Customer Reviews

Secrets of the Dead - The Lost Vikings (vol. 2) [VHS]

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While the video will take a bit of attention to follow, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in anthropology and archaeology. This would make a wonderful educational video for the classroom, especially senior high school students would appreciate this. The video does a great job of connecting the facts to make them easy to follow without patronizing the audience and it does leave a few openings for the viewer to draw his own conclusions about the facts. This is one of the more conclusive of the "Secrets of the Dead" titles, where speculation is replaced with more certianty about the events of the past.

In the middle ages, the Vikings established extensive colonies on Greenland made of up an estimated five to six thousand people. Those colonies thrived for approximately four hundred years, even communicating with the Pope and having their own bishop. There was extensive trade with other colonies and they even built cathedrals with stained glass. However, over a short period of time, the colony declined and the people vanished. What happened to them is a mystery, but thanks to some dedicated scientists using state of the art technology, many of the questions are answered.
What I loved about the tape is the descriptions of the technology used to extract clues about how the Vikings lived. Ice core samples from the Greenland ice cap are used to create an accurate record of the temperature variance over the years. The human remains are used to determine their health, diet and activities. Finally, even the number of preserved blowflies is used to calculate the amount of carrion that was present, which determines the amount of excess food.
Like so many civilizations that have died out, it is clear that the Viking colonies had a long period of decline before there was a dramatic event that ended it completely, after it grew too small to be self-supporting. The only unanswered question is what happened to the last people, as there are very few unburied corpses that would indicate a final mass dying. The experts speculate that the last people attempted to migrate to another location, but either did not make it or landed somewhere where they were absorbed without being recorded.
This is a tape that is fascinating in the descriptions of the quality of anthropological science. Civilizations that vanish hold a special historical appeal and in this tape you can learn about one of the most interesting instances where a large group of people vanished with no historical record to explain it.