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On an unknown date in (perhaps) the 860s, Norse raider Ragnar Lodbrok (or Ragnar Lothbrok) was allegedly put to death in the Indiana Jones-esque manner of being cast into a pit of snakes. Ragnar is a half-legendary character who plundered France and Britain in the mid-ninth century, the heyday of Viking marauders; he’s also the lead character of the cable TV series Vikings. He’s known from Scandinavian sagas, like the Ragnarssona Þattr, which describes Ragnar’s final battle after shipwrecking in Northumbria.....

Wood from three different trees cut by Vikings found at L'Anse aux Meadows been precisely dated to 1021 CE - 1,000 years ago this year. The Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, located at the tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, was discovered in the 1960s, but has never been precisely dated. Previous estimates about when the Viking crossed the Atlantic and made their way to present day Newfoundland and Labrador have been based on Norse sagas and radiocarbon dating that typically has an error margin of about 50 years. The best estimates put their arrival at around 990 at...

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient bridle and other artifacts from a mountain pass almost 2,000 meters above sea level.Near a mountain pass, not far from Norway's highest mountain Galdhøpiggen, archaeologists have found traces of horse travel.A metal bit and parts of the leather straps that fasten around the horse's head have emerged from under the ice...Traffic through a mountain pass on Lomseggen was at its peak during the Viking Age.Snow and ice melting in the area has previously uncovered hundreds of ancient artifacts. They have revealed that Norwegians used this mountain pass for more than 1,200 years (link in Norwegian)...The...

Physicists from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary have determined that the sunstones claimed to be used by Vikings to navigate on foggy and cloudy days could provide accurate results. Vikings living between 900 and 1200AD did not have magnetic compasses, and their ability to navigate was attributed in part to the use of calcite, cordierite or tourmaline crystals which functioned as linear polarizers to help them determine geographic north. The crystals can split sunlight into two beams, and when the crystal is turned, splitting the two beams at the same brightness, a navigator could see the polarized rings around the...

Analysis of hair combs made from deer antler has shed new light on the trade routes of Vikings - revealing connections between northern Scandinavia and the edges of continental Europe.Led by researchers from the University of York, the findings provide evidence of trade connections between the town of Hedeby (modern Schleswig-Holstein, Germany), the largest urban settlement in Viking Age Europe, and upland Scandinavia, hundreds of kilometres to the north...Hedeby was a major centre of antler-working, with 288,000 antler finds recorded, most of which was waste material from the production of hair combs: a major urban craft in the Viking Age...The...

In a Press Announcement by the University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History, Archaeologists Have Discovered a Votive Gold Hoard During Road Development Works South of Lillehammer on the Shores of Lake Mjosa, Norway.Excavations have found five tiny pieces of rectangular sheet gold decorated with motifs and stamped imagery depicting a man and a woman. The objects were discovered in the remains of a pagan temple, where previous excavations have uncovered thirty similar stamped gold objects in the vicinity over the past three decades.The building measures around fifteen metres in length and was likely used for ritual drinking, however, it...

New research and technologies may end up changing the way we think about early Arctic history, upending the assumption that the ancient ancestors of today's Inuit people learned how to spin yarn from Viking settlers. It has long been assumed that the ancient Dorset and Thule people learned how to spin yarn from Norse settlers who arrived in Newfoundland some 1,000 years ago, according to the Canadian press. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Michele Hayeur Smith of Brown University in Rhode Island and lead author of a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Hayeur Smith and...

The general lack of sources about the Picts and their way of life has led to numerous assumptions over the centuries. In the eighth century, during the early medieval period, for example, historians such as the Venerable Bede thought that the Picts emigrated from areas around the Aegean Sea or Eastern Europe and that they traced descent matrilineally, through the mother's side...In the newly published study, an international team of researchers extracted genetic information from eight human skeletons buried in two Pictish cemeteries — seven from Lundin Links and one from Balintore in modern-day Scotland...The team was able to extract...

An old sewer pipe needed repair in Trondheim in mid-Norway last year. A last-minute dig to save possible archaeological objects yielded a surprising and rare result: a gaming piece with runes... The area that was excavated was a mere four metres long, but it turned out to be very deep.At 3,8 metres under today's surface, the archaeologists found birch bark dated to around 1000-1150 AD. Slightly higher up they found a layer of coal dated to around 1030-1180 AD.The gaming piece in soapstone was found between these two layers...The find is unusual for Trondheim, where only two items with runic...

An ivory chess piece purchased for less than $10 was recently identified as one of the missing Lewis Chessman, 900-year-old artifacts dating back to the Viking era, which could be worth over $1 million dollars. The medieval chess piece was originally purchased for $7.50 by an antique dealer in Scotland in 1964. It was passed down through his family, but they never realized its significance. “For many years it resided in a drawer in [my mother’s] home where it had been carefully wrapped in a small bag,” the family, who wished to remain anonymous, said in a statement obtained by the...

Nearly 300 silver coins believed to be more than 1,000 years old have been discovered near a Viking fortress site in north-west Denmark, a museum has said.The trove – lying in two spots not far apart – was unearthed by a girl who was metal-detecting in a cornfield last autumn."A hoard like this is very rare," Lars Christian Norbach, the director of the North Jutland Museum, where the artefacts will go on display, told Agence France-Presse.The silver coins were found about 5 miles (8km) from the Fyrkat Viking ringfort, near the town of Hobro. From their inscriptions, they are believed...

Shetelig had previously excavated a rich Viking ship grave just nearby, where Grønhaugskipet was found, as well as excavated the famous Oseberg ship – the world’s largest and most well-preserved surviving Viking ship – in 1904. At Salshaugen he only found 15 wooden spades and some arrowheads...It turns out, however, that Shetelig simply did not dig deep enough....in June 2022, archaeologists decided to search the area using ground-penetrating radar or georadar – a device that uses radio waves to map out what lies below the surface of the ground.And lo and behold – there was the outline of a Viking...

Vikings occupied Greenland from roughly 985 to 1450, farming and building communities before abandoning their settlements and mysteriously vanishing. Why they disappeared has long been a puzzle, but a new paper from the Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) determines that one factor—rising sea level—likely played a major role...The departure of these Viking settlers coincided with the beginning of the period known as the Little Ice Age, which had a particular impact on the North Atlantic. But while cooling and freezing might seem likely to lower sea levels, a variety of factors combined to have the opposite...

Archaeologists have used wood taxa analysis to distinguish between imported, drift and native wood from five Norse farmsteads on Greenland.Historical records have long suggested that medieval Norse colonists on Greenland (AD 985–1450) relied on imported material such as iron and wood. Until now, it has not been fully recognized where these imports of wood came from...All sites were occupied between AD 1000 and 1400 and dated by radiocarbon dating and associated artifact types.A microscopic examination of the cellular structure of the wood previously found by archaeologists on these sites enabled the identification of tree genus or species, and the results...

The Viking shields found on the Gokstad ship in 1880 were not strictly ceremonial and may have been used in hand-to-hand combat, according to a new analysis.Dozens of Viking round shields from a famous ship burial unearthed in Norway were not strictly ceremonial as long thought; instead they may have protected warriors in battle, a new study finds.A reanalysis of the wooden shields, which were unearthed in the Gokstad ship in southern Norway in 1880, suggests they may have once been covered with rawhide (untanned cattle skin) and used in hand-to-hand combat, according to a new study published on March...

The cave is one of Ireland's largest natural caves, running for around 402 metres to a depth of 46 metres...The earliest historical reference to the cave is in the Trecheng Breth Féne "A Triad of Judgments of the Irish", more widely known as "The Triads of Ireland". The Triads are a series of manuscripts that date from the 14th to the 19th century AD, describing Dunmore Cave (written as "Dearc Fearna") as one of "the three darkest places in Ireland".This may be in reference to events in the "Annals of the Four Masters", a chronicle of medieval Irish history compiled...

Researchers have discovered that an ancient gold disc found in southern Denmark includes the earliest written reference to the Norse god Odin, revealing that he was worshiped up to 150 years earlier than previously thought, according to a report. The piece of jewelry — which dates to the 400s AD — was uncovered in Vindelev in central Denmark in 2020 amidst a treasure trove that included Roman coins. For years it was publicly displayed at a museum near the site before academics had the opportunity to study it, according to NBC News. A runic inscription with a reference to Odin,...

A controversial Minnesota artifact is making a name for itself across the country in its next biggest publicity move. The Kensington Runestone, which was unearthed in Minnesota but has been long disputed as a hoax, will now be featured on 2,300 20-foot moving trucks across the country. U-Haul unveiled the image Saturday morning at the Alexandria museum that houses the stone during the city's "Awake the Lakes" celebration. About 1,000 people celebrated the announcement at the Runestone Museum with T-shirts and a truck depicting the stone behind a large Vikings ship -- the fourth image representing Minnesota on the company's...

In the autumn of 2021, archaeologists of the Museum of Cultural History investigated a grave field by Tyrifjorden in Ringerike. In one of the graves, they discovered a stone with several runic inscriptions. Burnt bones and charcoal from the grave reveal that the runes were inscribed between the years 1 and 250 AD. This makes it the earliest known rune stone...Sometime between 1,800 and 2,000 years ago, someone stood near Tyrifjorden and carved runes into the 31x32 cm block of reddish-brown Ringerike sandstone. They spoke an early form of the ancient Nordic language that is the ancestor language of modern...

In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language....Johan Bollaert, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies... has investigated written language used in public inscriptions in Norway from the 1100s to the 1500s. Last autumn, he defended his doctoral thesis "Visuality and Literacy in the Medieval Epigraphy of Norway."The assumption that runes represent a more oral tradition is based on the idea that runic inscriptions are contextually bound and are...