Monumental ship burial beneath ancient Norwegian mound predates the Viking Age

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-monumental-ship-burial-beneath-ancient.html

by pseudolus • 3 months ago

106 27 3 months ago

mzi4• 3 months ago

It isn't like boats were invented in Scandinavia by the vikings. At Tanum, close to the present Norwegian border we have rock carvings dating back to 1700BCE, with prominent ships depicted. Boatrs have been important in Scandinavia for a long time.

https://www.tanumworldheritage.se/rock-carving-facts/?lang=e...

Tor3• 3 months ago

Indeed - though the article doesn't really state the boats weren't in existence before the Vikings, it's about ship burials which apparently weren't supposed to exist in Scandinavia until the practice was imported from England. A theory I'd never heard before, but I guess that's on me. In any case, the find in the article seems to contradict that theory.

As for boats, the Viking age has been connected with acquiring sail technology, not so much with boats as such (which have existed for a long time, the rock carvings you linked to show depictions of boat designs which have actually been found in archeological digs, and that indicates that older, different carvings are also true and that boats were used for long distance trade and expeditions a millenium or two, at least, before the Vikings).

If the appearance of efficient sail technology really coincided with the beginning of Viking raids is still in the open I believe.

mzi4• 3 months ago

Stone ships had been burial sites for two thousand years before the Vikings came to Lindisfarne. And long distance trade has been established and given the extent of the Battle of Tollense contact between tribes must have stretched far and deep. And Britain was an important source of tin so trade routes both started and ended there.

mzi4• 3 months ago

I had to look into this again. In Valsgärde, close to Uppsala, Sweden you have confirmed ship/boat burials from 600CE. At the same time as the ship burials at Sutton Hoo in England. The "Swedish" (at the time national borders were different) had more in common with "Denmark" that in turn had closer relations to England. Tröndelag Norway had less of international trade leading up to the Viking age, at least compared to Denmark/Jutland and the Baltic.

INTPenis2• 3 months ago

I know it's frustrating but media sort of reflects the most cautious and the most adventurous opinions of archaeology. Because saying vikings started at 793 is just a safe archaeological opinion, while even the romans built coastal forts along the british east coast to defend against "pirates".

Then the media will turn around and print something absolutely outlandish based on a total hypothesis, just because it attracts clicks.

card_zero6• 3 months ago

Those forts: https://www.roman-britain.co.uk/military/roman-frontier-syst...

This site suggests "Germanic groups such as the Saxons, Franks, and Frisians". That seems like the more parsimonious explanation.

yeahforsureman2• 3 months ago

Well yeah, there definitely was the period and cultural phenomenon called the Nordic Bronze Age, which also seems to closely match the dating of those rock carvings. You can read more about it elsewhere, but we're talking about relative largesse, reach and cultural interaction easily matching or exceeding that of the Vikings, originating and spanning a large part of the Indo-European sphere of dominance from Scandinavia to Mycenaean Greece and even beyond. Making and accumulating bronze itself drove the development of trade networks and connections of pretty extreme reach and complexity, unmatched for a long time after the Bronze Age Collapse.

conartist6• 3 months ago

how did they do it without AI though

vasco2• 3 months ago

Is my understanding of carbon dating needing an update or the precision to distinguish 100y difference on a 1.2k to 1.3k years base not enough?

If 100y is the difference it could just be that the tree grew for 100y and the at the end they used it?

internet_points• 3 months ago

Most likely they used trees that had grown for at least 100y, as that's how you get the hardest wood (wood from young trees gets all bent in humid weather)

ggm• 3 months ago

Wood stored underwater is a thing. Lots of places use bog wood, drowned trees. Down deep, it just goes on being wood.

Tree ring databases are pretty good. I think they cross calibrate to radio carbon maybe.

teruakohatu• 3 months ago

In New Zealand 50,000 yr old ancient Kauri trees are literally mined in swampy ground.

card_zero6• 3 months ago

That is not an issue, because the tree will have been absorbing freshly made atmospheric carbon-14 until it died, at which point it starts to decay into carbon-12. So carbon-14 dating pinpoints the time of death, if you get the methodology right. We apparently now use accelerator mass spectrometers to just outright count all the atoms of c-14 and c-12. But in the 70s c-14 dating was notoriously tricky and full of pitfalls to with calibration and contamination and estimation, and it looks like we've only reduced the last of those possible sources of errors, the need for estimation, and the rest of it is still sketchy.

vasco2• 3 months ago

So as long as the tree was felled or died close enough to being used it'd still be accurate. Thanks!

tremon• 3 months ago

But C-14 decay doesn't start with the tree's death, or does it? I assume that a live tree will also contain a certain amount of C-12. What would the result be if we carbon-dated one of the roots of the giant sequoia's in California, versus one of its branch tips?

bookofjoe• 3 months ago

Shades of Skinwalker Ranch

MikeNotThePope• 3 months ago

Related: I enjoyed the 2021 Netflix movie The Dig, which is about excavating a Viking longboat beneath a mound in a farmer’s field & uncovering the well known Sutton Hoo treasure.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/JZQz0rkNajo

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo

Monumental ship burial beneath ancient Norwegian mound predates the Viking Age

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