An ancient solar flare illuminated the start of the Viking Age

I believe that the various layer/boundary processes like dendrochronology, soil profiles, C14, ceramic luminescence, geomagnetic change, kinda-sorta line up and so people can use remarkably 'different' inputs, to put an archeological site into a context in time which at least to some approximation "lines up" with other evidence.

So if you find a tooth which dates from one kind of ring mark to date X, and a wooden artifact to date Y, and soil profile to date Z and they have distinct periods, you can start to tell a story about how they co-relate.

I like the ones which say "the bone marks say they were a metalworker (heavy use of hammer changing ligament anchor points)" combined with "the tooth enamel had to be laid down in puberty in the black sea" combined with "we found it in a layer in scandenavian bogs which we know date to this time" to say: Metalworkers were mobile from the black sea right up to the arctic circle, at this time.

> And then, on June 8, 793, a group of marauders attacked a small island off the northeastern coast of Great Britain… With that description, the Vikings entered the annals of medieval history

I had no idea it was dated that precisely. I don’t suppose there is a June 8 “holiday” in any of the Scandinavian countries?

As an Aroura photographer, I know that these storms are fleeting and don't last long. Maybe the sky was illuminated for one night. But not long enough to make a serious impact to a centuries long campaign.

Vikings did Vikinging a full century before Lindisfarne on the eastern shore of the Baltic. There’s Salme ships on Saaremaa dated to around 700 AD, as well as the Scandinavian settlement in Grobina, Courland with its start dated to 650 AD.

There are also Vendel age Scandinavian finds deeper in Courland along the rivers, such as seeming trade outposts and such.

Sure, maybe that doesn’t count as it’s primarily Gotlanders, and the lands in question were not Christian, but Scandinavians learned to sail around, trade, fight, and colonize long before Lindisfarne.

>> the sun has on several occasions, about once every millennium and a half or so it appears, sent flares in our direction with enough energy to make measurably more carbon-14.

>>The solar flare in 775 and a slightly weaker one in 993 with a distinct carbon spike

How strong were these in relation to the Carrington Event? If these occur roughly every 1.5 millenia, how 'rough' is that repetition? We're at almost 1.25 millenia today, and our technology is massively vulnerable to a Carrington level event...