Monumental ship burial beneath ancient Norwegian mound predates the Viking Age | Hacker News Reader

Monumental ship burial beneath ancient Norwegian mound predates the Viking Age

phys.org

106 pointspseudolus27 comments

It isn't like boats were invented in Scandinavia by the vikings. At Tanum, close to the present Norwegian border we have rock carvings dating back to 1700BCE, with prominent ships depicted. Boatrs have been important in Scandinavia for a long time.

https://www.tanumworldheritage.se/rock-carving-facts/?lang=e...

Indeed - though the article doesn't really state the boats weren't in existence before the Vikings, it's about ship burials which apparently weren't supposed to exist in Scandinavia until the practice was imported from England. A theory I'd never heard before, but I guess that's on me. In any case, the find in the article seems to contradict that theory.

As for boats, the Viking age has been connected with acquiring sail technology, not so much with boats as such (which have existed for a long time, the rock carvings you linked to show depictions of boat designs which have actually been found in archeological digs, and that indicates that older, different carvings are also true and that boats were used for long distance trade and expeditions a millenium or two, at least, before the Vikings).

If the appearance of efficient sail technology really coincided with the beginning of Viking raids is still in the open I believe.

Stone ships had been burial sites for two thousand years before the Vikings came to Lindisfarne. And long distance trade has been established and given the extent of the Battle of Tollense contact between tribes must have stretched far and deep. And Britain was an important source of tin so trade routes both started and ended there.

Two thousand years! I thought of the stone ships too (these are burials marked by stones laid out in the shape of a ship), but I went searching for an old example and it seemed like the oldest persuasively dated one is from around 600.

Tjelvar on Gotland are presumed to be from 750BCE, and I don't think that is the oldest in Scandinavia.

Oh, nice. That's the one I couldn't find a Wikipedia article on, though I see now it's mentioned under Boge (with a picture). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boge,_Gotland

I had to look into this again. In Valsgärde, close to Uppsala, Sweden you have confirmed ship/boat burials from 600CE. At the same time as the ship burials at Sutton Hoo in England. The "Swedish" (at the time national borders were different) had more in common with "Denmark" that in turn had closer relations to England. Tröndelag Norway had less of international trade leading up to the Viking age, at least compared to Denmark/Jutland and the Baltic.

I know it's frustrating but media sort of reflects the most cautious and the most adventurous opinions of archaeology. Because saying vikings started at 793 is just a safe archaeological opinion, while even the romans built coastal forts along the british east coast to defend against "pirates".

Then the media will turn around and print something absolutely outlandish based on a total hypothesis, just because it attracts clicks.

Those forts: https://www.roman-britain.co.uk/military/roman-frontier-syst...

This site suggests "Germanic groups such as the Saxons, Franks, and Frisians". That seems like the more parsimonious explanation.

Yeah but again we're coming up against safe archaelogical assumptions based on findings. But when we're talking Saxons and Frisians I find it hard to fail to mention the Angles and the Jutes.

> This site suggests "Germanic groups such as the Saxons, Franks, and Frisians". That seems like the more parsimonious explanation.

More... than what? What do you think Vikings are?

Scandinavian? Different tribes? Danes, at least?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Europe_a...

INTPenis is mentioning Angles and Jutes because they were in present day Denmark (and England). You might ask what the cultural difference is, from Vikings, and I'd flounder. Vikings spoke Old Norse, a germanic language related to whatever the other tribes spoke (um, West Germanic, such as Old Frankish). They believed in gods related to the gods of these other tribes and used similar runes.

Well, the Saxons famously had Saxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seax

If you want to say this is an arbitrary modern set of categories ... I guess the Romans are responsible for the categorization really, by writing down tribe names such as Frisii.

Well, it's fair enough to observe that the Vikings spoke a North Germanic language while the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Franks, and Frisians spoke a West Germanic one. Other than that, it seems pretty clear that the category "Germanic groups such as the Saxons, Franks, and Frisians" would include Vikings. "Such as" isn't exactly the mark of an exhaustive list.

(And interestingly enough, the cognate word ("wicing") is attested in Old English a long time before it's attested in Old Norse. It means "pirate". It wouldn't be at all surprising if Saxons raiding England referred to themselves that way, just like Danes raiding England did later.)

Confusingly, though, there's the chance we might still not be talking about real cognates. The Old Norse víkingr can be derived from (Old Norse) vík (inlet, cove, fjord) + -ingr ('one belonging to', 'one who frequents'), or possibly even something close to Old Norse vika (sea mile), originally referring to the distance between two shifts of rowers, ultimately from the Proto-Germanic ~wîkan 'to recede' and found in the early Nordic verb ~wikan 'to turn', similar to Old Icelandic víkja 'to move, to turn', with well-attested nautical usages.

The Old English wīc, on the other hand, has an old Germanic etymology referring to 'camps', 'villages' and the like.

God knows there are a lot of inlets and fjords in Scandinavia, which incidentally were also places from where the surplus "víkingr" males surged west, possibly having adapted the term as an ethnonym by then; at least in modern Scandinavian languages cognates like 'viking' (pl. 'vikingar') are definitely associated with the geographic root 'vik' — as are innumerable surnames like Sandvik, Vikman, etc. Then again, those roving Vikings did of course build up "camps" and "settlements" wherever they went, although this perhaps sounds more likely a name someone else would give to them...

As for the difference between the Norse (ie North Germanic/Scandinavian) tribes/people and their more southern cousins (Angles, Saxons, Franks etc.) prior to and at the beginning of the Viking era, you might say the former were in fact quite clearly relatively more isolated in terms of geography, language and still-very-much-pagan culture. (And while eg Angles and Saxons did invade and settle much of Britain from current Northern German and parts of Denmark, this was already a couple of hundred years before, and a lot happened since.)

Today I learned that smooth jazz was invented by the Saxons.

Well yeah, there definitely was the period and cultural phenomenon called the Nordic Bronze Age, which also seems to closely match the dating of those rock carvings. You can read more about it elsewhere, but we're talking about relative largesse, reach and cultural interaction easily matching or exceeding that of the Vikings, originating and spanning a large part of the Indo-European sphere of dominance from Scandinavia to Mycenaean Greece and even beyond. Making and accumulating bronze itself drove the development of trade networks and connections of pretty extreme reach and complexity, unmatched for a long time after the Bronze Age Collapse.

how did they do it without AI though

Is my understanding of carbon dating needing an update or the precision to distinguish 100y difference on a 1.2k to 1.3k years base not enough?

If 100y is the difference it could just be that the tree grew for 100y and the at the end they used it?

That is not an issue, because the tree will have been absorbing freshly made atmospheric carbon-14 until it died, at which point it starts to decay into carbon-12. So carbon-14 dating pinpoints the time of death, if you get the methodology right. We apparently now use accelerator mass spectrometers to just outright count all the atoms of c-14 and c-12. But in the 70s c-14 dating was notoriously tricky and full of pitfalls to with calibration and contamination and estimation, and it looks like we've only reduced the last of those possible sources of errors, the need for estimation, and the rest of it is still sketchy.

But C-14 decay doesn't start with the tree's death, or does it? I assume that a live tree will also contain a certain amount of C-12. What would the result be if we carbon-dated one of the roots of the giant sequoia's in California, versus one of its branch tips?

It's nearly all carbon-12, yes. So you're asking how long it takes a giant sequoia to pump carbon dioxide from its needles [leaves?] to its nethermost reaches. Something like 80 feet. I don't know, but if it takes a year, I'd be surprised and impressed. Further investigation of plant respiration might show that every cell has to exchange gas with the outside on a daily cycle, but I'm not sure.

So as long as the tree was felled or died close enough to being used it'd still be accurate. Thanks!

Wood stored underwater is a thing. Lots of places use bog wood, drowned trees. Down deep, it just goes on being wood.

Tree ring databases are pretty good. I think they cross calibrate to radio carbon maybe.

In New Zealand 50,000 yr old ancient Kauri trees are literally mined in swampy ground.

Most likely they used trees that had grown for at least 100y, as that's how you get the hardest wood (wood from young trees gets all bent in humid weather)

Related: I enjoyed the 2021 Netflix movie The Dig, which is about excavating a Viking longboat beneath a mound in a farmer’s field & uncovering the well known Sutton Hoo treasure.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/JZQz0rkNajo

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo

Shades of Skinwalker Ranch

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