Viking skeletons dug up in Dublin, and the Irish archaeologists who discovered them, are the stars of a new documentary, writes Paul O'Doherty
Sitting in a dusty Portakabin overlooking a Monaco-sized hole on top of what was briefly Dame Street's Millennium Garden, it's easy to talk about Dublin's Viking skeletons with Linzi Simpson, an urban archaeologist. We're discussing the remains of the four Viking warriors that Simpson and her team excavated from South Great George's Street in August 2003, which form the kernel of Mummy Autopsy: The Lost Vikings , a documentary being shown on Discovery Channel on Friday.
It's a topic that animates Simpson. In 2002 she was involved on a site on Ship Street Great that unearthed the upper torso of a Viking warrior, close to where a Viking skeleton had been uncovered in the 19th century, on Bride Street. A year later she was working on the massive Dunnes Stores site across the road, on South Great George's Street, with a team of about 25 people. They were excavating an area at the back of the Dubh Linn (black pool) gardens and Dublin Castle, on the rim of the River Poddle, the mainframe and the disputed whereabouts of the Longphort and commercial centre of Viking Dublin. It is a section of the capital where major development work is planned for the coming years.
"I'll never forget when I saw the first findings. We were going into a big meeting to tell [Dunnes Stores] that everything was fine and that it was full steam ahead when Kevin Weldon, who works with me, took me aside and showed me what looked like a Victorian sewer pipe. It was actually a shield. I said to him, 'That looks modern,' and he said, 'No, look,' and he dusted off a bit of dust that he'd covered over, and I could see an arm. I said, 'Oh God,' because I knew straight away. I grabbed Mags's attention" - she is referring to her employer, Margaret Gowen - "on the way into the meeting and told her, 'I think we've found a Viking skeleton.' "
By the time they'd gone public a second skeleton was being discovered. "RTÉ came down, and they were saying, 'Oh, this is a very exciting find, and it's the only one of its kind,' and I was saying to myself, 'No, no, I think there's another one behind you.' "
Eventually four were unearthed; all were given Viking names: Eric, Torcaill, Ivar and Raghnall. Security was a big problem, with gold-diggers and metal-detector bandits trying to break in day and night. The site had to be sealed and security guards put on duty around the clock.
The bones had been badly damaged in the 18th century, during a previous development. "The skeletons were missing their legs, and we didn't get their swords. We got one guy with the remains of his shield on his torso. In one case we had a leg thrown back where obviously someone didn't want it."
Mummy Autopsy: The Lost Vikings takes up the story at the dating and where-did-they-come-from stage, with the Vikings carefully ensconced on the laboratory table. The mummy investigators, Dr John Shultz, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Central Florida, and James Murrell, a radiological technologist from the University of New Mexico, take up the story. They have an air of being the type of people who believe they're the only ones who know what they're doing. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that the Irish archaeologists and historians featured in the show (including Simpson, grave-goods expert Dr Elizabeth O'Brien and Donnchadh O'Corrain, professor of medieval studies at University College Cork) just might be the real authorities.
Simpson, who is originally from Limerick, has always been interested in archaeology and "digging bits of crockery out of streams"; she studied ancient history and archaeology at Trinity College. She has worked for Gowen's firm of archaeologists since 1990. She's married to Seán Duffy, a history lecturer at Trinity, with whom she has a daughter, Sadhbh. (Her husband is a fan of Brian Boru, whose daughter was also called Sadhbh.)
And there's also a story behind the unusual spelling of Linzi's own name. When she was born her grandmother Agnes named her, albeit a little morbidly, after a Polish dressmaker who had recently committed suicide. "My granny lives with my mother, and she's very proud of my name. She always says: 'When anyone reads your name they remember it, and that's down to me. I made sure you had an original name.' "
Mummy Autopsy: The Lost Vikings is on Discovery Channel on Friday at 10pm