Ancient migrations of Vikings appear to have left a lasting legacy in the modern population of Ireland.
The early medieval period in Ireland was a time of key importance. It was a turning point in European history and the origin of much contemporary Irish culture and identity. Ireland, the early medieval"land of saints and scholars," had much cultural and economic growth during the 5th and 6th centuries. Elsewhere in Europe there were unstable populations in the wake of the fall of Rome.
We used a database of some 10,000 radiocarbon dates of human activity in Ireland that has accumulated since the technique was pioneered in the 1940s. Each one of these"dates" was once a living thing—a fragment of wood, a grain of cereal, or an animal or human bone. When any organism dies, a naturally radioactive stopwatch is set off. A radiocarbon laboratory is able to estimate the time elapsed since the organism died by measuring how much of this radioactivity remains.
The results can be interpreted as a record of population change. A guess at absolute population numbers is made by comparing the radiocarbon evidence against church and census records from more recent centuries."How many people lived in the past?" is a question archaeologists are often asked, but until now we had very few tools with which to form an answer.
Unlike the potato famine, the gradual nature of the early medieval decline implies that there was no single cause. Plagues, famines, wars and natural disasters can all put the brakes on growth. So too can changing values brought about by political forces, religious practices and economic instability. There are hints from the historical and archaeological records that all these factors could have played a role.
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