“It’s a really exciting opportunity to understand more about how such a group was made up,” Jarman said. This matches with historical accounts throughout the Viking age.Īnd if the charnel does belong to the Great Army, it tells a new story. This further suggests that the deaths of the children were ritualistic, meant to accompany the dead Vikings in the afterlife. Two of the skeletons bear signs of traumatic injury. Large stones next to the mound appear to have held some type of marker. The juvenile grave, which included a sheep’s jaw buried at the children’s feet, is believed to be a ritual killing that occurred to mark the creation of the new burial mound, Jarman said. Iconic Viking grave belonged to a female warriorĭating the charnel and double grave to the same time, and linking them to the Vikings with the help of artifacts, shapes a story around Repton and what happened there in the ninth century. Þórhallur Þráinsson/Neil Price/Uppsala University The drawing is a reconstruction of how the grave with the woman originally may have looked. She was also buried with a gaming board and pieces, only hierarchically associated with officers to use for battle strategy and tactics. It’s possible that the injury severed his penis or testicles a boar’s tusk was placed between his legs, and the researchers believe that the tusk was meant to replace what he lost and prepare him for the afterlife.Ī grand grave of a great Viking warrior excavated during the 1880s has been found to be that of a female Viking warrior. The evidence of fatal injuries mark his bones, including a large cut to his left femur. The older of the two men was buried with a necklace bearing Thor’s hammer and a Viking sword. The double grave also held some interesting artifacts. The double grave was covered in stones, fragments of a finely carved Anglo-Saxon cross that had been destroyed, Jarman said. They might have been leaders of the Great Army. The two men were buried next to what is thought to have been the burial place of the Anglo-Saxon kings, suggesting their importance. Though common in Scandinavia, these double graves are more rare in England. This was a very deliberate statement and expression of power on the Vikings’ part.” A mound was then built on top and the whole charnel turned into a burial monument - desecrating what was probably an important Anglo-Saxon building, possibly a mausoleum. At some point, possibly towards the end of the winter before the army moved on, the building in the vicarage garden was turned into a burial chamber and the bones were moved the eastern compartment. “The original excavations also found evidence for fortifications. “It was also the burial place of several Mercian (Anglo-Saxon) royals, so this was a political statement as well,” Jarman said. Iron Age Britain: Ancient remains may reveal secretsīut the Vikings also wanted to make a power move, rife with politics. Anna Gowthorpe/PA Wire/Press Association Images The site in Pocklington, East Yorkshire, includes more than 75 square barrows that contained skeletons from the Arras Culture - a group of people who lived in the region in the Middle Iron Age as far back as 800BC. Map Archaeological Practice Ltd staff member Sophie Coy holds a spear head that was found at a 2,500-year-old settlement discovered in Pocklington, East Yorkshire during work on a housing development which is said to be of international significance and is enabling the largest study of an Iron Age population in the last 35 years, Thursday March 17, 2016. Wystan’s Church in Repton, Derbyshire, includes a double grave containing two men, a grave containing four adolescents between the ages of 8 and 18 and a large burial mound covering a charnel – a vault containing skeletal remains – that includes the bones of nearly 300 people. The results were published in the journal Antiquity on Friday.Ĭonfirming the dates provides new evidence about the activities of the Viking Great Army in England and greater understanding of the impact of the Vikings in central England, as well as how important it is for researchers to use the latest techniques. The new calibration used by the researchers, accounting for this “marine reservoir effect,” has confirmed that all of the bones date to the same time period from the ninth century. Eating fish and other marine life results in older carbon in our bones than land-based food sources, throwing off carbon dating. The Viking Great Army may have finally been found.Ī mass grave discovered in England in the 1980s was initially thought to be associated with the Vikings, but radiocarbon dating suggested that the skeletons belonged to different time periods.Ī new study says that an unlikely culprit confused the radiocarbon dating: fish consumed by the Vikings.
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