Posted on 06/08/2007 3:27:19 PM PDT by blam
Viking graves to be re-opened
A worker welded together the aluminium casket in which the Vikings' remains were re-buried in 1948.
The Viking graves that contained the famous ships Oseberg and Gokstad will be re-opened in September, in an effort to gain new knowledge from the remains of the two women and one man buried in them.
Grave robbers plundered the Viking mounds centuries ago. This photo was taken in 1904.
These leather shoes were found in the Oseberg ship and probably belonged to the older of the two women buried with the ship.
The burial mound containing the famed Oseberg ship contained the bodies of two women buried in 834. The vessel was excavated in 1904.
It will be the first time the graves have been opened in nearly 60 and 80 years, respectively.
Experts fear the human remains from Viking times may be in the process of disintegrating, if they haven't already. They want to try to extract them to apply new methods of studying bone matter that can yield new information on the Vikings' genetics and background.
When the skeletal remains of the man buried in the Godkstad mound were re-buried in 1928, they were packed into gauze, fastened to an oak plank and laid in a casket made of lead. It was then sealed and placed in a stone sarcophagus.
A similar re-burial procedure was used for the remains of two women found in the nearby Oseberg mound southwest of Oslo. Those remains, however, were placed in an aluminium casket.
"Now we fear that condensation caused by temperature swings in both metal caskets may have made the textile damp," Terje Gansum of the Midgard Historical Center in Vestfold told newspaper Aftenposten. "This could in turn have destroyed the remains, or at least damaged them."
Vivian Wangen of the Kulturhistorisk Museum in Oslo described the pending grave openings as a means of "preserving this scientific material."
The two graves are due to be opened between September 10 and September 14.
Some bones from one of the Oseberg women were held back from re-burial in the 1940s, and a team of experts in Copenhagen was able to trace her to the Black Sea area through DNA analysis last year.
Archaeologists now would like to determine, among other things, whether she was related to the other woman in the grave.
Thanks! These posts are very interesting!
They’re messing with great uncle Ole again...
I was just going to ping him :)
The form of the Viking long ship has always had me enthralled. One of my fondest wishes would be to see one of the Great ships replicated in all their glory. The Oseburg ship is dark and plain, yet its beauty shines through.
Imagine in your mind’s eye the following: [from Nova web site]
The impression that a Viking fleet must have made under full sail can scarcely be imagined today, but a rhapsodizing monk at the monastery of St. Omer, France, tried his best to evoke the sailing of the royal Danish fleet in A.D. 1013:
When at length they were all gathered, they went on board the towered ships...On one side lions molded in gold were to be seen on the ships, on the other birds on the tops of the masts indicated by their movements the winds as they blew, or dragons of various kinds poured fire from their nostrils...But why should I now dwell upon the sides of the ships, which were not only painted with ornate colors but were covered with gold and silver figures?...The blue water, smitten by many oars, might be seen foaming far and wide, and the sunlight, cast back in the gleam of metal, spread a double radiance in the air.
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Thanks for the heads-up, SAHM!
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Something is missing - the northern half of the Danube.
very interesting.
all of those red-hair russians fascinate me.
More accurately they were able to trace her DESCENDANTS to the Black Sea area. The only way of knowing where she was from would be to do mineralogical analysis of her teeth and bones.
Just because people living in the Black Sea area today have similar DNA does not place her there. It would be like someone analyzing my mother's grandparents bones in a Canadian cemetery and declaring they must have been from California because their DNA is all over the population here.
It would be like someone a thousand years from now analyzing my mother's grandparents' bones in a Canadian cemetery and declaring they must have been from California because their DNA is all over the population here.
Red hair is fascinating...
"Just because people living in the Black Sea area today have similar DNA does not place her there. It would be like someone analyzing my mother's grandparents bones in a Canadian cemetery and declaring they must have been from California because their DNA is all over the population here."
See the map above. The colored areas are refuge sites during the Last Glacial Maximum (18-23,000 year ago), one of the coldest periods during the whole Ice Age. The purple area in Spain is mainly where the people who would become the Irish and British were , mostly R1b haplotypes. The red area (Black Sea area) was mainly R1a haplotypes and were the people who were to become (mainly) the Vikings. They are comparing this DNA to the ancient homeland of the Vikings...no suprise to me.
This is my R1b (Y-chromosome) DNA migration map for the last 60,000 years. The fork just above m45 is where the R1's parted from the R2's. Just below M173, the fork there is where the R1a's parted ways with the R1b's. 90% of the people in Ireland and Spain have R1b DNA as do 68% of all other Europeans. As you would guess, 'I' and R1a are mostly the rest.
My mother's haplogroup is V and 'she' also migrated out of the Iberian refuge with the R1b's...as she miigrated further north 'she' dropped her association with the R1b's and 'hooked-up' with the guys with the 'I' haplogroup and eventually became the Sa'ami (Laplanders).
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