Archaeologists in Norway using ground-penetrating
radar have detected one of the largest Viking ship graves ever found.
Experts say intact
Viking ship graves of this size are vanishingly rare. “I think we could talk
about a hundred-year find,” says archaeologist Jan Bill, curator of Viking
ships at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. “It’s quite spectacular from an archaeology point of view.”
The site where the
ship grave was found is well-known. A burial mound 30 feet tall looms over the
site, serving as a local landmark visible from the highway just north of the
Swedish border. But archaeologists thought any archaeological remains in the
nearby fields must have been destroyed by farmers’ plows in the late 19th
century.
Then, this spring,
officials from the surrounding county of Ostfold asked experts from the Norwegian Institute for
Cultural Research to survey the
fields using a large ground-penetrating radar array. They were able to scan the
soil underneath almost 10 acres of farmland around the mound.
Underneath, they
found evidence of ten large graves and traces of a ship’s hull, hidden just 20
inches beneath the surface. Knut Paasche, head of the archaeology department at
the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Research and director of the recent work
at the site, estimates the ship was at least 65 feet long. It appears to be
well-preserved, with clear outlines of the keel and the first few strakes, or
lines of planking, visible in the radar scans.
The ship would
have been dragged onshore from the nearby Oslo fjord. At some point during the
Viking Age, it was the final resting place of someone powerful. “Ships like
this functioned as a coffin,” says Paasche. “There was one king or queen or
local chieftain on board.”
Source for more information: By Andrew PUBLISHED
Photograph courtesy NIKU
Curryhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture-exploration/2018/10/viking-ship-discovered-norway-archaeology/
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