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Archaeologists in Sweden dug up 139 Viking Age graves when excavating a Stone Age settlement.
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Along with human and animal remains, the team found three large ship-forming stone settings and a ship form mound likely used as massive grave markers.
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Only about six percent of the burial ground has been excavated, leaving plenty of history yet to be revealed.
It was supposed to be a routine Stone Age settlement excavation to clear a path for a new roundabout and water pipes near Tvååker in southern Sweden. It turned into so much more, as archaeologists first started uncovering furnaces and flint before stumbling upon 139 cremation graves and stones that were once a part of ship-shaped graves.
This wasn’t an average Stone Age settlement. Excavators had found a Viking Age burial ground.
“When we did the preliminary excavation in May 2017,” Petra Nordin, the project leader, said in a statement from Sweden’s National Historical Museums’ Arkeologerna, “we found five graves, on layers of fire waste and bone fragments from humans and dogs. Then we realized that there was a large Viking burial ground that we had to focus on.”
That focus has already revealed 139 identified graves, artifacts, and the discovery of ship-shaped stones used as grave markers. And the site is just beginning to yield interesting results. “We have only excavated six percent of the burial ground,” Nordin said. Even a 2023 report on the growing finds didn’t include the latest information on the graves.
The archaeologists found the cemetery on a flat ridge along two important transport routes, one a river and one an old road that once transported iron. With the ground plowed and leveled multiple times to accommodate pastures, the team had to sift through various layers of sediment and artifacts but was able to discover three large stones shaped like boats and a ship-shaped mound, all of which were popularly used as grave markers, some of which were mass graves, in Viking burials.
“Sometimes we have gone with a metal detector and found objects in a place that allow us to say that this is probably actually a grave,” Anders Kiellin, an archeologist on the project, said in a statement.
The burial mounds include one constructed in the shape of a ship that stands at a towering 164 feet tall. Viking culture would often use the remains of actual ships that were ritually burned in creating the mounds, and the excavation team said that Grave 68 may feature stone packing around what were once possibly pieces of a Viking ship.
It was common for the dead to be burned on a pyre during this time, and most of the artifacts found at the site have been scorched. But the team has discovered buckles, ceramics, and a clipped Arab coin dated between 795 and 806 A.D., which falls in line with the approximate age of the oldest graves located at the site. Animal bones of birds, dogs, cattle, and pigs were found among the human bones.
“After the dead have been burned,” Nordin said, “unburnt animals have been placed on top, before the graves are finally closed. The most common animal bones were cattle, such as cows, and it is probably about food sacrifices.”
While archaeologists first expected to find a larger village at the site, discovering such a large burial ground now begs the question: where did everyone live before their deaths? The experts now believe that there was a probably a village in the Tvååker area that had expanded, but where that village was located remains a mystery.
“There has been talk, amongst other things, that there may have been a Viking-era trading post at Gamla Kopstad, south of the town of Varberg, or at Galtaback Harbor,” Nordin said. “Is the village located at the mouth of the Tvååker [River]or is it near the burial ground? We don’t know. But it is exciting to see what will emerge in the future.”
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