***
By ANDREW CURRY
According
to historians, the Viking Age began on June 8, A.D. 793 , at an island monastery off the coast of
northern England Lindisfarne , with plunder and
slaughter.” The “heathen men” were Vikings, fierce warriors who sailed from Scandinavia and bore down on
their prey in Europe and beyond in sleek, fast-sailing ships. In
the centuries that followed, the Vikings’ vessels carried them deep into Russia Constantinople , Sicily North Africa . They organized
flotillas capable of carrying warriors across vast distances, and terrorized
the English, Irish, and French coasts with lightning-fast raids. Exploratory
voyages to the west took them all the way to North America .
The Vikings’ explosion
across Europe and Asia and into the Americas Lindisfarne is surprisingly
shaky. A recent discovery on a remote Baltic island is beginning to change
that. Two ships filled with slain warriors uncovered on the Estonian island of
Saaremaa may help archaeologists and historians understand how the Vikings’
warships evolved from short-range, rowed craft to sailing ships; where the
first warriors came from; and how their battle tactics developed. “We all agree
these burials are Scandinavian in origin,” says Marge Konsa, an archaeologist
at the University of Tartu
Between them, the two boats contain the remains of dozens of men. Seven lay haphazardly in the smaller of the two boats, which was found first. Nearby, in the larger vessel, 33 men were buried in a neat pile, stacked like wood, together with their weapons and animals. The site seems to be a hastily arranged mass grave, the final resting place for Scandinavian warriors killed in an ill-fated raid on
In 2008, workers digging trenches for electrical cables in the tiny island town of
Soon Konsa realized
she had found something unique for this place and period. “This isn’t a fishing
boat, it’s a war boat,” Konsa says. “It’s quite fast and narrow, and also quite
light.” Based on radiocarbon dating of tiny fragments of boat timbers, Konsa
estimates the vessel was built between 650 and 700, and perhaps repaired and
patched for decades before making its final voyage. It had no sail, and would
have been rowed for short stretches along the Baltic coast, or between islands
to make the journey from Scandinavia to the seafarers’
hunting grounds farther east. From bones found inside the boat, Konsa pieced
together the remains of the seven men, all between the ages of 18 and 45. She
also found knives, whetstones, and a bone comb among the remains. The craft was
a remarkable find—the first such boat ever recovered in Estonia
Two
years later, Jüri Peets, an archaeologist at the University of Tallinn Nova Scotia Constantinople , was made possible by
their mastery of the ocean, particularly the sail. However, archaeologically
speaking, there’s not a great deal of evidence for sailing in the Baltic until
roughly 820, when researchers think a 60-foot-long vessel, called the Oseberg
ship, was built. Discovered in 1904, the Oseberg ship was used for the burial
of a high-ranking Viking woman in what is today Norway
The Salme site may
change all that, pushing the first evidence for sailing back a century or more.
Though, again, most of the wood had disappeared, by measuring the position of
the more than 1,200 nails and rivets and carefully looking at soil where the
wood had rotted, Peets concluded that Salme 2 was about 55 feet long and 10
feet wide. The craft had a keel, an element critical to keeping a sailing ship
upright in the water. Peets believes clusters of iron and wood near the center
of the boat and pieces of cloth recovered from the soil are indications of a
mast and sail.
If he is right, Salme
2 is the oldest sailing vessel ever found in the Baltic. And other scholars are
inclined to agree. “I would think that the big Salme boat would be the perfect
place to find the first example of a sail before the Viking Age,” says Jan
Bill, an archaeologist and specialist in Viking ships at the University of Oslo England Saaremaa , a distance of about 100 miles. The vessel
also shows that the key technology of the Viking Age took shape at least
decades, and maybe almost a whole century, before 793.
Like its nearby sister
vessel, Salme 2 brought a crew with it when it was buried. “Three days after we
started digging, a sword was discovered, and after some days skeletons in rows
began to appear,” says Ragnar Saage, a graduate student who worked with Peets
on the excavation. It took two summers of painstaking work to excavate all the
bodies: 33 in all, stacked neatly four deep. “We couldn’t believe our eyes,”
says Saage. “It was a strange feeling to dig this kind of site.”
Taken together, the two ships represent a tantalizing mystery. Peets and Konsa agree the vessels were probably buried at the same time, as part of the same event. Based on the boats’ construction and the artifacts and remains found inside, the archaeologists believe the dead men were Scandinavian, probably from what is today Sweden, 150 miles away across the Baltic Sea. But what were they doing in
Peets, who finished
excavating the larger ship, Salme 2, in September 2012, has gathered enough
information to sketch out what might have happened. Lured across the sea by
booty, to collect tribute from the locals, or to settle a grudge, a mighty
raiding party met a formidable foe on this isolated beach. After a struggle,
one side’s survivors—there’s no way to tell if they were the winners or the
losers—gathered the bodies together and ceremonially destroyed their fallen comrades’
swords by burning, and then bending or breaking them.
The surviving warriors
then had enough time to pull at least two of their ships 70 yards up the gently
sloping beach. The 33 men of Salme 2, all of whom were vigorous, healthy adult
men of fighting age, were then buried inside. This was done with obvious care
and respect. “The skeletons were covered with shields, like a blanket,” says
Saage. (The 15 shields have long since rotted away, but their bronze bosses and
fragments of their handles remain.) The men were buried with their belongings,
including everything from weaponry to elk-horn combs, joints of sheep and cow,
and even the remains of dogs and a hawk. “Every time I tried to clean the
skeletons or bring up bodies, I found more artifacts and swords,” says Raili
Allmae, the forensic anthropologist in charge of excavating the site’s human
remains. Fragments of textile, perhaps bits of a sail used as a shroud to cover
the pile of bodies before sand was laid on top, were also recovered from among
the bones. The condition and placement of the warriors in the smaller ship are
harder to explain. Konsa used a program designed to help reconstruct crime
scenes to piece together the men’s original locations. Some had been slumped in
pairs or alone and some were leaning up against the inside of the hull in a
sitting position. And these men are much less richly equipped than those found
nearby.
While boat burials are familiar from both written sagas and archaeological finds in
Yet to trained eyes
the burials bore indications of a rush job. Only the bodies in each ship were
covered with sand, perhaps to discourage scavenging animals from disturbing
them. Men moving rocks with their hands and scooping sand with their helmets
could have done the job in a few hours. “It is an amazing find,” says John
Ljungkvist, an expert in Iron Age burials at Uppsala University Sweden
The job done, the two
boats and their cargo of corpses were then abandoned on the beach. Peets and
Konsa think a heavy fall or winter storm might have washed up enough sand and
gravel to partially fill in and cover the crafts. Over the next 1,300 years,
the area’s coastline receded, leaving the boat graves buried more than 200
yards from the sea and 12 feet above the waterline.
The bodies themselves
are already proving a rich source of information, drawing clear connections
between the Vendel era and the aggression that would soon emerge as a Viking
hallmark. Given the Vikings’ bloodthirsty reputation, surprisingly little is
known about warfare leading up to the Viking era. “A mass grave from this
period is unique,” says Ljungkvist. “We don’t have physical evidence of warfare
and raiding, so that is very special.” By looking at the bodies, archaeologists
can tell a great deal about how they died and how such raiding parties might
have been organized.
It’s a key question.
Scholars have long debated why the Vikings expanded as rapidly and aggressively
as they did—and why the Viking raids on western Europe didn’t happen earlier.
The theories range from climate change, with a warm period in Europe around 800 creating
overpopulation that forced young men to seek their fortune elsewhere, to a
coincidence of greed, wanderlust, and the technology to make long-distance
raids possible.
The Salme finds
suggest that the historical view of the Viking Age as a sudden phenomenon needs
a radical adjustment. It’s clear from the remains that Scandinavian princes
were organizing war parties decades or more before the fateful 793 raid on Lindisfarne : Though the men were
interred en masse, the Salme sailing party was far from egalitarian. The
weapons paint a picture of warriors led by a rich warlord or chieftain and a
handful of well-equipped lieutenants. Even the stack of bodies on Salme 2 was
hierarchical. Five men with double-edged swords and elaborately decorated hilts
were buried on top. At the bottom, the bodies were buried with simple, single-edged
iron blades. “These were some noblemen with their retinue,” Peets says. “The
more elaborate swords are clearly connected to people of higher status.” One of
the uppermost skeletons even had an elaborately decorated walrus-ivory gaming
piece—perhaps the “king”—in his mouth. A jeweled sword hilt, the finest of the
40 blades in the burial, was found nearby. It’s possible the men found in Salme
1 were from the bottom of the social ladder. Konsa thinks they may have been
servants or lower-class “support staff,” and buried with less care, and fewer
grave goods, far away from the warriors and aristocrats of Salme 2.
To
find out who these men were and where they came from,
archaeologists are looking at the skeletons themselves. Since Peets finished
excavating Salme 2 in fall 2012, the remains of the slain warriors have come to
rest at the University of Tallinn Institute of History
Allmae has ample
reason to think the men were felled in a fierce battle. Lying on a steel lab
table is a humerus, or upper arm bone. Lining it up against her own arm, she
demonstrates how the man probably raised his right hand over his head to ward
off sword blows—to no avail. Deep chop marks cut clean through the bone.
Another warrior’s skull was cut straight through. “Somebody chopped off the top
of his head,” Allmae says. “I also suppose it was done with a sword—two
strokes.” Only five of the 40 skeletons have clear cut marks on their bones,
which she says isn’t unusual for mass graves—there are lots of ways to die in
battle, after all. “There were also arrowheads in the body or in the pelvic
area that could have been deadly but not touched the bones,” Allmae adds.
Bloody flesh wounds that didn’t connect with bone could also have felled the
men without leaving a lasting trace.
Unlike many
battlefield graves, and different from the treatment of the seven men found in
the first ship, the Salme 2 bodies seem to have been laid to rest with some
thought to the afterlife. The man with the severed arm was found with the rest
of his limb carefully arranged in its proper place. Allmae’s analysis shows
that this would have been an intimidating crew, especially in eighth-century Europe . The average height
was 5’10”, and several of the men might have been well over six feet tall. Some
of the bones bear signs of old wounds, suggesting these were veterans of more
than one scrap. Based on the style of the swords, arrowheads, and other
weapons, in addition to the objects found in the graves and especially the
boats themselves, Peets and Konsa are already certain that the men were from Scandinavia . “These were very
typical swords for Scandinavian warriors,” Peets says. More clues may come from
the chemical composition of the bones. Allmae plans to use a technique called
isotopic analysis that matches chemical signatures in the bones to trace
elements in water to help pin down where the men might have grown up.
For
all the information the team has gathered from the
excavation, there are some questions the dead men simply can’t answer. It’s
clear there was a battle, but who was fighting whom? A saga written in 1225
tells of a Swedish noble named Yngvar who met his end while raiding in Estonia
If the battle was a
raid on a village, or a military clash with locals, the visitors may have won a
costly victory. “They must have had some control of the battleground—not
necessarily won, but enough time to make the boat graves,” says Saage. But the
fact that the dead men and their grave goods were left untouched long enough
for storms to cover them with sand suggests the area was abandoned after the
fight.
Perhaps
the men were fighting other Scandinavians. Konsa found
arrowheads where the outside of the smaller ship’s hull would have been, as
though arrows were embedded in the wood. “Maybe the battle had already begun
out at sea,” she says, before fighting continued on the beach. Could rival
warlords have been duking it out on an isolated shore, carrying on a feud begun
back home? Or was this the final resting place of the fabled Yngvar, brought
low by fierce local fighters? We’ll never know the whole story. But the remains
of these bold, unlucky adventurers are enough to sketch out a powerful scene of
a voyage gone badly wrong, and a warlord slain while leading his men into
battle on a far-off shore.
Andrew
Curry is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.
Posts
