slavic warriors or strangers, as he calls them, in the realm of Harold Bluth and their burials had been identified using also isotope analyses at this fortress of Treleborg and at several other sites. What I want to point out is actually that one of the richest graves in the cemetery, labelled as grave 128, has a foreign isotopic signature and also contained this emblematic T-shaped axe. So, this is a very interesting example of the correlation of isotopic signature, isotopic data and artefactual data, with a very high status emblematic object. But what has so far been unnoticed, I think, is that it's not only the type of axe, it's not only the isotopes, but there's also the decor. And you can see that on one of the sides of this axe there is a representation of a winged animal. Perhaps a bird, but perhaps a winged snake, analogous to some of those snakes that we see in West Slavic art that has recently been reinterpreted. All these reinterpretations of West Slavic material culture and warrior ideologies are also helping us to track down the mobility of West Slavic elites or their warriors outside of Poland, Germany and Scandinavia. There is a growing group of curious finds from places like England, such as this Spurgo from childhood, which again suggests the presence of high status elite riders or warriors beyond this world of Scandinavia, Poland and Germany in the British Isles. In my view, and this is just very preliminary, also this sword guard from London, from Sherbourne Lane, which is usually interpreted as an Anglo-Saxon product, may have actually belonged to, or being produced by Western Slavs or in a Western Slavic workshop. You can notice the decor and the similarities of this decor to some of the finds from Llewthomierysg or Getch and other places. So to sum up this quick, very quick overview of latest work on West Slavic material culture and warrior identity shows the great and still untapped potential Central European archaeology can have for nuancing the picture of cross cultural interactions in the Viking Age. I think we certainly have to work more on strengthening and expanding our research networks and so I think we have to develop more collaborative and interdisciplinary projects together and events like this are great to start this kind of collaboration. We also have to find in ourselves the strength and courage to challenge previous vitrified misconceptions. I'm trying to find that strength although sometimes it's not so. Thank you so much for your attention.