Origins of Faroe Island Viking Settlers Examined

TORSHAVN, FAROE ISLANDS—An archipelago of 18 islands lying in the North Atlantic roughly halfway between Norway and Iceland, the Faroe Islands were colonized by Norse settlers sometime between a.d. 872 and 930. According to the Færeyinga Saga, a later literary account of that event, a Norse chief named Grímur Kamban led the Viking band that settled the Faroes. But just where Grímur and his followers came from has never been clear. Now, according to a statement released by Frontiers, a genetic study of 139 Faroese men has revealed that the Vikings who colonized the islands came from a diverse range of Scandinavian backgrounds and were distinct from the populations that later settled in Iceland. “Scientists have long assumed that the Faroe Islands and Iceland were both settled by similar Norse people,” says anthropologist Christopher Tillquist of the University of Louisville, who led the study. “Our results demonstrate that Viking expansion into the North Atlantic was more complex than previously thought.” Read the original scholarly article about this research in Frontiers in Genetics. For more about the history of the people who settled the Faroe Islands, go to “Letter from the Faroes: Lost History of the Sheep Islands.”

Looted Etruscan Sarcophagi Recovered

ROME, ITALY—Italian police seized an array of third-century b.c. Etruscan artifacts that looters had found on their own land in the Umbrian town of Città della Pieve and had attempted to sell on the black market, according to a report in The Straits Times. Two sarcophagi, eight stone urns carved with Greek mythological scenes, a perfume bottle, and bronze mirrors are among the finds. The urns, some of which were inscribed with the family name Pulfna, were topped by lids featured sculptures of reclining women whose lips and jewelry still preserve traces of paint. In 2015, a farmer in Città della Pieve plowing land near the findspot of the recovered artifacts uncovered a hypogeum that also belonged to the Pulfna family. To read about a noble Etruscan family buried in a necropolis in Vulci, go to "The Tomb of the Silver Hands."

How Peaches Spread Across North America

UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA—According to a statement released by Penn State University, while peaches were likely first introduced to North America by Spanish explorers, the fruits traveled across the continent along Indigenous networks starting in the early 16th century. Indigenous populations quickly adopted and selectively bred the stonefruits, facilitating their dispersal. A team of Penn State researchers radiocarbon dated preserved peach pits previously unearthed at 28 archaeological sites in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas to build a chronology of the fruit tree's domestication. They confirmed that the earliest North American peaches—the first fruit domesticated in Eurasia to be adopted in Indigenous cultures of eastern North America—were likely planted at a Muscogee farmstead in Georgia's Oconee Valley. Occupation at the site began between 1520 and 1550, prior to the founding of Florida's Spanish colonial settlement of St. Augustine in 1565. This indicated that the fruit spread independently of the Spanish colony. “Peaches need a lot of care by people to be productive,” says Penn State anthopologist Jacob Holland-Lulewicz. “How quickly peaches spread is very much a product of Indigenous networks and land management.” As early as the 1620s, peach groves were also widespread in Indigenous settlements of the American Southeast. Records of early European settlers describe that new North American peach varieties even outnumbered those found in Europe by the mid- to late-1600s. According to the researchers, the fruit had become so integral that when ancestors of the modern-day Muscogee Nation were forced out of Georgia and Alabama in the 1800s, they took peaches with them. “The act of growing and caring for peaches is an important cultural practice for Muscogee (Creek) peoples today,” says Holland-Lulewicz. “These were the first peaches introduced in the 1500s and 1600s that were then carried halfway across the continent and continue to be grown today.” Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature Communications. For more about domestication of crops crucial to Indigenous communities in North America, go to “Letter from the Four Corners: In Search of Prehistoric Potatoes.”

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