page_title: Viking expansion
section_title: Settlement demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Viking expansion / Motivation for expansion / Settlement demographics
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Н.К.Рерих "Заморские гости". Серия "Начало Руси. Славяне". 1901. Холст, масло. 85x112,5 см. Государственная Третьяковская галерея, Москва. Français&#160;: Nicolas Rœrich “Les invités étrangers [litt. les hôtes d'au-delà des mers]”. English: Nicholas Roerich "Guests from Overseas". From the series "Beginnings of Russia. The Slavs." 1901
context_page_description: Viking expansion is the process by which Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, sailed most of the North Atlantic, reaching south to North Africa and east to Russia, Constantinople and the Middle East as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries. Vikings under Leif Erikson, the heir to Erik the Red, reached North America and set up a short-lived settlement in present-day L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. Longer lasting and more established settlements were formed in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Great Britain, Ireland and Normandy.
  It is debated whether the term Viking represents all Norse settlers or just those who raided.
context_section_description: Viking settlements in Ireland and Great Britain are thought to have been primarily male enterprises; however, some graves show nearly equal male/female distribution. Disagreement is partly due to method of classification; previous archaeology often guessed biological sex from burial artifacts, whereas modern archaeology may use osteology to find biological sex, and isotope analysis to find origin (DNA sampling is usually not possible). The males buried during that period in a cemetery on the Isle of Man had mainly names of Norse origin, while the females there had names of indigenous origin. Irish and British women are mentioned in old texts on the founding of Iceland, indicating that the Viking explorers were accompanied there by women from the British Isles who either came along voluntarily or were taken along by force. Genetic studies of the population in the Western Isles and Isle of Skye also show that Viking settlements were established mainly by male Vikings who mated with women from the local populations of those places.
  However, not all Viking settlements were primarily male. Genetic studies of the Shetland population suggest that family units consisting of Viking women as well as men were the norm among the migrants to these areas.
  This may be because areas like the Shetland Islands, being closer to Scandinavia, were more suitable targets for family migrations, while frontier settlements further north and west were more suitable for groups of unattached male colonizers.
caption: Guests from Overseas (1901) by Nicholas Roerich, depicting a Viking raid. (Varangians in Rus')
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2048", "Image ImageLength": "1545", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2018:08:19 11:41:04", "Image ExifOffset": "232", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "382", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7372", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2048", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1545"}