The ghostly outline of the 1,200-year-old Viking ship burial was revealed by ground-penetrating radar in 2018.

It's
the first such burial excavated in Scandinavia in more than a century.
P H OTO G R A P H C O U RT E S Y N I K U

H I S T O RY & C U LT U R E

'100-year find’: Enormous Viking ship holds

surprising clues on burial rituals
The 1,200-year-old vessel, discovered in a Norwegian potato field, is revealing an
extraordinary picture of how ancient Scandinavian warlords were sent into the afterlife.

B Y A N D R E W C U R RY

PUBLISHED MARCH 15, 2023 • 14 MIN READ

In the south of Scandinavia, it’s not uncommon to see low, rounded hills appear here
and there across expanses of flat farmland: These are often the remains of Viking-era
burial mounds, many plundered centuries ago and plowed under by 19th-century
farmers. In 2018, local officials asked the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Research
to investigate the area around such a burial mound in Gjellestad, a site just north of
the Swedish border. Ground-penetrating radar revealed the outlines of ten more
mounds, plowed under in the last 150 years—and the ghostly outline of a wooden
ship just six inches below the surface of a potato field.

The ship was likely from the Viking era and

its apparent size, more than 60 feet long,
would make it one of the largest yet
discovered. It was the first intact Viking ship
discovered in decades and declared a
“hundred-year find” by archaeologists.

The Gjellestad ship also wasn’t supposed to

be dug up—at least not anytime soon—but
the effects of climate change and increased
agriculture have forced the archaeologists’
hand. Their five-year study—the first Viking

About this map

ship grave excavation of its size in more than
100 years—not only provides an
unprecedented treasure trove of information
on the ships and burials of the formidable ancient seafarers, but also serves as an
experimental testbed for what even the tiniest artifacts can tell us.

Not buried at sea

While the image of Viking warriors laid to rest in their sleek ships is a mainstay of
popular culture, the idea that the craft were set on fire or pushed out to sea as part of
burial ceremonies has little archaeological evidence to support it.

Here's what you don't know about the Vikings. 

Rather, around A.D. 400, hundreds of powerful Scandinavian warlords began to be

buried in their longships under earthen mounds more than 20 feet high. Thousands
more, presumably of lesser means, were buried in smaller boats.

Today, however, Scandinavia’s ship graves are a critically endangered species. Over
the centuries, the prominent mounds were robbed or plowed away, their contents
stolen or damaged. The few ships found since 1904 were simple shipwrecks or were
left in bogs.
While most of the wooden ship eroded away over the centuries, preserved iron rivets (marked in white) will enable
researchers to reconstruct the 60-foot-long vessel, which was built at the time when Viking ships began to be
powered by sail as well as oar.
P H OTO G R A P H C O U RT E S Y M U S E U M O F C U LT U R A L H I S TO RY

This made the Norwegian government’s 2018 decision to leave the newly discovered
Gjellestad ship underground a surprise to the public, but not to archaeologists who
understand sometimes leaving things in the ground is the best way to preserve them
for future researchers.

A year later, however, a team of archaeologists returned to the potato field to conduct
a small excavation and get a sense of how well the wooden longship was preserved. A
trench cut across the center of the vessel revealed that the keel—the “spine” of the
ship—was still intact, surviving for centuries in a deep, damp layer of earth. Based on
tree rings from the keel and other parts of the vessel, researchers learned the
Gjellestad ship was built sometime around A.D. 800.
Inside a Viking amulet "factory"

Thanks to an agricultural ditch dug in the 1960s and increasingly hotter, drier
weather due to climate change, however, parts of the ship above the keel protruded
above the protective water bath that had kept the ship’s wood oxygen-free and intact
for more than a thousand years.

“The keel is so deep it’s been wet the whole time,” says excavation director Christian
Løchsen Rødsrud, a University of Oslo archaeologist, “but the [planking has] been
dried and become wet again so many times, there’s not much left.”

What’s more, archaeologists identified an aggressive fungus present within the ship
that had begun to consume any wood that remained. What started as a cursory
examination quickly unfurled into a large-scale emergency excavation: the Gjellestad
ship had to be dug up.

“It’s going to be like Tetris"

In the summer of 2020 researchers broke ground on a Viking ship burial for the first
time since 1905. The condition of the ship forced Rødsrud and his team to get
creative. The top half of the Gjellestad ship had been plowed away long ago, and
much of what remained had rotted away, leaving just plank-shaped impressions in
the soil.
Excavation members clean a piece of keel (the ship’s “spine”) preserved on the Gjellestad ship.
P H OTO G R A P H C O U RT E S Y M U S E U M O F C U LT U R A L H I S TO RY

But a key element of the ship’s construction remained: More than 1,400 rusted-
covered iron rivets, each exactly where it was when it held the ship’s planks together.
Every rivet is surveyed, and its exact location recorded before being excavated in a
small block of surrounding soil. Over the next year, each block of soil will be CT
scanned, and the rivets reassembled into a 3-D model of the ship. Ultimately, the
rivets will map the curvature of the hull, creating a digital version of the ship itself.

“Imagine reconstructing a house by looking only at the nails and roof beam,”
Rødsrud says. “It’s going to be like Tetris.”

Even before the digital model is complete, the researchers have uncovered critical
clues about the Gjellestad ship. The 60-foot-long keel is unusually skinny for a Viking
longship, and it’s missing the reinforcements required to support a mast—meaning
the vessel might have been rowed, but never sailed.
Read more about Viking fact vs. fiction.

More importantly, the vessel dates to the late 8th century, around time Scandinavian
mariners first began to fit sails on their longships, which made them capable of both
long voyages and fast, sudden attacks. This suggests that the Gjellestad ship “is from
the very beginning of the Viking Age,” says Rødsrud, and could be a transitional
design reflecting a period of experimentation with sails. However, “[w]e cannot
conclude that the ship was not able to carry a mast before the reconstruction is
made,” he adds.

Jan Bill, a curator at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo and expert on Viking-age
sailing vessels, suggests cost might have been a factor. Sails were hand-woven from
wool, involving huge investments of time and labor. Perhaps the mast and sail were
removed from the Gjellestad ship and reused on a later vessel. “The cost of the sail
might be almost as much as the ship itself,” says Bill. “It could be they removed the
mast because it was so expensive.”

Theater of the Dead

The technology researchers bring to the first Viking ship excavation in a century is
also providing extraordinary insight into Scandinavian burial practices at the time.
By analyzing the soil in and around the Gjellestad ship, archaeologists were able to
determine that people cleared a 50-foot circle of grass and topsoil from the site
before hauling the ship on shore, possibly from a nearby stream. A ditch dug around
the circle would keep spectators away from the vessel in its center, while an earthen
ramp or gangplank was installed on one side of the ship to facilitate the burial. At the
bow of the ship was a “pool” of blue-grey clay. The effect may have resembled a
theater-in- the-round, with rituals taking place on the ship over weeks or even
months.

Such Viking ship burials were “more than just a static ceremony,” says Neil Price, an
archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not part of the project.
“They’re an arena for interacting with the dead.”
While the tomb was plundered in antiquity—possibly by the forces of Harald Bluetooth—small items like these beads
were left behind.
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Whoever orchestrated the burial some 1,200 years ago paid attention to the smallest
details. Squares of sod were carefully cut and then re-used like bricks to build up
around the burial chamber. Squashed into layers less than an inch thick over
hundreds of years, the turf bricks allowed the researchers to pinpoint the time of year
it was cut by the blades of grass. The long-gone warlord was laid to rest at “harvest
season, when the fields are all yellow,” Rødsrud notes.

The scene has echoes in other well-known Viking ship burials like the Gokstad ship,
which was built not long after Gjellestad vessel and is now on display in Oslo’s Viking
Ship Museum. Researchers took over 100 soil samples from its burial mound, which
was excavated in 1880 and still stands today.
By analyzing the layers of soil in and under the Gokstad mound, Rebecca Cannell, a
soil expert working for the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research,
revealed other Viking ship graves were also far more than just piles of dirt. The
Gokstad burial, too, was elaborately constructed, with a clay “pool” beside the ship
and turf squares in alternating colors brought from nearby wetlands and stacked in
specific patterns above the burial chamber. “It would have been beautiful,” Cannell
says, “like a mosaic in brown and black and green.”

Ravaged by Bluetooth
When they began their work, archaeologists hoped to find out who was buried in the
Gjellestad ship. Skeletons found in other ship graves belonged to both women and
men; often there were multiple people interred in the mounds, with some perhaps
representing retainers or enslaved people sacrificed to accompany their ruler into the
afterlife. Unfortunately, the archaeologists soon realized the burial had been
plundered long ago. “There’s no gold or silver left, even though I’m sure they were in
there,” Rødsrud says.

But because burial mounds were important symbols representing a Viking

community’s revered ancestors and were often erected next to significant
settlements, presumably filled with heavily armed warriors, the theft was puzzling.
How, they wondered, could tomb robbers escape undetected and unpunished? “You
can’t really rob something like that in secret—it’s huge,” Price observes. “You’d not
only have to dig a hole but cut through the ship’s planking.”
A microscopic image of wood from the Gjellestad ship shows the fungal damage (in black) to the vessel’s remains
that prompted the unexpected excavation.
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From disturbances in the soil around the plundered central chamber of the Gjellestad
ship, the team determined that robbers cut a gaping tunnel in the mound’s west side,
possibly big enough for someone to walk upright into the burial chamber.

Similar break-ins at other Viking burial mounds have been dated to 950, coinciding
with the takeover of southern Norway by Harald Bluetooth. Archaeologists think the
conqueror made a show of violating the graves of his rivals’ ancestors—and the
Gjellestad ship burial might have been one of his targets.

Whenever they broke in, the Gjellestad robbers didn’t get everything, and what’s left
hints at the rich treasure that once lay within: amber and glass beads, some covered
in gold foil, a broken whetstone, a shard from a glass beaker, and fittings from a large
wooden chest. Inside and outside the burial chamber, archaeologists recovered the
bones of horses and oxen, suggesting a sacrifice accompanied the deceased to the
afterlife. Other finds are more mysterious, like an axe head apparently wedged under
the ship’s hull during the burial’s staging, either to prop it in place or as part of an
unknown ritual.

Over the next year, Rødsrud’s team will continue scanning rivets and reassembling
them digitally. They’ve decided not to unwrap the blocks of soil that contain the
ancient fasteners: As part of a planned museum on the site, the rivets will be put back
in the ground, in the exact spots where they were found. The data gathered,
meanwhile, will be made available to scholars around the world to study, and
hopefully reveal more about what drove the Vikings to set sail across the known
world in their fearsomely efficient longships. In the meantime, the research team
will continue to post their results online, and hope to soon have a digital
reconstruction to “display” virtually.

“[The Gjellestad ship is] a type of ship we didn’t know before,” Rødsrud says
hopefully, “and I’m sure it will tell us about seafaring in the Viking Age in a new
way.”