County archaeologists recently dated the remains of a Viking ship buried on a small island called Reka and discovered that it is the oldest in all of Scandinavia.
In fact, its origins are so ancient that there are technical doubts as to whether it can be called a Viking ship burial. This is because funerary activities predate the Viking Age, when the term Viking began to be used for Scandinavian sailors. Time spent trading, time spent raiding.
The Helllaugshaugen tumulus in Reka is located in an archaeologically rich area called Namdalen. There is a very unusual concentration of burial mounds here, most of which have never been surveyed or excavated, whereas Herlaugshausen was excavated at three different times.
According to records from the 18th and 19th centuries, the mound contained construction materials such as nails, a bronze cauldron, animal bones, and a seated skeleton holding a sword. These have long been extinct, and interest in Herlaugshaugen for Norway’s recent ancestors has ended.
A team of archaeologists and professional metal detectives has now set out to investigate the mound as part of a collaboration with the Norwegian Directorate General for Cultural Heritage and the Trøndelag county authorities.
Researchers found iron nails and other evidence suggesting the mound was a burial site for a ship. A man was buried at this site around 700 AD, decades before the generally accepted starting point of the Viking Age.
Moreover, the ship was very large. Historians often believe that the boat building methods developed by the Scandinavians were one of several trends and forces that started the Viking Age, but here the emergence of large, seaworthy ships , means skill, will, ability, commercial interest. Everything existed to use it before 700 AD.
NTNU University Museum archaeologist Gail Gronnesby said: “This dating is really exciting because it takes the whole ship burial tradition back so far into the past.” told Phys.org.
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Viking raids may have been underway within Scandinavia at an earlier date, but the first external invasions by medieval Scandinavians are recorded as occurring within the last quarter of the 8th century. Masu.
The other side of Viking identity, that of merchants, may have already been fully formed in much earlier times, such as during the Merovingian period, when this burial ground was built.
“I think its location along the shipping route plays an important role in understanding why the Herlaugshaugen tomb is in Reka,” said Lars Forseth, an archaeologist with the Trøndelag county authority. “We know that whetstones were traded from Trøndelag to the continent from the mid-700s onwards, and the transport of goods along that route is key to understanding the development of Viking and pre-Viking ship design.”
Ships would have been a great sign of status, as they provided an economic link from the continent to these different Norwegian fjords and inlets. Anyone who owned this could have made a lot of money. The presence of ship burial sites and other mounds at Namdalen suggests to archaeologists like Forseth that the area of Namdalen may have been a stronghold for an elite merchant community.
Continue reading for more history: Four years after discovery, Viking ship buried for the first time in 100 years has been discovered, revealing lost secrets
The various valleys of Namdalen contain 10% of all recorded burial mounds in Norway, but most of them have not been explored, so this idea is still unfounded.
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