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Posted on 12/23/2025 1:00:35 PM PST by SunkenCiv
According to a statement released by the Public Library of Science, a new study of the 2,400-year-old Hjortspring boat, discovered with a cache of weapons in the early twentieth century on Denmark's island of Als, suggests that it may have been constructed in the Baltic Sea region. First, Mikael Fauvelle of Lund University and his colleagues radiocarbon dated cording and caulk found with the boat to the fourth or third century B.C. Then, they used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to determine that the caulk had likely been made of animal fat and pine pitch. At the time, there were very few pine forests in Denmark, or in northern Germany, where some scholars had previously suggested the boat had been built. "We argue that this means the boat and its crew most likely came from further east along the shores of the Baltic Sea where pine forests were more abundant," Fauvelle said. The examination also revealed a fingerprint on a tar fragment from the vessel. "It is great to have found a direct connection with one of the people who used this ancient boat," Fauvelle added. The study concluded that the invaders who traveled to Als in the boat were likely defeated, and their vessel was sunk in a bog by the victors. Read the original scholarly article about this research in PLOS One. To read about Viking ship burials, go to "."
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
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The Hjortspring boat as currently displayed at the National Museum of DenmarkPhoto by Boel Bengtsson/Fauvelle et al., 2025, PLOS One
[sidebar] In 1903, a Norwegian farmer discovered an ornate piece of wood sticking out of the mud.
One year later, an almost totally intact Viking ship burial had been uncovered, along with incredible artefacts and the bodies of two high-status women.
Today the women have raised a wealth of fascinating questions and their ship remains one of the best-preserved Viking artefacts in the world.
The Oseberg ship, its artefacts and the female burials will be next on display in 2027, when Oslo's rebuilt Museum of the Viking Age is expected to reopen.The Astounding Viking Ship Buried on a Norwegian Farm | 8:42
BBC Global | 717K subscribers | 588,971 views | May 31, 2025
Whoops:
To read about Viking ship burials, go to "Setting Sail for Valhalla."
Maybe they bought the caulk at Home Depot...............
Very interesting. Also interesting they had cannabis seeds stored. I wonder if it was for the hemp production, i.e. rope, clothing etc, or smoking, or both. They said the one lady showed signs of arthritis, so maybe even for medicinal purposes.
It says a lot about the sophistication of their tools and the term of the ship’s development. It had to be at least two centuries prior to that craft. This one was apparently sewn together with moss as a caulking. Are you familiar with earlier examples of clinker boat construction?
Boating accident?
YOU DO NOT NEED THE WHOLE TREE TO GET PITCH.
YOU CAN HARVEST PITCH INTO VESSELS & TRANSPORT SUCH
Clinker-built seems to have been popular in northern Europe, I suppose I could look it up though... uh... Wikipedia has the date wrong, by centuries, considering this example. Unless there are alt- versions of sewn boats of course.
Generally, an awl or drill was used to cut matching holes from the inside of the hull to the edge of each plank, then the cord ran through these in succession, with caulk, and wood expansion (and cord contraction) from exposure to seawater, keeping the seam tight.
The Brittanica page uses this boat as its example, which is either awkward for them, or it means there’s been more than one boat found there. The planking on this one (I went to the PLOS-one paper and blew up the graphic a bit) is vertical rather than bow to stern.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/clinker-construction
😂
They were iron age arms dealers, or maybe the article is correct, and they were raiders, and the locals kilt ‘em all and sank the boat in the bog. Seems unlikely they’d have not stripped the boat of its cargo of weapons though.
I wonder if the DIY store in Alaska is called Nome Depot?
I missed that detail. Here’s the YT transcript, processed at https://textformatter.ai/app
More than a millennium ago, the Vikings ruled the seas. Their travels took them as far as North America to the west, Russia to the east, and ancient Constantinople to the south. But the greatest Viking ship ever found was discovered on home soil in southern Norway, purposefully buried beneath the earth for one last voyage, carrying two women on their way to the realm of the dead.
This tomb, frozen in time, shattered previous assumptions about Viking society while throwing up new mysteries in the process. Who were these women in life to warrant such an opulent death? Best ship, the most horses, the best furniture, everything is the best. Whoever was buried here commanded a lot of wealth and power. This is the story of the most iconic Viking ship ever discovered.
[Music]
The picture shows the excavation situation in 194. And, uh, we are seeing a picture from probably the last part of the excavation. They have been digging down to the ship, removed the burial chamber and most of the objects on the ship. And Gustafson has his very, uh, natural chef pulse in the middle.
A year earlier, in 1903, a farmer in Osberg had come knocking on Swedish archaeologist Gabriel Gustafson’s door in Oslo. The local farmer who owned the land wanted to open it to see if he could find something interesting, and he certainly did.
Gustafson and his team soon realized this was one of the best preserved Viking ships anyone had seen, and the excitement was not contained to merely the archaeologists. We can also see that there is a fence and people looking down. This was so popular that they could sell tickets, uh, to see the excavation. Imagine selling tickets these days to come and see archaeologists. Yeah, it was for its time an absolutely excellent excavation as this image really does show as well. Gustafson, he was good at this and he was, uh, very advanced in the way he saw that documentation was important, and we are very thankful for it.
They had soon uncovered a ship almost perfectly intact, still adorned in ornate North art and iconography and measuring a huge 21 m long and 5 m wide. And how many oars were there? There were 15 on each side because it’s almost 5 m wide, which means that you need one person on each oar or a really big person. Dating the wood known as dendrochronology tells us that the ship was originally constructed in about 820 AD and used on the seas for around 14 years before being buried in 834 AD. Well, with a few exceptions. Some of the oars that were buried with it were made specifically to be buried. They hadn’t ever been used in water. It was a seagoing vessel, but, uh, after it was put down in the earth, it should still go somewhere. So those oars that you mentioned, they were actually placed in the oar holes ready to turn the ship north. It’s so fascinating. Just imagine this world of thought.
And incredibly, thanks to the ship being buried in a specific type of clay, it remained full of all sorts of historical treasures that would have typically perished long ago: 15 horses, four dogs, and two oxen. Three really fascinating fancy sleds and one working sled. There is a wagon. Oh, the wagon. The wagon. Oh, so beautiful. Um, it’s carved with cats. Yeah. Yeah, we love the cats. We do love the cats. The tapestries, the textiles. They were fantastic. Beds and a chair, a chest full of, um, apples, buckets, and barrels. Kitchen equipment. There’s textile working equipment. You forget the little probis. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. There’s, yeah, cannabis seeds.
There are some really nice imported, stolen, bought, I don’t know, goods. The list goes on, but suffice to say, this was no accidental burial. And neither was it just a boat full of Viking loot. Sorry, imported goods. Because it was about to challenge centuries of assumptions about the Vikings and their society. The two skeletons sent to the afterlife with all this treasure were two women, sparking years of speculation about who they could be. All of which revealed more about the speculators than it did the women. Um, the thing is if you take gender out of the equation, you just talk about the burial, uh, like for like, then this is a chieftain’s burial. Uh, if you then add gender in, then you suddenly get academics going all up in arms going, oh, but what could it have been? Were they priestesses or were they human sacrifices? Uh, but the fact remains that if you just stop focusing on the gender, it’s a chieftain’s burial. Best ship, the most horses, best furniture, everything is the best, the most expensive, the finest. Conspicuous consumption on a very high level, isn’t it? Yes.
Uh, neither of them were young. The oldest has been assessed at about 80 and the youngest in her 50s to 60s, right? The best age. Yeah, obviously. Yes. Uh, the older woman suffered from arthritis, but, uh, the shoes seem to have been made specifically for her to cater for her infirmities. Just the mere fact of her reaching the age of 80 shows that she led a privileged lifestyle. So when we talk about what does it mean to have been a woman or a man in the Viking age, we tend to focus on, you know, the higher status people in society. So we’re telling a fairly limited story there. But I don’t think there was a comparable experience between what it was to be a poor woman and what it was to be a high status woman. And I think it was the status that mattered more than the gender.
More than a century later, their identities are still a mystery. Partly because their remains were too degraded to extract quality DNA, leaving unanswered questions as to who they were or their relationship to each other. We are getting this personal touch through their objects. Uh, perhaps even more so than through their human remains. Yeah, but it’s also fascinating because all this state of preservation that there are so many things intact also gives us more life to the women who were buried there. So they are suddenly living people, people that you actually kind of care for.
The burial itself and also the ceremony of doing it must have been important in the society also for political reasons because you needed to state this power of maybe the family of the two ladies, and there were some still living relatives who wanted to keep the power and needed this performance to tell everyone. But the political significance of this iconic Viking tomb wasn’t only relevant to 834 AD. Let’s not forget that this was 1904, the year before Norway gained its independence, 1905 from Sweden. Uh, and burials were used actively to promote a shared national heritage story that people loved and believed in. So, this became a symbol of independence for Norway. And I think that’s also quite important to remember.
A grandiose ship burial like this with all its associated rights and rituals may seem like it’s from another world. But take all that away and the humans at the heart of these ceremonies may have been far more familiar than they were different. Bidding one last farewell to some loved ones. They had a very different relationship to the realms of the dead and also a very different relationship with rituals and beliefs. It was much more present to them than it is to us. But even though you might be pleased that you’re sending your beloved relative or, um, wonderful ruler off to an equally lovely life in the afterlife, you would still be feeling the loss of them, wouldn’t you? And at the end of the day, the people who lived then and the people who made this burial, however much they also celebrated, they also felt grief in the same way that we do because they just shared human emotions.
The date may be particular to classification, whether applying the term, “clinker” to be confined to metal fasteners joining the planking versus sewing.
The hulls are light and strong, but an absolute bear to fix. The one with which I’m most familiar being the Nordic “folkboat.”
Interesting, because modern kayaks are being built with a thin light wood and “sewn”. The term is “stitch-built”.
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