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Viking-Era Discoveries & Theories

Tribble said:
A couple in northern Norway were pulling up the floor of their house to install insulation when they found a glass bead, and then a Viking axe. Now archeologists suspect they live above an ancient Viking grave.

https://www.thelocal.no/20200526/norway-couple-find-viking-grave-under-floor-of-house
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More on this find.

When Mariann Kristiansen tore up the floor of her house in northern Norway to set down a layer of insulation, she expected to find nothing more untoward than the odd bit of wonky masonry.

Instead, she and her husband exposed a grave from the height of the Viking era, complete with an iron axe head and detailed ornament.

The tomb had lain undiscovered beneath the house in Bodo, just inside the Arctic circle, since Ms Kristiansen’s great-grandfather built it in 1914, separated only by topsoil and rocks, which may once have been a cairn.

“The area around Bodo has a rich history, with many Iron Age settlements,” Geir Davidsen, head of cultural heritage at the local authority, said.

The items have been provisionally dated to between AD950 and 1050, towards the end of the Viking period and around the time of King Canute, who controlled a dominion comprising England, Norway and Denmark.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/viking-trove-found-under-floorboards-in-norway-8dvsk09cf
 
Unearthing a Viking ship, a rare discovery.

Archaeologists in Norway have begun the first excavation of a Viking ship in more than a century.

The vessel was discovered in a burial site in Gjellestad in the south-east of the country two years ago. Although it is believed to be in poor condition, the find remains significant as only three other well-preserved Viking ships have been discovered in the country. The excavation is expected to last five months.

Knut Paasche, an expert from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research said that only part of the ship's timber appeared to have been preserved, but added that modern techniques could allow archaeologists to discover its original shape.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53204948
 
So what sort of an accent did Ragnar have?

Vikings are well known for helmets, swords and longboats, and they must have made a racket when raiding settlements, but history does not quite record what they sounded like. The centuries cast a hush over their conversations, poems, songs and music.

That may soon change because a pioneering research project aims to breathe life into the sounds of early medieval languages, including Old Norse and Early Irish.

The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, part of Birmingham City University, and the composer Edmund Hunt are to lead an effort to fuse music and historic linguistics to examine the sonic footprints of Vikings and Celts.

The project, Augmented Vocality: Recomposing the Sounds of Early Irish and Old Norse, will apply new vocal processing and electronic music technology to turn surviving texts into sound.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture...oject-aims-to-decipher-sound-of-old-languages
 
Shield Maidens will not be erased from history! #istandwithLagertha

They were rapacious plunderers whose culture venerated male warriors both for their bravery on the battlefield and their macho behaviour off it, but historians argue that some Vikings may in fact have been transgender men.

The Norsemen from southern Scandinavia, who raided and traded their way across Europe and beyond from the 8th to the 11th centuries, were once regarded as subscribing to traditional gender roles. Men were fighters, explorers and farmers and women were mostly home-makers. But the history world was shaken three years ago when it emerged that a burial site that had been assumed to belong to a high-status warrior from the mid-900s housed a female skeleton.

Now scholars are exploring whether this could mean that the Norse people had transgender members.

Neil Price, professor of archaeology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, has written in his new book that the female-bodied Viking may “have been transgender . . . or non-binary, or gender fluid”.

The grave, in which swords, spears and two slaughtered horses were found alongside an expensively dressed skeleton, was first excavated in Birka, Sweden, in 1878.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...yed-a-key-role-in-pillage-life-h2pp82k98?t=ie
 
Hmmm. Applying the term 'transgender' to this individual seems like retrofitting. There were a few powerfully-built women about who took over duties as warriors, when not enough men were available. Wearing male battle clothing was probably good common sense.
 
ramonmercado said:
Shield Maidens will not be erased from history! #istandwithLagertha

They were rapacious plunderers whose culture venerated male warriors both for their bravery on the battlefield and their macho behaviour off it, but historians argue that some Vikings may in fact have been transgender men.

The Norsemen from southern Scandinavia, who raided and traded their way across Europe and beyond from the 8th to the 11th centuries, were once regarded as subscribing to traditional gender roles. Men were fighters, explorers and farmers and women were mostly home-makers. But the history world was shaken three years ago when it emerged that a burial site that had been assumed to belong to a high-status warrior from the mid-900s housed a female skeleton.

Now scholars are exploring whether this could mean that the Norse people had transgender members.

Neil Price, professor of archaeology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, has written in his new book that the female-bodied Viking may “have been transgender . . . or non-binary, or gender fluid”.

The grave, in which swords, spears and two slaughtered horses were found alongside an expensively dressed skeleton, was first excavated in Birka, Sweden, in 1878.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...yed-a-key-role-in-pillage-life-h2pp82k98?t=ie
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I’ve watched a couple of telly programmes in which the presenters have made much of so-called “Viking women warriors”. lt boils down to “we’ve found a female skeleton in a grave with weapons”. Desperate attempts at “wokeness” aside, where’s the evidence for women warriors?

l was fascinated by the Vikings as a kid, having spent two or three years in Norway. l read all of the Norse-based kids’ fiction l could locate. My interest still persists, though in a more low-key way: l went to the excellent Viking ship exhibit at the BM a few years ago. l don’t recall anything in the literature or sagas about female warriors. l seem to remember a wife who carried on the armed defence of a house after her husband was killed early on in the fight, but actual female warriors...?

My theory would that - as a sword, for example, was a hugely expensive item back then - a highly-respected woman might have been honoured by having one placed in her grave, for example.

Or am l 180⁰ wrong, and did l miss the 9th century Gerta’s Saga: How One Norse Woman Invaded England and Kebabbed King Alfred?

maximus otter
 
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maximus otter said:
I’ve watched a couple of telly programmes in which the presenters have made much of so-called “Viking women warriors”. lt boils down to “we’ve found a female skeleton in a grave with weapons”. Desperate attempts at “wokeness” aside, where’s the evidence for women warriors?

l was fascinated by the Vikings as a kid, having spent two or three years in Norway. l read all of the Norse-based kids’ fiction l could locate. My interest still persists, though in a more low-key way: l went to the excellent Viking ship exhibit at the BM. a few years ago. l don’t recall anything in the literature or sagas about female warriors. l seem to remember a wife who carried on the armed defence of a house after her husband was killed early on in the fight, but actual female warriors...?

My theory would that - as a sword, for example, was a hugely expensive item back then - a highly-respected woman might have been honoured by having one placed in her grave, for example.

Or am l 180⁰ wrong, and did l miss the 9th century Gerta’s Saga: How One Norse Woman Invaded England and Kebabbed King Alfred?

maximus otter
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Business is resumed. You've been alright for a few days but glad you are back to normal.

I agree most women would have raised kids, ran the farm, educated the family, balanced the books and grew the family farm - that was their "job" whilst their menfolk fucked off and got killed. I imagine most of the time it was a relief that these idiots were gone.

By your logic why would a sword be placed in a woman's grave if she was safely tucked up at home whilst men did proper things like killing? Particularly as you say swords were very valuable - that doesn't make any sense at all.

Or could some woman have decided that kids and staying at home was not for them and went Viking? Didn't John Skylitzes write about woman Vikings fighting - well yes he did.

Also Lagerthra? Written about in the Gesta Danorum in the 12 century? Rusla? That's the evidence.

So it's been written about - you've just chosen not to read it or you've not read enough in the first place.

Also see https://www.ancient.eu/article/35/female-gladiators-in-ancient-rome/
 
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Mythopoeika said:
Hmmm. Applying the term 'transgender' to this individual seems like retrofitting. There were a few powerfully-built women about who took over duties as warriors, when not enough men were available. Wearing male battle clothing was probably good common sense.
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Yes, there is a tendency to see the past through the eyes of the present. There have been tough women, some would say masculine, ever since we evolved from the apes, we live in relatively pampered times but they did not, and you had to be tough to survive in many cases (unless you were rich). These strong, violent females of history, we'll never know exactly what they were like or their personalities because they didn't record their lives. Doesn't mean were not still evolving as the human race, of course.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Business is resumed. You've been alright for a few days but glad you are back to normal.

I agree most women would have raised kids, ran the farm, educated the family, balanced the books and grew the family farm - that was their "job" whilst their menfolk fucked off and got killed. I imagine most of the time it was a relief that these idiots were gone.

By your logic why would a sword be placed in a woman's grave if she was safely tucked up at home whilst men did proper things like killing? Particularly as you say swords were very valuable - that doesn't make any sense at all.

Or could some woman have decided that kids and staying at home was not for them and went Viking? Didn't John Skylitzes write about woman Vikings fighting - well yes he did.

Also Lagerthra? Written about in the Gesta Danorum in the 12 century? Rusla? That's the evidence.

So it's been written about - you've just chosen not to read it or you've not read enough in the first place.

Also see https://www.ancient.eu/article/35/female-gladiators-in-ancient-rome/
Click to expand...

Would we want Max any other way?
 
Vikings were less of a race, more of a concept or culture

DNA analysis from Orkney bones found Scottish locals had merely adopted Viking identities, University of Cambridge research finds.

The biggest ever study of skeletons from archaeological sites in Europe and Greenland has shown that the Vikings were less of a race and more of an idea, with some even hailing from Scotland.

DNA analysis from bones from burial sites in Orkney has found that the remains were of Scottish locals who had adopted Viking identities.

Skeletons with British heritage were also found in Norway, while other Vikings had ancestors from Asian and Southern Europe.

The results of the six-year genetic project, published in the journal Nature, show that in England their genetic legacy has left the population with up to six percent Viking DNA.

In fact, the Vikings were so popular that it now appears that Britons chose to assimilate with their culture and practices. Genetically, Celtic speaking Picts of Scotland ‘became’ Vikings without ever genetically mixing with Scandinavians.

The team discovered that two men buried with swords and other Viking memorabilia in Orkney were in fact locals who had adopted Norse traditions.

The team sequenced the whole genomes from skeletons of 442 men, women, children and babies from their teeth and bones found in Viking cemeteries.

The findings show that distinct populations travelled to different locations. For example the Vikings from what is now Norway travelled to Ireland, Scotland, Iceland and Greenland.

The Vikings from what is now Denmark travelled to England. And Vikings from what is now Sweden went to the Baltic countries on all male ‘raiding parties’.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/16/vikings-less-race-concept-culture/

maximus otter
 
Did we discuss this, like about a humdred years ago?

(Anyhow, the Vikings certainly had men who took on the role of a woman as part of shamanatic practices, an idea borrowed from the Saami. it was regarded as rather subversive).
 
Killing the legend of buried Viking warrior swords

Swords found in early medieval graves don’t necessarily mark the final resting place of a warrior, new research suggests.

The study considered every description of, or reference to, a warrior burial in Old English or Old Norse literature, and found that none feature a sword, suggesting that it is highly unlikely that the presence of a sword indicates a warrior burial.

“If the presence of a sword in a grave doesn’t define a person’s status as a warrior, then perhaps we have to think in a completely different way about what a sword represented in the early medieval mortuary context,” says Dr Sebo, a lecturer in medieval literature.”

Working in conjunction with archaeological data, the researchers found many anomalies to challenge the assumed significance of buried swords.

This includes swords found in the graves of people with obvious and significant deformities, meaning they could not have used the weapons in battle. It therefore poses significant questions about what such a buried sword signifies – perhaps to provide them with a means of defending themselves from otherworldly foes when crossing over in the afterlife?

https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2019/03/20/killing-the-legend-of-buried-viking-swords/

maximus otter
 
King Ship.

Pyramids, castles, palaces: symbols of power and status have taken many forms down the ages, and for the Vikings what really counted was the longship.

This month Norwegian archaeologists hope to complete their excavation of a rare, buried longship at Gjellestad, an ancient site south-east of Oslo. It is the first such excavation in Norway for about a century. Most of the ocean-going ship has rotted away over the centuries, but archaeologist Dr Knut Paasche believes the layout of the iron nails will still enable a replica to be built eventually.

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) revealed it to be about 19m (62ft) long and 5m (16ft) wide - putting it on a par with the well-preserved Oseberg and Gokstad Viking ships on display in Oslo. Those ships were found on the western side of the wide Oslo Fjord. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55145985
 
The find includes a rare gold arm ring.

A "stunning" collection of 1,000-year-old gold and silver Viking jewellery has been discovered on the Isle of Man by a metal detectorist.

Retired police officer Kath Giles made the find on farm land in the north of the island. The horde includes a gold arm ring and a "massive" silver brooch dating back to 950 AD. It was unearthed in December but has been revealed for the first time during a coroner's hearing.

Manx National Heritage's curator of archaeology Allison Fox said the arm ring in particular was a "rare find". Ms Giles said she immediately knew she had found "something very special" and was "thrilled" at the discovery, which is likely to be worth several thousand pounds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-56111192
 
Did Vikings Host Rituals Designed to Stop Ragnarök in This Volcanic Cave?

Some 1,000 years ago, Viking elites may have hosted ceremonies intended to avert the apocalypse at a large ritual site deep in a volcanic cave in Iceland.

viking_stone_boat.jpg


As the Jerusalem Post reports, archaeologists investigating the site, located about 980 feet beyond the cave’s entrance, discovered a boat-shaped rock structure, as well as beads and decorative materials from distant lands.

The team’s findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, show that the eruption that formed the cave, known as Surtshellir, occurred in the late ninth century A.D., soon after the first Viking settlement of Iceland.

Per the paper, this incident was probably the first major volcanic eruption witnessed by people in northern Europe since the end of the last Ice Age more than 10,000 years prior. The explosion covered about 90 square miles of fertile land in volcanic rock.

“[T]he impacts of this eruption must have been unsettling, posing existential challenges for Iceland’s newly arrived settlers,” write the authors in the study.

1619772771264.jpeg


Vikings entered the newly formed cave soon after the lava cooled. They constructed the boat structure, placing ritual offerings inside and burning the bones of animals, including sheep, goats, cattle, horses and pigs. Historical records show that the Vikings associated the cave with Surtr, a giant responsible for battling the gods during Ragnarök and bringing about the end of the world in Norse mythology.

Among the artifacts found in the cave was orpiment, a pigment from eastern Turkey used for decorative purposes, and 63 beads, some of which came from as far away as Baghdad.

The new research shows that conversion to Christianity seems to have led to the abandonment of rituals at the cave. One of the last artifacts placed in the rock boat was a set of scale weights, including one in the form of a Christian cross, which may have been intended as a signal of the end of pagan rituals at the site. Still, some of the mythology around the cave appears to have persisted, with an Icelandic Christian tradition identifying Surtshellir as the place where Satan would emerge on Judgment Day.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-vikings-conduct-rituals-stop-ragnarok-cave-180977619/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surtshellir

maximus otter
 
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Did the Vikings get to the Azores in the 8th Century?

In 1427, the Portuguese navigator Diogo de Silves first set foot on an uninhabited, Sun-kissed island with white sand beaches, crystal blue bays, and dramatic cliffs, proclaiming it Santa Maria Island.

Later arrivals by other Portuguese explorers revealed it to be the southeasternmost island of the Azores archipelago, which lies about 1368 kilometers west of Portugal’s coast.

According to a new study of lake sediment cores, however, the Portuguese may not have been the first people to reach the island paradise: Viking seafarers may have arrived some 700 years earlier than de Silves and his crew. Any Vikings were long gone by the time Portuguese sailors arrived, the authors note, but some Norse rodent stowaways may have left a lasting genetic mark on the island.

The paper is a welcome addition to the sparse data on the Azores prehistory, says Jeremy Searle, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University. His team proposed a Norse connection to the island in 2015, based on genetic similarities between Azorean and northern European mice. “To actually have firm data supporting that is obviously pretty gratifying.”

Conclusive archaeological evidence of humans in the Azores is sparse and only dates back to the early 15th century. In recent years, a few studies hinted at even earlier occupation, although it wasn’t clear who these earlier settlers were or when they arrived. About 10 years ago, Pedro Raposeiro, an ecologist at the University of the Azores, Ponta Delgada, and colleagues set out to collect cylindrical cores of sediment from five lakebeds around the archipelago as part of an effort to detail the region’s climate history. As particles in the air settle to the bottom of the lake, they form datable layers. The researchers suspected they would find signs of human disturbance—pollen from nonnative crops, spores from fungi that grow on livestock dung—dating back to the early 1400s. And they did.

But the researchers were surprised to find these signals extended even further back in time. In a sedimentary layer dating to between 700 C.E. and 850 C.E. taken from Peixinho Lake on the Azores’s Pico Island, the researchers saw a sudden uptick of an organic compound called 5-beta-stigmastanol, which is found in the feces of ruminants such as cows and sheep. They also saw an increase in charcoal particles and a dip in the abundance of native tree pollens, perhaps pointing to humans cutting down and burning trees to clear space for livestock to graze, Raposeiro says. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/vikings-paradise-were-norse-first-settle-azores
 
Regarding the previous two posts, the Azores, with their natural beacon/landmark of Pico mountain visible at great distance, would have been a natural stopping off point for early trans-Atlantic seafarers.
Now that we know that the Vikings reached both the Azores and the Americas and clearly invested some time and effort in slash and burn deforestation and settlement building, the mystery remains as to why their colonies didn't thrive.
When Europeans re-discovered the Azores and the New World 6 or 7 centuries later, there were no accounts of meeting any Scandinavian types, so what happened to all the Vikings? Could a Vesuvius-like eruption have wiped them out on the Azores and hostilities with native tribes resulted in their demise in the Americas?
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Regarding the previous two posts, the Azores, with their natural beacon/landmark of Pico mountain visible at great distance, would have been a natural stopping off point for early trans-Atlantic seafarers.
Now that we know that the Vikings reached both the Azores and the Americas and clearly invested some time and effort in slash and burn deforestation and settlement building, the mystery remains as to why their colonies didn't thrive.
When Europeans re-discovered the Azores and the New World 6 or 7 centuries later, there were no accounts of meeting any Scandinavian types, so what happened to all the Vikings? Could a Vesuvius-like eruption have wiped them out on the Azores and hostilities with native tribes resulted in their demise in the Americas?
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It's reckoned they left Greenland due to a mini Ice Age.

I agree with you though. I'd probably put my money on the Natives sensibly clearing them out.

All you need is a couple of things to go wrong with a settlement that is as isolated as the Azores. Difficult just to nip back to Europe for support. It's also possible Earthquakes and Tsunami may have wiped them out.

The 1700 Tsunami did kill off a fair few Native American coastal communities. https://ceetep.oregonstate.edu/site...ive-american-oral-tradition-and-mythology.pdf

Also, I think it was in Egil's Saga. I'm sure he mentioned some communities in Greenland just got really homesick and upped and left. Does anyone remember this?
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Regarding the previous two posts, the Azores, with their natural beacon/landmark of Pico mountain visible at great distance, would have been a natural stopping off point for early trans-Atlantic seafarers.
Now that we know that the Vikings reached both the Azores and the Americas and clearly invested some time and effort in slash and burn deforestation and settlement building, the mystery remains as to why their colonies didn't thrive.
When Europeans re-discovered the Azores and the New World 6 or 7 centuries later, there were no accounts of meeting any Scandinavian types, so what happened to all the Vikings? Could a Vesuvius-like eruption have wiped them out on the Azores and hostilities with native tribes resulted in their demise in the Americas?
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They wouldn't be the only ones who didn't survive the new world. There was a colony in Virginia 600 years later that was destroyed by winter and illness.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Also, I think it was in Egil's Saga. I'm sure he mentioned some communities in Greenland just got really homesick and upped and left. Does anyone remember this?
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I'm not that old.
 
Brooches have depictions of birds but no tailless cats.

Two intricately decorated Viking age bronze brooches found by metal detectorists on the Isle of Man have gone on display for the first time.

The 1,000-year-old pieces, which are about 10cm in length, date back to about AD 950. The ornate oval brooches feature silver wire decorations and depictions of birds.

Manx National Heritage said the items filled in a "missing piece" of the island's Viking history.

After being discovered in 2018, the items were sent to York Archaeological Trust for specialist conservation work before being returned to the island earlier this year. Although brooches known to have been worn by Scandinavian men from the period have been found on the island, until now no brooches associated with women had been discovered.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-59703390
 
ramonmercado said:
Let's start with the helmets, so beloved of Scandinavian football fans. The Vikings never wore them. They have only been included in depictions since the 19th Century. Wagner celebrated Norse legend in his opera Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) and horned helmets were created as props for the performance of his Ring Cycle at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876.

The horned helmet is based on historical fact, says Emma Boast from the Jorvik Centre, but it just wasn't a Viking thing. The British Museum has a ceremonial horned helmet from the Iron Age that was found in the River Thames. It is dated 150-50 BC. ...
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This Live Science article reinforces the refutation of the common attribution of horned helmets to Vikings, based on dating of two impressive specimens from Denmark.
Horned 'Viking' helmets were actually from a different civilization, archaeologists say

Two spectacular bronze helmets decorated with bull-like, curved horns may have inspired the idea that more than 1,500 years later, Vikings wore bulls' horns on their helmets, although there is no evidence they ever did.

Rather, the two helmets were likely emblems of the growing power of leaders in Bronze Age Scandinavia.

In 1942, a worker cutting peat for fuel discovered the helmets — which sport "eyes" and "beaks" — in a bog near the town of Viksø (also spelled Veksø) in eastern Denmark, a few miles northwest of Copenhagen. The helmets' design suggested to some archaeologists that the artifacts originated in the Nordic Bronze Age (roughly from 1750 B.C. to 500 B.C.), but until now no firm date had been determined. The researchers of the new study used radiocarbon methods to date a plug of birch tar on one of the horns. ...

"For many years in popular culture, people associated the Viksø helmets with the Vikings," said Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "But actually, it's nonsense. The horned theme is from the Bronze Age and is traceable back to the ancient Near East."

The new research by Vandkilde and her colleagues confirms that the helmets were deposited in the bog in about 900 B.C. — almost 3,000 years ago and many centuries before the Vikings or Norse dominated the region. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/horned-viking-helmets-from-different-civilization
 
From Greenland to Kyiv.

When archaeologist Natalia Khamaiko first started digging in a vacant lot at 35 Spaska Street in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2007, her expectations were low. Previous archaeological surveys had yielded little, despite the site’s location along what had once been a thriving medieval waterfront, where Norse merchants from Scandinavia traded furs for silver minted in the Islamic world.

Khamaiko and her colleagues had better luck. They unearthed layer after layer of new finds, preserved by periodic flooding from the Dniepr River. A layer dating to the 1100s C.E. yielded gold wire, glass fragments, bits of carved ivory, an iron sword from Germany, and thousands of animal bones, including nine massive fragments that turned out to be walrus snouts. Those snouts and carvings, ancient DNA reveals, came from a genetic group of walruses found only in the western Atlantic Ocean. They suggest a thriving 4000-kilometer trade route stretched from Greenland and Canada to the muddy banks of the Dniepr.

The find “adds something very important and unexpected” to researchers’ understanding of trade in the Viking age and early medieval period, says Søren Sindbæk, an archaeologist at Aarhus University who was not involved in the research.

Walrus ivory was one of the most prized commodities in medieval times, valued across Europe and the Islamic world for its use in sword hilts, gaming pieces, and sacramental objects. Walrus tusks were transported still attached to the animal’s snout, then broken off once they were ready to be carved. Scholars previously thought the medieval ivory trade was regional, with artisans in Scandinavia using tusks from Greenland and those in modern-day Russia and Ukraine sourcing ivory from the Russian Arctic. “Eastern European finds were from Eastern European walruses,” says James Barrett, an archaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

But the walrus skulls in Kyiv showed something else. When Khamaiko, Barrett, and other colleagues analyzed DNA preserved in the dense bone, they found the animals were from a group known to live only in Greenland and eastern Canada. “We were very surprised. We have never known before that there are finds like these in Kyiv,” Khamaiko, now an archaeologist at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, wrote in an email.

Chemical traces in the walrus bone also matched walrus samples from Greenland and Iceland, but not samples from the Barents Sea north of Kyiv. And cut marks on the skull fragments, perhaps made as decoration or to help snap out the tusks, resembled similar marks on Scandinavian finds. Finally, near the walrus snouts, Khamaiko’s team recovered a handful of gaming pieces from a hnefatafl set, a chesslike board game common in northern Europe at the time; one was made from walrus ivory. “They look exactly like similar pieces that were found in the Scandinavian countries,” Khamaiko wrote. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...lrus-ivory-greenland-kyiv-ancient-skulls-show
 
@ramonmercado this reminds me, in a compare and contrast way :) , of the excavations in York but especially of those in Dublin.
 
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