Gone Medieval - Viking Ships

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

The Vikings are remembered fundamentally as seafaring people, and how could they be so if not for their ships? In this episode, Cat speaks to a world expert on Viking ships, Professor Jan Bill, who introduces us to the incredible remains of a Viking ship discovered in a field in Gjellestad, Norway, in 2017. With the excavations nearly complete, Jan and Cat discuss the remarkable proportions of this Viking ship, the technology used to reveal it, and what it tells us about medieval seafaring as a whole. Jan is a Professor of Viking Age Archaeology at the University of Oslo and curator of the Viking Ship Collection at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo since 2007. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and in this episode of the podcast we're going to be talking about ships, Viking ships. Because in 2017, a new and previously completely unknown Viking ship burial was discovered in a field at a place called Yellow Star in southeastern Norway. The discovery caused the sensation not least because of the almost perfect image of the ship's outline revealed by the ground penetrating radar used to find it,

but also because it was the first ship found of quite such proportions in more than a century. And now the excavations of the ship are almost complete. So I've invited along the World Authority on Viking Ships to the Gone Medieval podcast, Professor Jan Bill, who is the curator of the Viking ship collection at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. Welcome to the podcast, Jan. Well, thank you very much, Kat. Now, I've asked Jan to give us an update on the excavations and tell us what's actually been happening, but also you try to put this discovery into a bit more of wider context to understand why it's so important.

And Jan, you pretty much dedicated your life to studying these ships, really. So I wanted to know, first of all, what were your first thoughts when you heard about the Yellow Star discovery? The first thought was, of course, that this is fantastic, because as you said, we haven't been doing excavations. like that for a hundred years. And archaeology has developed so much all its methodologies, the way we're thinking and so on. So digging at a new ship grave today would be a fantastic chance. And some of the listeners might not have caught this story the first term around. So I wondered if you could just briefly tell everyone how this discovery came about. What happened when they found it? Well, very briefly said, the farmer who is zoning the land, had problems with water,

so he wanted to dig drainage stitches, to do that in Norway on a place like Yelista. You have to ask for a permission for that because there are so many archaeological monuments in the area. Therefore, there was a huge survey conducted with ground penetrating radar, and that showed that indeed there was a lot of archaeological monuments on that particular field, a lot of big mounds, remains of longhouses, and also a shipgrave, and that of course made it to the headlines. And at that point, did you or did everyone realize that it was a Viking shipgrave? Well, that was of course a question. How old would it be? But basically, ship graves disappeared with Christianity in Norway, so it couldn't be later than somewhere in the 10th century.

And then the oldest examples that we know from before of real ship graves, graves with big vessels in them date back to the late 8th century, because it could be older, but it was very, very likely that it would be from between, say, 600 and year thousand. But there wasn't really any clue. I mean, there's, well, when I said there's no clue, As you already said that there were a lot of other monuments and there was a really quite giant mound right next to this. But we didn't know that there was a ship burial. Is that right? Yes, that is right.

And then not completely true because we do know from some old records that boats had been excavated on that particular field earlier. And boat remains had been observed there. So it wasn't a complete surprise that something like that would turn up. But just nobody had imagined that it could be a ship or. of that size, in a mound of that size, as we are actually talking about here. So how big actually is it? What's the estimate of the length of the ship? Well, the original length have probably been around 20 metres, and the mound itself has covered the burial. They have been between 40 and 50 meters in diameter.

They're pretty substantial, really. And this caused a lot of excitement, and we were fortunate that the Norwegian government gave some money for it to be excavated properly. So let's talk about that a little bit. So that started last year. What did they actually discover when they started excavating? Well, actually, we started the year before because quite soon after it has been identified on the dew radar, we made a first trench through the ship. There was an old drainage stitch. So we opened that and went down to the ship so that we could see if anything was preserved of the wood. and in fact it was, but only very little. We found the keel or a part of the keel down in the bottom of a trench, and then we could see that the remainder of the wood around this drainage sit had deteriorated a lot,

so it was basically not wood anymore, but black soil. Of course, we could not know if this was because of the drainage stitch in which we were working, or if this was the situation all over the ship. But what we could see was that this tiny piece of wood that we took up from the keel that was actively being decomposed as we were digging. It was in a very poor state and rapidly deteriorating. So we could see that it was important to do something immediately. And that is what we said to the authorities.

And then they came with the money and said, dig it so it don't disappear. So great opportunity then. And I think a radiocarbon date was obtained or some other dating was obtained from that initial excavation as well, wasn't it? Yes, that is true. From this piece of keel that we took up, we were able to make a dental chronological date and that is a date which is based on measurement of the earrings.

And they form a pattern and then you can see where that pattern. pattern fits in on longer base curves and determine how old the wood is. So that was what we did and we found out that this particular piece of wood had been growing as late as in 732. Then of course we could not know how much was missing to the original surface of the tree. So our dating at that point was to say that this is later than 732. That makes it quite early, which is interesting, but as you say, that's only a preliminary date. And in terms of the rest of the excavations then, what else was discovered when the rest of the ship was dug out? Well, we started the full excavation of the ship in 2020, and what we soon discovered was that, well, a sad thing was that it had been extensively plundered on more than one occasion.

people had dug down into the ship, especially to the central area of it. So most of what had been the burial chamber and the area where the deceased person would have rested, that had been heavily disturbed. But we could also see that the rest of the ship was actually in a pretty good shape, apart from the fact that the wood had disappeared. So what we were standing with was basically an outline of the ship, some remains of wood which were just colouring in the ground and then about 1,200 boat nails which had kept that all together.

And that's given you a good idea of the type of ship. I mean, is it too early to say something about the shape of it and how it compares to the other ships that we've got? Well, we are very curious about what type of ship it is because the dating of the wood opens up for the possibility that it's an 8th century vessel, might be later. And then what we have been seeing from the ships during excavation is that it's quite lightly built, and it's not having that kind of strong keel construction and so on, as, for example, the Uspurk ship. So we are really in doubt about the

character of the ship. We know that it's about 20 meters long. It has been about 20 meters long. It's more than 4 meters wide, so it's a big vessel. But we can't really say at the moment whether it was a rowing vessel or whether it had sail. And this is, of course, a hugely interesting question because we know that the use of sail only spread over all of Scandinavia during the 7th century. And that we have finds from Norway, which are rowing ships or mainly rowing ships, that dates from the 8th century, late 8th century. So of course the big question is, is this an older sailing ship than the first we know of from Norway, the Osberg ship that I mentioned before. Okay, so we're going to get back to the grave robbing element a bit later on because that's really interesting in itself, but obviously it was a bit disappointing that there wasn't quite so much found in the grave. But were there any remains of either the person buried or anything else else that was buried with them?

Yes, actually, part of the burial chamber area had not been. disturbed by these intruders. That means that we could study how things had been arranged there. Unfortunately, the preservation conditions were not exactly brilliant. So things were hard to see, but we could see that big mammal had been placed inside the burial chamber, probably a horse. We also have remains of iron objects that seems to have been from a kind of chest or something like that. There is an axe or it was more like the imprint of an axe at the time of excavation. And then also, and that's perhaps the best preserved finds from the excavation altogether, a small number of beets found in the burial chamber lying closely together. So we are speculating

that they might have been in a purse or something like that. And these are actually very interesting because one of them is quite extraordinary it's a very big amber bead so it's several centimeters in diameter and then among the glass beats there are examples that we at best can date to the decades around 800 and this is actually the best data will find that we have from the excavation so far so at the time being it looks like this ship burl actually dates to around 800 which would make it the oldest one in eastern Norway and about 30 years older than the Osberg ship burial.

That's all really exciting. And obviously we were all a bit disappointed, weren't we? When we saw there there was so little left in the burial chamber. So we can't really say much about who was buried there. And I know this is really pushing the evidence quite far. But with the beads, what do you think about the idea that this might have been the grave of a woman, as opposed to a man? Well, I think it's a completely open question.

Of course, you could say that an axe is not a typical piece of equipment in a female burial, but then again, when you're talking about ship burials, then you usually have axes independently from whether it is a female or male burrow. The beads themselves, they are also ambiguous because usually we connect them with female burials, especially if they are in larger numbers and if we can see that they have been used as a bracelet or something like that. In male burials, however, we do also find beats

and a fine situation here where we have them probably in a kind of purse and a storeaway place and not attached to a person, but that is completely open to interpretation. I think we might get a little bit of a clue when we get the x-rays done from the axe and can see whether it's more of a working axe or whether it's actually a battle axe. The other things that we have from the burial chamber, the possible chest and also the supposed horse, these are things that can be in burials of both sex, so they don't

really give any indication. We had hoped so much for finding some human bones, but at the moment it looks like there's none of that material. And the bone materialing altogether is too poorly preserved for DNA studies. Otherwise, that would have been a good way to go with that. But of course, we have picked up whatever is there. And maybe in future we can start getting answers that we cannot today with the technology of today. Yeah, that's such a good point, isn't it? Because when the last ships were excavated a century ago, they can do half the things that we can do now.

So yeah, fingers crossed, but it's intriguing. But let's get back to that grave robbing them. So you mentioned that the whole mound and the ship had been robbed twice at least in the past. And that's actually not very unusual, is it? Because we have similar evidence from the other ship mounds as well, haven't we? Yes, that is true. Of course, the term itself to grave robbery or grave plundering and so on, it might be a little bit misleading because it's not necessary,

the purpose to get valuable things from a burial when you take your way into it. There can be many different explanations for that. But what we do see in several of the ship graves, and especially clearly in the Ouseberg and Gockstad ship burials, which are not so far away from Yelstad, actually, that is that the break-in has been very, very violent. So you have the remains of the deceased person scattered all around. They've been thrown out of the burial chambers and so on. And the other quality is that they, regains have been very, very visible. And here you have to imagine these huge burial mounts like 40 to 50 meters in diameter, maybe six, seven meters high. And then you actually dig your way into the burial mount to the center of it. So that means,

perhaps as much as 25 meters into the mount, down at 5 or 6 meters step. And there you are using your axes to get into the burial chamber, and then you start to take out things and throw up the skeletons and so on. And when you leave it, you are not like covering up. You leave that big scar in the side of the mound. So I think what we're really looking at when we're looking at that kind of Regins, that is that you are defacing the mount, that you are basically giving it a new message, rather than being a message from an important rule or powerful ruler at some point,

then you are sending the message of the one who destroyed it, the one who was powerful enough to destroy it, and that's a completely different thing. So that could well be what we are looking at in Yelistad as well, but of course this is a working hypothesis. and there are other possibilities as well. As you've got that evidence from the others as well, it seems quite plausible, doesn't it? So those break-ins in the other ships, do we have any evidence for when that happens? Any dates for when they were broken into at all? We actually managed to get dates for that quite recently.

As the break-ins were conducted, the people breaking into the mounts were so kind to leave some of their tools after them. So during the excavation, these were recovered and were now, collection so what we did a few years ago was that we simply put those tools into a CT scanner so we were able to obtain sections of them without damaging them and then we made dendocrinality on those and it turned out that we actually could date both the break in gockstead and in osseberg but unfortunately not in tunne which we tried to also but the break in gockstadt had taken place after nine 39 and the break-in in Ouseberg after 953. And looking at the age of the word that we were analyzing,

it's very, very likely that the break-ins took place before 975. So we actually ended up with a dating frame between 953 and 975. And we could even say that the two break-ins were most likely connected because some of the tools from either burial seem to have been made from trees which were standing really close to each other. They had almost identical growth patterns. And of course this is a very interesting period in Scandinavian history, 953 to 975 because it's almost identical to the ruling period of Harold Bluetooth. So we have suggested, might be right. might be true, that actually these break-ins were the deed of Harold Bluetooth that was done

on his will as he had conquered Norway, and that he did it in order to obliterate the memories of another ruling dynasty that were referring to the same origin myth that he was expressing with his yelling monument. That's a pretty incredible piece of detective work, I think, that we can try and piece together after a thousand years. Yeah, you shall never rest assured if you do something like that. Yeah, your crimes will come back to haunt you a thousand years later. Hello, I'm James Rogers and over on the history hit warfare podcast. We're marking the 20th anniversary of 9-11.

We welcome Joe Ditmar, who was on the 105th floor of Tower 2. He takes us through his personal experience of surviving 9-11 and his escape on that day. We also welcome Jessica Doulog, who provides a different perspective. She served at Ground Zero, and she tells us about the efforts to fight the raging fires and evacuate thousands of people via boat. We're also joined by world-leading experts on the history of terrorist hijackings and the history of terror attacks on New York City going back to the 1920s. Join us for this special commemorative week on the history hit warfare podcast. Also, I think, brings us quite nicely to this idea of what these mounds mean and what they mean to people, because obviously there's the religious

spec issue we can get to in a moment. But there's also this idea of it as a display of power. So do you want to talk a little bit about these mounds, these huge, big vast monuments? Why are people making a mound over their grave in this way in the Viking Age? Well, there might be many good explanations for it and not just one. Of course, we do not know today why the Vikings built mounds for their deceased. What we do know is that they certainly did not do it for everybody, but for quite a lot of people. We also know that there were places where they were more eager to do it than other places. So going to Norway or Sweden, we have thousands of mounds from the late part of the Iron Age and Viking Age.

If we go to Denmark, we have almost none. So there are clearly regional differences in how you're looking at this. A very common way of explaining mount is that they are used to mark ownership in inherited rights to the land and also a way to, so to speak, to give the deceased a part of the land with him or her. Mounds can be used for both male and female burials. But I think when we are looking at the ship burials, we have to see them in a more narrow context, perhaps. One thing is that burials in boats and ships is a very old phenomenon in Scandinavia. You can actually trace it back to the Bronze Age.

There are even some Stone Age examples. Whether there is continuity up to the Viking Age, that's perhaps uncertain. But from most periods, we actually see examples of that. So there's a good chance that there are some very long-lasting beliefs behind the idea of burying. dead people in boats, even if it was only a few persons out of a generation who would get that kind of burial. There have been quite a lot of speculations about the motive behind that, and there are some indications that perhaps it's part of a kind of fertility idea, that the boat was being part of a kind of circular way of thinkings, which would ensure that you send off the

that were people, but at the same time, you also stimulated the fertility of the grounds that the mount was placed on. When we are looking at the ship burials, I think there is perhaps other explanations added on to this symbolism and that it has much to do with demonstrating power. When we are looking at the ship mounts, what we see is very often a pattern in the way that they have been constructed and the way the ritual has been playing out during the burial. We often see that this ship is not just in the mound as a grave gift, but it's actually put there as a kind of scene as a place where you could unfold the ritual and this scene very often seems to be placed in water, not in real water, but in something which is symbolizing that it is

floating on water. If we're looking at the Osberg Burial, for example, we see that the ship is actually moored to a big stone. So there's a huge rope which is securing it to a big stone. And some of the oars of the ship is in the ore ports. So they are lying ready to be used. So it's a very clear signal or very clear story that here is a ship which is waiting for its cargo for its passengers and then it's going to sail away the investigations of the gocks that mount that we did some years ago gave us another result in the same direction because we could see that around the ship the subsoil had been dug up and moved around in an area just as big as the entire mound, which meant that the ship during the burial ritual actually would be floating on

a sea of clay. It's a very blue clay in that area, and you have to imagine this ship sitting in that blue clay as was it water. In both Oseberg and Gockstad, we actually see that the gangway, the plank that you used to enter the ship with, that that was large. lying on top of everything else or even outside the ship. So it was clear that this had been playing a role in the burial ritual and then put up in the ship as the last thing, or laid down as the last thing. So the whole burial ritual, it very clearly has been a kind of sending off of somebody.

And of course, it would be very straightforward just to think of this as now the deceased person is being sent off to the realm of the dead and that was easy and logical but then we have this fantastic story that we know from beowulf beowulf that is a poem written in in ang saxon language probably written down the first time in the eighth century and then copied in the eleventh century and the poem starts with an introduction of the Danish royal family, and that is very, very interesting in this context. What we read in Beowulf is that once upon a time a small child was drifting up on the shores of Denmark in a boat, and he was lying on a shield with beautiful weapons around him.

He was, of course, adopted by the king, and when the king died, he was. he became the new king. So we have the foundation of a new dynasty here. And then this king, he was named Skol or shield, because he was lying on a shield. He, of course, was a fantastic hero and king. And when he felt that death was approaching, he instructed his followers that when he was dead, they should put him on a ship, surrounded by grave gifts which should be no less than what he had had with him when he arrived and then they should push this ship out on the sea and this is what they did and then the she would see and this is what they did and then this ship was taken by the currents and sailed away from the shore now this story which was told and apparently was quite popular actually when

we're thinking of Viking times. This story is actually also the story of a ship burial. It's not a ship burial in a mound on land, but it is a ship burial on a ship which is sailing away with a deceased person. And it's also an origin myth for the Danish kings and actually an Oregon myth that they adopted or had been using for a long time. And they even referred to themselves as the sildings, so they were the children of that king's guild. So this is really a very, very fascinating story to use as a lens for looking at the ship burials. So when we are seeing the ship burials as scenes where you're playing out the departure of a ship with a deceased person on board, it might very well have been the departure of sealed on this ship, as we learned it from

be a wolf. Actually, when we are looking at the kings that we know of from written sources, and we are thinking of ship burials, then there's one person who is really standing out, and that is King Harold Bluetooth in Denmark. He was the second king of a new dynasty, King Gormor, his father was the first one. And he, perhaps together with his father, built a fantastic monument in Yelling in Denmark. At the core of this monument was the Danish, the South Scandinavian version of the ship burial, namely the stone ship, huge stones which were put up in the shape of a ship. What Harald did was that he built one which just surpassed everything that you had ever seen at that time in Scandinavia. It was a stone ship which was more than 350 meters long.

And in the center of that he built a huge mound probably for his father. So what he did really as a king of a new dynasty, a king who, according to his own rules, Stone was the first one to be king of all of Denmark and also a king who conquered Norway. I mean, that's a really, really interesting point, isn't it? And bringing together a few threads here. It's very clear that this, well, the whole writing itself, so putting the ship in the ground is part of something much bigger. It's not just that you think that this is what they need for the afterworld. It's very much a statement of, of some wider beliefs.

So you have this element of the funeral and the ceremony and the sort of something that clearly means something to everyone. And then you have this movement on to moving away from actual ships to the settings and to making those very grand statements like that, which I think is just such an interesting aspect of it and this idea of inheritance as well. So presumably this then relates to why only some people get these mounds. It's not just about money, but it's about position as well, I presume.

Yes, I think that is what it is about. And there are some very, very interesting clues here that this is not just a random, display of power, but that they really linked together. We have been doing dendrochronological examinations, not only of that single piece from the Yelsta ship, but also of the graves from Oseberg and Gockstead. And what we have actually learned, that is that there are connections between these shipwheres, and there are connections between them and the shipwheres in Western Norway. The Uspurk ship, which is also found in a ship burial in eastern Norway along the

Oslo Fjord, was originally built in Western Norway and it was built with wood from the same area as these ships that are found in the West Norwegian ship burials of which we have two rather well preserved examples. Going to the Goctstedt burl, which is slightly younger from around 9 the ship itself is built in the Oslo Fiord area, but one of the three boats which were found on boarded and which had been used as part of the burial ritual, that boat actually also came from the same area, so it was a West Norwegian boat ending up in an East Norwegian ship burial. And looking at Yelista, only having one sample is not a very strong result yet, but the indication is that ship also had been built in western Norway. So what we are really seeing that is several

ship burials from eastern and western Norway, which are connected through the materials used in the ships and boats. And that could very well represent not only trading connections, but rather dynastic connections across Norway, which would make a lot of sense because it would connect the two most fertile parts of Norway together. And these are the places where you would want to secure your power if you try to create a big kingdom. That's a really exciting result, actually, isn't it? And that's the sort of thing that we were only really now beginning to be able to do.

And 100 years ago, it was really quite beyond the method. So I think that's super exciting. And just to wind up a bit, Yelista, what's next for that now? What else are we waiting for it? And what else is going to happen around that site? Quite a lot is actually going to happen. Of course, now we are completing the excavation of the ship, and there will be a lot of exciting work now going on

and doing the reconstruction of it, how it has looked and so on. But if we're looking further into the future, we are going to have several research projects there. One will focus on finishing the excavation of the mound area, because this is an unique chance to excavate the entire area of the burial mound to see whatever traces there might be of ritual and of break-in. We already know by now that the ritual connected to the burial was really very complex and spread out over a long time.

So we think that there's a lot to learn by studying that further. But then we also have another project, which is actually, starting these days, where the geophysics, which first brought the Yelester ship to light, are actually being extended to the surrounding fields, where we will be looking for settlement traces to see if we can find some kind of settlement associated with this huge burial ground, but also to investigate what has been the beach area at that time. Through metal detecting, quite a lot of finds have come up in that area, and these are finds which indicates that there might have been a trading station,

a beach market or something like that, in that particular area. And this is a pattern that we know also from the Goxstadt burial. So, of course, we are very interested in seeing what is actually hidden in that area. area. But the project will go much further than just looking at geophysics. It's also going to establish the archaeological context in the region for the Yelestat ship burial. So it will be looking at settlement patterns at burials from the wider region and also on where we have different activities in the area. So the hope with that project is really to try to understand the processes that led up to the formation of this ship burial. And this is a project that is headed by the

Norwegian Institute of Cultural Studies in cooperation with our museum and with the vegan county. That's great. I mean, there's so much potential there. And I'm personally just sort of on tenta hooks constantly checking updates because they keep on coming up on social media. So if people want to find out more and follow it and definitely this follow the Museum of Cultural History on various social media. And there are updates. coming up. And then of course eventually we will have more information about this in the brand new museum of the Viking Age, which will be ready in a few years, about five years, four, five years time now, isn't that? Yeah, 26, I think it's realistic. 2026. So that is the Viking ship museum in

Australia is being extended. If you haven't seen the Viking ships in Osloy yet, then you have to be really, really quick because they're about to close for several years. They're going to be essentially wrapped in bubble wrap while the extensions are taking place. So I think you have about a month or so until October to see them. So after that, we're going to have a really great top Viking Age museum in Oslo. That is much extended. So hopefully we'll have the full story of Yellowstar in that. Jan, thank you so much for joining me here today on Gone Medieval. Yeah, you're welcome. So this has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you've enjoyed the episode, please do leave us a review and subscribe. I'm Dr. Kat Jammann. Thank you so much for listening today and I will be back

next week with a brand new episode.