Bookshelf

River Kings

Cat Jarman

William Collins £25 (hb)

The finding of a tiny, facetted, orange-brown, carnelian bead, wrapped in tissue paper and kept in a large Tupperware box in Derby Museum, led bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman on a trail which was to take her to Baghdad in Iraq and Gujarat in India. The bead came from the grave of a Viking warrior at Repton, and it had remained, forgotten and uninterpreted, in the museum that since the original excavations at Repton by Martin and Birthe Biddle in 1982. It is hoped that the findings of the latest excavations, led by Mark Horton of Bristol University in 2017 (see ACID 2019), will soon be shared and published, unlike those of the Biddles of 40 years ago, which also still remain unpublished. The story of Jarman’s quest to trace the origins of the tiny Repton bead forms the starting point for this fascinating history of the Vikings, from their roots in Scandinavia to the Silk Roads and eventually to the Far East. It takes her from the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland, following rivers like the Dnieper and the Volga, through to the Black and Caspian Seas and eventually to Baghdad and Constantinople or Istanbul, where a runic inscription in a gallery of the magnificent Hagia Sophia mosque records a visitor named Halfdan – a Viking name which intriguingly is also found at Repton. While described as a new history of the Vikings, the book concentrates almost entirely on their journeys to the south and east, and there’s only a passing mention of Leif Erikson’s equally ambitious journey across the Atlantic to the west, eventually reaching Newfoundland and North America 500 years before Columbus. But Jarman follows the journeys of the Vikings – then known as the Rus’ – from their Scandinavian homeland through the archaeological evidence they left in the landscapes of places like the townships on the shores of Lake Ilmen and the River Dneiper. Their trading with the east included furs, silks and coins (such as the hoard of Islamic silver dirhams found four km from Repton at Foremark) and, perhaps most shockingly, in slaves. And although the title of the book is masculine, Jarman makes a strong case for the presence of powerful Viking women leaders, based on the archaeological evidence found in their graves. Maybe it would have been better titled River Kings and Queens?

Sheffield Castle: Archaeology, Archives, Regeneration, 1927-2018

John Moreland and Dawn Hadley

White Rose University Press, Free to read online or download at: https://doi.org/10.22599/SheffieldCastle. Print version £53.26 (hb)

This free on-line book presents a unique perspective on Sheffield Castle by excavating decades of museum archives to reveal a building that made the ‘Steel City’ a seat of considerable power in medieval England. Although largely demolished at the end of the Civil War, Sheffield Castle has left an enduring legacy and continues to exert a powerful influence over the present city and its current regeneration. This weighty book (in its printed version) describes the ways in which successive building projects have uncovered the castle remains, and the future of the site, currently under active discussion following the demolition of the 1960s Market Hall. It also represents the first comprehensive analysis of the archaeological evidence for the castle, and the medieval landscape within which it lay. It publishes for the first time all the major excavations carried out on the site and in the neighbouring deer park in the 20th and 21st centuries and includes the first modern analysis of the artefacts excavated. One of the highlights of the book are the wonderful archive photographs of the excavations and plans produced by archaeologists of the past. Sheffield Castle was of course the enforced home of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots, when Elizabeth 1 ordered that George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury and husband of Bess of Hardwick, should be responsible for her incarceration. But the principal value of this book is the way it uses the archives to tell the fascinating stories of those who rediscovered the castle, the circumstances in which they worked, their archaeological methods, and the influences that shaped them. It also places their endeavours within the current discussions about the place of the past in the present. These debates continue in the ongoing attempts to put the castle site at the heart of a heritage-led urban regeneration initiative.