1300-Year-Old Viking Boat

In Norse tradition, ship burials were used to honor the dead and give them a permanent resting place underwater. A discovery on the Norwegian island of Leka suggests that these rituals date back farther than previously thought.

Archaeologists working for the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage found possible ship fragments while investigating the area around the Herlaugshaugen burial mound, named for the ninth-century Viking king Herlaug who, according to legend, had himself and 11 of his companions buried alive rather than be killed by an opposing leader. 

They dug trenches at the site and dug up wood fragments and iron planking rivets that were believed to once have been part of a ship and eventually part of a ship burial. 

Using radiocarbon dating of the wood, they determined that the burial took place around 700 C.E., making it the earliest known example of a ship burial in Scandinavia.       READ MORE...

Rare Viking Era Gold Ring

We’ve all been there—scrolling through eBay or stopping at a roadside antique store, sorting through jewelry and thinking: “What if I find a really valuable antique in here?”

Most of the time, that doesn’t happen. But a young Norwegian woman, Mari Ingelin Heskestad, found herself living out that dream when she purchased a collection of cheap jewelry from an online auction house, only to notice one object stuck out.

Heskestad had an inkling the twisted gold ring was something unique. “It was really heavy, and shiny,” she told the newspaper Bergensavisen, BA. “It looked very special.”

But instead of bringing it straight to a dealer or auction house to cash in, she delivered it to the municipal cultural heritage department of Vestland County, in Western Norway. 

Karoline Hareide Breivik, the acting head of the department, confirmed in a statement that the ring dated to the late Iron Age or Viking Age. 

She noted that the find was extremely rare; it also marked the first time she was aware of a ring from the Scandinavian Viking Age having been found in an online auction.

“We’re so impressed with her—the fact that she reacted exactly as you should when you find something you might believe is of historic value,” Sigrun Wølstad, a senior advisor to the county, told Science Norway.  READ MORE...

Not From Viking Civilization

The two Viksø helmets were found in pieces a bog in eastern Denmark in 1942. Archaeologists think they were deliberately deposited there as religious offerings. (Image credit: National Museum of Denmark)

Two spectacular bronze helmets decorated with bull-like, curved horns may have inspired the idea that more than 1,500 years later, Vikings wore bulls' horns on their helmets, although there is no evidence they ever did.

Rather, the two helmets were likely emblems of the growing power of leaders in Bronze Age Scandinavia.

In 1942, a worker cutting peat for fuel discovered the helmets — which sport "eyes" and "beaks" — in a bog near the town of Viksø (also spelled Veksø) in eastern Denmark, a few miles northwest of Copenhagen. The helmets' design suggested to some archaeologists that the artifacts originated in the Nordic Bronze Age (roughly from 1750 B.C. to 500 B.C.), but until now no firm date had been determined. The researchers of the new study used radiocarbon methods to date a plug of birch tar on one of the horn

"For many years in popular culture, people associate the Viksø helmets with the Vikings," said Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "But actually, it's nonsense. The horned theme is from the Bronze Age and is traceable back to the ancient Near East."

The new research by Vandkilde and her colleagues confirms that the helmets were deposited in the bog in about 900 B.C. — almost 3,000 years ago and many centuries before the Vikings or Norse dominated the region.

That dates the helmets to the late Nordic Bronze Age, a time when archaeologists think the regular trade of metals and other items had become common throughout Europe and foreign ideas were influencing Indigenous cultures, the researchers wrote in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift.                  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS, CLICK HERE...