There's Something A-Boat Skamby: An Interim Report on the Excavation Of A Viking Boat-Grave At Skamby In Östergötland, Sweden, In July And August 2005 (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Lost World?: a re-evaluation of the boat grave at Årby in Turinge parish, Södermanland, Sweden
Dying Gods: religious beliefs in Northern and Eastern Europe in the time of Christianisation, 2015
During the 1972 rescue excavation prior to a motorway construction project in the Swedish region of Södermanland, a previously unknown Viking Age burial ground was found near the farmstead of Årby in Turinge parish. The find included some early Christian graves as well as a boat grave that resembled a pre-Christian burial of a wealthy lady of the late Birka period. However, over the following 40 years, archaeology has developed new concepts and methods that seem to challenge this idea. Thus, a recent object ‘autopsy’ revealed that the boat grave dates from a much later period than previously assumed. This raises some interesting questions regarding the ecclesiastical organization in the 11th century. Why, all of a sudden, revive ancient burial rites? Was it an attempt by the people of Turinge to reconnect with ‘a lost world’? (Tesch, this volume.) In this paper, I intend to explain some of the details that contributed to the re-evaluation of the Turinge boat grave.
A Late Iron Age Boat-Grave from Petersdal, Denmark
In 1921 a secondary grave was excavated in a Bronze Age burial-mound on the island of Amager in the strait of Øresund between Denmark and Sweden. Recently the material was examined in detail and the result is presented here. This grave proved to be one of the few Late Iron Age boat-graves in South Scandinavia. The boat, only preserved through a pattern of clench-nails, was 10–12 m long. It contained traces of grave-goods: sword, spear, riding-gear, bucket and chest, but no trace of a body survived. The grave is contextually dated to the first half of the 8th century.
Gjellestad, and other Norse Viking Ship Burial Sites
Viking Gjellestad, 2024
This article examines Gjellestad as one of many archaeological sites containing ship burials. These burial sites are our most important source of information about boats and ships in the Late Iron Age. They also shed light on religious practices and reveal past power distribution and the political dynamics of their contemporary society. Instead of focusing solely on Gjellestad as an example of such an archaeological context, the article goes through the entire inventory of ship burials from the Nordic countries, as well as relevant examples from beyond this core region. The focus here is on ship mounds as political messengers; the chapter demonstrates that ship burials were primarily a phenomenon of the Viking Age and clearly indicate a burial practice associated with the elite and ruling class of society. Ship burials were placed in local centres of power, areas that must have held central functions in terms of long-distance trade, political administration, and the exercise of power.
Archaeological review from Cambridge, 2007
This article discusses the evidence from a group of wealthy Viking-Age boat-graves in a mixed-rite cemetery at Gamla Uppsala, in the Mälar valley of central Sweden. When four boat-graves were excavated there in the 1970s, only one was found intact. The others had all been opened in antiquity: one was disturbed immediately after or even during the funeral, and two more were reopened some years later. This article aims to show that post-depositional disturbance of this kind should be treated as more than just damage to the archaeological record. It uses the evidence from the Gamla Uppsala boat-graves to show how disturbance can be recognized and dated, reconstruct the grave-openers' varying approaches, and suggest ways of understanding their motives.
Boat-rivets in Graves in pre-Viking Kent: Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Boat-burial Traditions
Medieval Archaeology, 2007
THE IDENTIFICATION of a number of clench-nails and roves in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries suggest the deliberate deposition of boat fragments and tokens in burial. The distribution of this practice, centred on 6th-to early 7th-century Kent, contrasts with that of the more commonly discussed form of boat-burial known particularly from 7th-century East Anglia. In this paper the characteristics of this burial rite are considered from a number of identified examples to provide for a preliminary typology of 'pseudo-boat-burials' and rove-graves. In conclusion, an interpretation is offered to account for their use in early Anglo-Saxon England, and the preferential deposition in Kent. Among the wide diversity of Anglo-Saxon mortuary rites the symbolic use of burial-ships represents both the most iconographic and elusive of customs. Despite discovery nearly 70 years ago, the most famous example of Anglo-Saxon burial, that of the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship-grave (Suffolk), still has only a handful of comparable finds in England. Of these, it is really only two, Sutton Hoo Mound 2 and Snape 1 (Suffolk), which provide evidence of anything like the same monumental deposition of an entire ocean-going vessel. The remaining corpus of boat-burials falls into two broadly defined groups: one comprising burial in much smaller craft, usually of the dugout logboat variety, and another characterised by the inclusion of boat timbers or parts of boats within the grave, often as biers or covers for the interred. This second group have sometimes been called 'pseudo-boat-burials', after Charles Green, who first drew attention to their sporadic occurrence in pre-Viking contexts. 1 Burials of the first group have a number of contemporary, or near contemporary, parallels in northern Europe. In southern Scandinavia, in particular, the adoption of boat-burial appears to have been much more widespread and