River Kings

The raid on the abbey at Lindisfarne late in the eighth century is the usual starting point for the Viking age, but Cat Jarman treats it as only a convenient place to begin. A bioarchaeologist, she uses forensic techniques on Vikings buried in Britain: thousand-year-old teeth reveal childhood diet and a likely birthplace, and radiocarbon dating narrows a death date to a few years. The book follows a carnelian bead that came into her temporary possession in 2012 back to eighth-century Baghdad. She finds that people from the Middle East travelled with the Vikings, and suggests a slave trade along the Silk Road may explain these links between East and West. It was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Tyler Cowen included it among the best non-fiction books of 2021 on Marginal Revolution.