BERGEN, NORWAY—ArtNet News reports that archaeologists from the University of Bergen are investigating the site of a burial mound containing a 100-foot-long Viking ship on the Myklebustgarden farm in western Norway. The burial, dated to the ninth century, was first excavated in the nineteenth century. One of the researchers to study the burial at the time was Anders Lorange, who was hired by the Bergen Museum in 1874. Archaeologist Morten Ramstad of the University of Bergen and his colleagues have now unearthed a glass bottle containing a letter about the excavation written by Lorange, his business card, and five coins wrapped in a piece of paper. The researchers have found some discrepancies between the information contained in the letter and what was found in the burial, however. It appears that Lorange was mistaken about the number of Viking shields recovered from the tomb, and he did not list an eighth-century bronze vessel thought to have been made in Ireland. “It tells us that even though Lorange was the archaeologist from the museum, he was not the one who did the actual excavation work,” Ramstad said. “He probably didn’t have a complete overview when he put the note in the bottle,” he explained. Lorange also left a message written in runic alphabet at the end of the letter, reading “Emma Gade my girlfriend.” A note written by Lorange about another woman was discovered at a different archaeological site in Norway in 1939. To read about a Viking ship burial uncovered on the Norwegian island of Edoya, go to "Sailing the Viking Seas."
