Early Ship Burial Discovered on Norwegian Island

TRONDHEIM, NORWAY—According to a Phys.org report, analysis of an early ship burial in Norway is pushing back the use of monumental ship burials in Scandinavia by about 100 years. Geir Grønnesby of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and his colleagues used metal detectors to search the Herlaugshaugen mound on the island of Leka and recovered 29 iron rivets that had been used to build the ship. Most of the wood of the ship had rotted away, but small amounts of wood that remained attached to the nails were radiocarbon dated to about A.D. 700. This new date suggests that large seagoing ships were in use before the beginning of the Viking Age around A.D. 800. Constructing such a large mound would have required the command of a powerful king or chief and plenty of labor, Grønnesby and his team members concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity. For more on ship burials, go to "Setting Sail for Valhalla."