And so it proved, for within that time the ship and the pyre, the girl, and the corpse had all become ashes and then dust. On the spot where the ship stood after having been hauled ashore, they built something like a round mound. In the middle of it they raised a large post of birch-wood on which they wrote the names of the dead man and of the king of the Rus, and then the crowd dispersed.
The Risala, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan
A 1904 photograph shows the excavation of a Viking ship burial in Oseber