Do you feel weird thinking about all the lost history?

Historians spend a lot of time thinking about lost history, and it's one of the factors that keep the discipline fresh with original research. Consider, for example, the title The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages. Two major questions allow us to move forward with this kind work.

First, why is history 'dark' to begin with? Not everything can be written down, even in the modern age of mass data collection, so some historians study the social rules that determine what gets written about and what gets left out. Who are the voices that our primary sources have silenced?

For example, the US Constitution opens with the famous phrase, "We the People." When historians first started writing early US history, they had thousands of documents like this -- things like the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the letters of the Founding Fathers. It was hard work just to piece together the political history of early United States.

And yet historians became increasingly aware that they were telling only part of the story. There were political reasons for this, such as the Civil Rights Movement, as well as scholarly reasons, such as the rise of Atlantic History and Subaltern Studies. But once historians recognized that "We the People" generally meant males that owned property and was even more restricted from place to place, the field was forever changed.

Perhaps we now lack the the details to tell many individual stories about women, slaves, and the poor, but the florescence of social history has allowed us to tell new stories about this period and to shine new light on the dark corners of this supposedly enlightened age.

Second, what can we learn about the past from things that aren't written down? If historians are becoming better with recovering the lost histories that the texts neglect, they're also becoming better at pulling historical information out of non-textual sources. Archaeology is of course one big source of this information, but historians are also working closer with art historians, classicists, linguists, and even scholars of environmental and cognitive change.

For example, a redditor recently asked what we know about vikings who surrendered or fled. It's a fair question, given the way that vikings are often represented on TV as bands of unstoppable warriors. And if you go back to the primary sources, you get some of this same impression.

Historians have long realized that this is in part a bias in the sources, most of which were written by monastic communities that had been disrupted by viking violence or the larger political upheavals that the vikings exploited. And a close reading of the sources actually suggests that vikings won only about half the time. But how can we add to the very limited story of the Viking Age by moving beyond what the texts can tell us?

To take only one example, archaeologists recently uncovered a viking crew that was captured and executed on the south coast of Britain right around the year 1000. They looked at the way the bones were jumbled and hacked to tell the story of viking crew that was captured without a fight and suffered a messy execution for their troubles.

But this doesn't just illustrate what we already knew from texts about vikings being occasionally defeated. It also illuminates our understanding of viking crews in radically new ways. The archaeologists tested the bones for the ratios of oxygen, strontium, and nitrogen isotopes in their teeth, ribs, and femurs, and they made some awesome conclusions.

This crew came from all over the northern world, spending their childhoods perhaps as widely spread as Iceland and distant Russia. They all ate different things growing up, which is a strong indicator that they didn't share a common culture, maybe not even a common language. How they were gathered together remains something of a mystery, but by about three years before their deaths, they were all eating a similar diet heavy in fish.

Three years might seem like an adequate training time for an elite crew, but there are other indicators that this was a rather ragtag bunch of vikings. They were mostly young (15-25) and of average build (172cm / 5'7"). Only two had injuries that could be attributed to veteran service. Many were malnourished or diseased (again, roughly comparable to the general population), including one with a deformed leg, several with bladder or kidney disease, sinusitis (likely caused from long winters spent indoors with smokey fires), and three cases of brucellosis (which comes from unsterilized milk or contact with animal feces, such as for fertilizing a field). So these archaeologists have given us an unprecedented ability to understand what viking crews really looked like, as well as an opportunity to start tracing a few of their life stories.

So I guess my reaction to lost history isn't so much a weird feeling as it is a sense of excitement and opportunity. We can reread the sources to pick out many stories that haven't yet been told. And we can look to new, non-textual sources to tell new stories that we never even imagined. Certainly we won't answer every question or be able to reconstruct the sequel to the Iliad, but with the way the field is moving, we still got some really exciting and challenging questions ahead of us!