1,200-year-old Viking grave — with a shield and knives — found in a backyard in Norway

“This location has been a prominent hill, clearly visible in the terrain and with a great view,” says Marianne Bugge Kræmer to sciencenorway.no. She is an archaeologist at the Oslo Municipality Cultural Heritage Management Office.

Here, on the upper side of the small pond called Holmendammen, someone in the Viking Age chose to build a grave. Today it is a residential area in the west side of Oslo.

“The grave was located directly under a thin layer of topsoil and turf right on the east side of the highest point on the site, with a fantastic view west over today’s Holmendammen. This was a valley where the stream Holmenbekken flowed in ancient times,” Bugge Kræmer said to sciencenorway.no.

Was going to build a new detached house

Holmendammen was built at the beginning of the 20th century after the Holmenbekken was dammed, and the dam was used to make ice, according to lokalhistorewiki.no (link in Norwegian), a website with local history information.

Bugge Kræmer was in charge of the investigation of the Viking grave, which appeared as archaeologists were surveying the site. The investigation was triggered by plans to build new detached house on a plot by Holmendammen in the Vestre Aker district in Oslo.

Brooch from the Viking Age

The remains of a richly appointed Viking grave appeared here. Cremated human remains were uncovered, as well as many other objects.

The archaeologists found fragments of a soapstone vessel. There was also a penannular brooch – also known as a celtic brooch, a sickle, two knives, horse tack such as a possible bridle and a bell, Bugge Kræmer said. The discovery was first reported by NRK Oslo and Viken.

A shield boss was also discovered in the grave. This is the metal in the centre of a wooden shield. Since the wood disintegrates over the course of centuries, it is often the round shield boss that remains.

The penannular brooch in particular dates the grave to the Viking Age.

“For now, the grave has been dated based on the artefacts it contains. This type of brooch with spheres begins to appear in approximately AD 850 and became common after the 10th century AD,” Kræmer said to sciencenorway.no.

For the record, the Viking Age is defined as the period between around AD 800 to 1066.

This is a provisional dating, since the finds from the grave are in the Museum of Cultural History for conservation and further research.

But this buckle may say something about who was buried here.

Below you can see where Holmendammen is located in Oslo.

Gender and things

“This kind of cape brooch was used by men, and along with the discovery of a shield boss suggests that the deceased was a man,” Zanette Tsigaridas Glørstad said to sciencenorway.no.

Glørstad is an archaeologist and associate professor at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. She is working with the Holmendammen find at the museum.

A great deal of information can be extracted from archaeological finds. Old DNA can be extracted from old bones and can, for example, reveal kinship, gender and other inherited characteristics. One striking example of this is a famous Viking grave in Birka in Sweden. For more than 150 years it was believed the person buried there was a male warrior, until researchers in 2017 did a genomic analysis which revealed that the remains in fact belonged to a woman.

But the remains from the grave at Holmendammen may not be able to be examined in this way.

“Right now the objects are in our conservation lab, and we are waiting for them to be ready before we can say anything more about the objects. We didn’t find any remains of unburnt bones, so we can’t extract DNA from what we found,” Glørstad said to sciencenorway.no.

It remains to be seen what information the researchers can uncover about the person who was buried here. A report on the discovery is now being prepared.

Oslo graves

Glørstad says this is the first artefact-rich Viking grave in Oslo that has been excavated by archaeologists. But many objects that can be linked to Viking graves have been found by, among others, construction workers in Oslo over the years.

Glørstad says that they are aware of the discovery of remains from around 60 graves from the Viking Age in Oslo. Most were found around the turn of the century in 1900 when the town expanded to St.Hanshaugen, Grünerløkka, Bjølsen, Tåsen and Sinsen.

These involve many individual items that can perhaps be connected to a grave, and in some cases they are found in a pile or together with burnt bones, says Glørstad.

For example, a Viking sword was found when Oslo’s new town hall was to be erected in the 1930s. This is just one of many discoveries that former county conservationist Frans-Arne Stylegar describes on this blog (in Norwegian), which Glørstad mentioned.

Medieval Woman’s Life-Sized Model Created in Norway

A life-size 3D model of a grinning old woman holding a walking stick looks like a contemporary elder on a stroll through her neighborhood. In reality, this woman lived nearly 800 years ago in Norway, and the model is a sculpted life-sized reconstruction based on her skeleton.

On Oct. 7, Ellen Grav, an archaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) University Museum, introduced the world to the lifelike model — named “Tora” — via Facebook. Tora’s likeness is now on display as part of an exhibitionat NTNU’s museum. (Tora’s name was selected in a public poll conducted by NRK, a Norwegian broadcast company.)

Tora was born near the end of the 1200s and lived in Trondheim, a city in central Norway. During that time, the medieval metropolis was growing rapidly and was inhabited by craftspeople and traders, according to the museum.

While there are no written records about Tora, archaeologists pieced together a story about this medieval woman’s life based on clues from her skeletal remains and where her body was exhumed.

“We know that she was buried in the churchyard near the street where the merchants lived,” Grav told Live Science in an email. “This suggests that she could have lived in a merchant’s family.”

Archaeologists suspect that the individuals who were buried in this churchyard were quite wealthy.

“Since Tora lived to be roughly 65, which is considered rather old for the period,” Grav said, “we do believe that she must have lived a somewhat good life for her time.”

A spinal deformity in Tora’s skeleton led Grav and her team to conclude that Tora likely walked hunched over. She also had no lower teeth and lived without them for a long period of time before her death. To the archaeologists, the bend in Tova’s back and her missing teeth hinted at “signs of hard work and lifelong wear on the skeleton,” Grav said.

Grav worked with Thomas Foldberg, a Denmark-based film industry makeup artist, to make Tora as lifelike as possible. Unlike many facial reconstructions that involve using either X-rays or CT scans, Foldberg focused on Tora’s skeleton to help create a 3D model of what this medieval woman may have looked like. For Tora’s skin, Foldberg used silicone and even “hand painted liver stains and other spots” on her body, Grav said.

“Every strand of hair in the eyebrows, lashes and facial hair is attached one by one,” Grav said. “It’s truly amazing artistic work.” 

For Tora’s costume, Marianne Vedeler, a textile professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Oslo in Norway, researched archeological finds from the area that dated to when Tora lived. Vedeler then tapped local dressmakers to fashion an outfit for the model.

“Nille Glæsel, an experienced dressmaker of Viking and medieval dresses [based in Norway], made Tora’s dress for us using medieval techniques,” Grav said. “She spun the yarn, weaved the fabric in and colored it with Rubia tinctorum [also known as rose madder]. Then she hand-sewed the dress after [Vedeler’s] reconstruction. She also made the shoes. We do have a lot of findings of shoes from Trondheim, so it was quite easy to know how the shoes should look.” 

As for Tora’s friendly expression, “it was very important for us to give the audience a feeling of a warm meeting, to better connect [them] with the medieval human,” Grav said.

“People always tend to think the medieval ages were dark and heavy, but there was also joy and happiness, people loved each other and some even lived a long life. Tora’s life was hard, but she must have had good days as well. I hope that people learn that they looked like us, had feelings like us and that they were people like us as well.”

Borgund: The Lost Viking Village Uncovered with 45,000 Artifacts Hidden in a Basement

In 1953, a parcel of land located close to the Borgund church on the west coast of Norway was going to be cleared, and a lot of debris ended up being discovered during the process. Fortunately, some people were able to identify the “debris” for what it actually was—items from the Norwegian Middle Ages.

An excavation was carried out the following summer. Archaeologists unearthed a large number of artefacts. The majority of them were put in a basement archive. After that, not much more transpired.

Now, some seven decades later, experts have begun the exhaustive work of analyzing the 45,000 objects that have been kept in storage for the purpose of gaining insight into a thousand-year-old Norwegian town with a shocking lack of historical knowledge. Medieval Borgund is mentioned in a few written sources, where it is referred to as one of the “little towns” (smaa kapstader) in Norway.

Professor Gitte Hansen, an archaeologist at the University Museum of Bergen, recently gave an interview with Science Norway in which she discussed what researchers have discovered about Borgund thus far. Danish archaeologist Gitte Hansen detailed that the construction of Borgund most likely took place at some point during the Viking Age.

“The story of Borgund begins sometime in the 900s or 1000s. Fast forward a few hundred years and this was the largest town along the coast of Norway between Trondheim and Bergen. Activity in Borgund may have been at its most extensive in the 13th century. In 1349, the Black Death comes to Norway. Then the climate gets colder. Towards the end of the 14th century, the town of Borgund slowly disappeared from history. In the end, it disappeared completely and was forgotten.” – Science Norway reports.

Professor Hansen is currently researching the artefacts in collaboration with researchers from Germany, Finland, Iceland, and the United States. The project has previously received financial support from the Research Council of Norway and contributions from several other research institutions in Norway.

Researchers specializing in different areas, such as textiles and the old Norse language, have been brought together to form a team. Scientists are able to gain knowledge about the clothing worn during the Viking Age by analyzing textiles that were discovered in Borgund.

Shoe soles, pieces of cloth, slag (the by-product of smelting ores and used metals), and potsherds were among the priceless artefacts discovered by the archaeology team led by Asbjørn Herteig during excavations of the long-lost Viking village of Borgund.

According to Professor Hansen, these artefacts can tell a great deal about how Vikings lived on a day-to-day basis. A significant number of the Viking artefacts are still well-preserved and may be scrutinized in great detail. The basement may contain as many as 250 separate pieces of clothing and other textiles.

“A Borgund garment from the Viking Age can be made up of as many as eight different textiles,” Professor Hansen explained.

According to Science Norway, in the remains of Borgund down in the basement under the museum in Bergen, researchers are now discovering ceramics from almost all of Europe. “We see a lot of English, German and French tableware,” Hansen says.

People who lived in Borgund may have been in Lübeck, Paris, and London. From here they may have brought back art, music, and perhaps inspiration for costumes. The town of Borgund was probably at its richest in the 13th century.

“Pots and tableware made of ceramic and soapstone from Borgund are such exciting finds that we have a research fellow in the process of specializing only in this,” Hansen says. “We hope to learn something about eating habits and dining etiquette here on the outskirts of Europe by looking at how people made and served food and drink.”

The study of the Borgund artefacts has already produced results and Professor Hanse says “there are many indications that people here had direct or indirect contact with people across large parts of Europe.”

In addition, researchers have found evidence that inhabitants of the Viking village of Borgund enjoyed eating fish. For the people of Borgund, fishing was essential.

It is still unknown, though, whether they transported fish to the German Hanseatic League in Bergen or exchanged fish with other regions of Norway and Europe.

Scientists found “a lot of fishing gear. This suggests that people in Borgund themselves may have fished a lot. A rich cod fishery in the Borgundfjord may have been very important for them,” Hansen says.

We might infer from the ironwork remnants that the forgotten town in Western Norway had a strong foundation. Perhaps blacksmiths played a particularly significant role in this town.

And why exactly did Asbjørn Herteig and his associates discover a significant amount of waste materials from shoemakers? Up to 340 shoe fragments can provide information on shoe style and the preferred types of leather used for shoes throughout the Viking Age.

Our knowledge of Borgund from the historians’ written sources is rather limited. Because of this, the role of archaeologists and other researchers in this specific project is crucial.

There is, however, one significant historical source. It is a royal decree from 1384 which obliges the farmers of Sunnmøre to buy their goods in the market town of Borgund (kaupstaden Borgund).

“This is how we know that Borgund was considered a town at the time,” Professor Hansen says. “This order can also be interpreted as Borgund struggling to keep going as a trading place in the years after the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century.” And then the city was forgotten.

Possible Medieval Shipwreck Spotted in Norway Lake

“Mjøsa is like a mini-ocean, or a really large fjord,” says marine archaeologist Øyvind Ødegård from NTNU. For centuries, ships and boats have travelled these waters. Diving archaeologists have registered around 20 wrecks in shallow water. But the lake has never been examined beyond scuba diving depth of around 20-30 metres.

“We believed that the chance of finding a shipwreck was quite high, and sure enough, a ship turned up,” Ødegård says.

The mapping of the sea bottom of Mjøsa started a couple of weeks ago. It yielded results on the very last day. At 410 metres, the autonomous underwater vehicle Hugin from the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment found a shipwreck.

Possibly a medieval shipwreck

The ship is about ten metres long – it’s possible that it originally was a bit longer – and 2,5 metres wide. This places it somewhere in between the categories of a large boat or a ship, according to Ødegård.

At one end, it looks as though the strakes are no longer fastened properly to the ship, which indicates that the iron nails fastening them have probably begun to rust and disintegrate.

“This tells us that the ship has probably been at the bottom of Mjøsa for a while,” Ødegård says.

The Norwegian newspaper VG excitedly announced for a brief time that the archaeologists had discovered a Viking ship, but this is not the case.

Ødegård explains that Viking ships usually have the steering oar on the side of the ship. During the Middle Ages, the steering oar was rather placed right at the back of the ship – and judging by the images obtained, this is what the shipwreck in question has.

“If this is correct, it is highly likely that the ship is not older than from the 1300s,” Ødegård says.

The ship is clinker built, a Nordic tradition of ship building also known from the Viking ships and listed on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

“This tradition is recognized as a very important part of our cultural heritage,” says Ødegård.

Naval battles and trade routes

The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment was given the task of mapping Mjøsa by The Norwegian Environment Agency. The job was to find possible explosives and ammunition that may have been dumped in the lake by an ammunition factory which is said to have done so between the 1940s and up until the 70s. Researchers from NTNU had simultaneously started up a project about Mjøsa, and so a collaboration came about.

“We realized that the entire lake is more or less unknown territory,” says Ødegård.

NTNU has therefore started up a research project about Mjøsa starting next year, which will go on for about five years.

Vice principle for NTNU, in Gjøvik, Gro Dæhlin, says to the newspaper VG that Mjøsa is a treasure trove for old ships.

Director of Mjøsmuseet, Arne Julsrud Berg, is also very excited about the find.

He tells VG that there were huge naval battles on Mjøsa in the 1100s and 1200s, when large fleets including ships the size of the famous Gokstad Viking ship met in battle on the water.

“Even during the Viking Age there were huge sea battles on Mjøsa,” Berg says to VG.

The areas surrounding Mjøsa were wealthy farm areas, and goods have been transported across Mjøsa to and from Oslo throughout the centuries.

More to come

Raising the ship would probably pose a very complex task.

“I don’t know if that has ever been done with robots,” says Ødegård.

On Thursday evening this week, having discovered the shipwreck in the sonar images from FFI, Ødegård and the team went out to try and get better images with a different robot, but the waters were too rough.

“What we want to do now is to get data from cameras and other sensors. We can blow away some sand from sediments with the propels on the robot, and we can use manipulator arms, but it will be what we call a non-intrusive investigation at first,” says Ødegård.

The two-week mapping only covered around 40 square kilometres of the 360 sqare kilometre large lake. More ships may turn up – within the next few days, when the researchers analyse more of the data collected, or sometime during next spring, when the next field trip will take place.

“Because this is a freshwater lake, the wood in such a ship is preserved. The metal may rust, and the ship may lose its structure, but the wood is intact. A similar ship to the one we now found, would not have survived for more than a few decades if it had gone down on the coast,” Ødegård says.

“So if we are going to find a Viking shipwreck in Norway, then Mjøsa is probably the place with the most potential for such a find,” he says.

Large-Scale Trade in Herring Dates to the Viking Age

Historians have believed extensive herring trade started around the year 1200 AD, later controlled by the Hanseatic League. Now, a new study shows that it was already established in the Viking Age.

“We found that this trade existed already around 800 AD, 400 years earlier, which really pushes back this extensive fishing,” says Doctoral Research Fellow Lane Atmore at the University of Oslo.

She is the first author of the study, published today in PNAS, which shows that herring bones from western populations around Sweden and Denmark were found as far east in the Baltic as Truso in today´s Poland. Truso is known as an important Viking Age trade port.

“In the genetic signature from these bones, we found that the fishes were adapted to higher salinity than you find in the central Baltic. This means they were coming from around Kattegat, and then they were being shipped into the eastern Baltic,” Atmore says.

The lower salinity of The Baltic Sea means that herring from the population in Kattegat will have a hard time adapting to the waters further east.

“That high salinity adapted fish are never found that far in,” Atmore says.

More difficult to trade

Her co-author, Associate Professor Bastiaan Star, has previously studied cod trade in the same area.

“Earlier we have seen that cod from the trading place Hedeby in what is now Germany had travelled all the way from northern Norway. Our new study shows that it was not just cod. It was also herring, a fish that technologically is much more difficult to trade,” Star says.

Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) is a much fattier fish than cod and not easy to store, let alone trade if you don’t have the right technology.

“If you don’t cure it with salt or smoke, it will go bad very quickly. You need access to salt and wood so that you can cure it and then ship it. You need to have extensive trade networks and to catch enough fish if it´s going to be worth the investment,” Atmore says.

“I think that fish was traded over greater distances than previously anticipated. We can now pin down this date because these bones are absolutely dated between 800 and 850,” Star says.

“We can´t prove that it was the Vikings who brought the herring from one place to the next, but we know that we have herring bone from a site where Vikings were trading,” Atmore says.

Biology and archaeology

Atmore and Star are both biologists. In this study, they have worked closely with archaeologists. One of them is Professor James H. Barrett at NTNU University Museum.

“The herring industry of the Baltic Sea supported one of the most important trades in medieval Europe,” Barrett says.

“By combining the genetic study of archaeological and modern samples of herring bone, one can discover the earliest known evidence for the growth of long-range trade in herring, from comparatively saline waters of the western Baltic to the Viking Age trading site of Truso in north-east Poland,” Barrett says.

The study also reveals what has happened to the herring populations in more recent times.

“The economic and political ramifications of the herring industry are well-charted, but its ecological impacts have been much debated,” Barrett says.

Spring spawners and autumn spawners

The different populations of herring have their own spawning grounds, hence their adaptation to different levels of salinity. Populations also differ in spawning season.

“There are two major populations that spread across all Atlantic herring. One spawns in the springtime, and one spawns in the autumn. These populations spawn in unique locations and in different seasons, so they don’t interbreed much. This means they are genetically different from each other,” Atmore explains.

She is now able to identify where these fish are coming from to see how populations grow and decline, and how this is impacted by the fishing industry.

“We found that earlier in the historical record, starting around 800, you get more fish in these archaeological sites that come from the autumn spawning population in the western Baltic. This is a population that was targeted by a famous fishery around 1200,” Atmore says.

Collapsed 100 years ago

In more recent times it was the opposite.

“They were then targeting the autumn spawners and this population collapsed in the 1920s. In the Baltic now commercial catches are 90% spring spawners,” Atmore says.

“It´s not that the autumn spawners entirely disappear in the Baltic. It is more that they are not commercially interesting anymore. They are still there, but not in the numbers we were used to,” Star says.

He is not in doubt that the fishing industry had a major impact on the herring populations.

“There is a consistent pattern with over exploitation that takes place over centuries,” Star says.

“Our results provide a new and persuasive way to test the archaeological hypothesis that human impacts on super-abundant European marine fish started already in the Middle Ages, and that different herring stocks were targeted sequentially through time,” Barrett says.

This also means that the ecology of the Baltic Sea has shifted. Autumn spawners spawn in a different place at a different season.

“They are also bigger than the spring spawners and they eat slightly different food. When the population of autumn spawners goes far down in size, the ecology is going to change,” Atmore says.

“The Baltic Sea is much more confined compared to the North Sea. Some of the impacts that humans or climate may have, is amplified in such a small system,” says Star.

Rare 1,000-Year-Old Viking Wooden Bowl Found By Young Boy

To most children finding something unusual and unexpected is a joy, but discovering a precious, rare ancient artefact must be a memory for a lifetime! One can only guess what goes through the mind of the youngster who has unearthed a rare 1,000-year-old bowl from the Viking Age.

The artefact was discovered by ten-year-old Erik Briskerud, who was with his father in Glomma, Norway. The father and his son were on a boat when they spotted a sandbank in the middle of the river.

Erik was surprised to see something resembling a root in the sand and decided to find out what it was. When he reached the spot, he saw a wooden object stuck in the sand. He cleared the sand with his father to find out what kind of object this was.

“When we had removed all the sand, it looked like a bowl,” he says. It would have been easy to throw away the wooden bowl, but Erik noticed someone had taken the time to create nice edges on the bowl with some carving tools.

The wooden bowl was sent to local scientists who sent a tiny sample of the object to Florida, USA, for dating. The answer came within the next few days, and everyone was excited about the results. Rooted in the sand was an 800-1,000-year-old wooden bowl dating from later Viking times.

It would be not just any bowl but one of the most special bowls found in Norway!

” I think it’s very cool. I didn’t think it was entirely from the Viking Age. Quite amazing that it is so old, Briskerud told the NRK in an interview.

“It is almost difficult to explain how special this find is, says an archaeologist at Innlandet county municipality Mildri Een Eide.

Some wooden bowls have previously been found in Norway from the Viking Age, but they are often only in small pieces or fragments.

“So this one is very special. Considering the age, she says that we do not know of any other finds of this kind in Norway. We think it is most likely made from a ball of wood or a wooden knot found on many trees and hollowed out.

We had to pinch ourselves a couple of times. We guessed the 18th century, but it turned out to be much older.”

As reported by the NRK, the “bowl is also special because it is roughly carved, which may indicate that it does not originate from the richest or most powerful.

“It is rare to find objects that belonged to ordinary Viking Age people. This is not an ornamental object”, says Een Eide.

The bowl will now be sent to the Cultural History Museum in Oslo, which will look after it for posterity. The reason why the bowl is so well preserved is most likely due to the sand.

“There is quite a little oxygen in the sand in Glomma, so it has been lying safely and well in the sand. A bit like a marsh corpse. But how it ended up there is not known. Glomma may have looked different, or it may have come with the flow.

She thinks the probability of finding more in the sandbank is small. In addition, it is challenging to dig in water. So it probably won’t happen at first,” Een Eide explained.

She praises ten-year-old Erik for realizing that this was something special.

“So we owe him a big thank you,” Een Eide says.

7,000-year-old fish traps discovered in the Norwegian mountains

Reidar Marstein was out walking in Jotunheimen this summer in June, some 850 metres above sea level when he saw something strange at the bottom of the mountain lake Tesse in Lom municipality.

The water in the lake is drained every summer in order to produce power. Hobby-archaeologist Marstein immediately realised that the short wooden poles he saw sticking up in the low water formed a pattern.

“I saw that they were placed in a particular system,” Marstein says to the Norwegian national broadcaster NRK (link in Norwegian).

The system of wooden poles were in fact Stone Age fish traps, the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo writes in a press release (link in Norwegian).

One of the poles has recently been established to be 7,000 years old, meaning it is dated to 5,000 years BC. This is the early Stone Age in a Norwegian context.

“The find is unique evidence of an ancient fishing tradition in the mountains!” the Museum writes in the press release.

Three large fish traps

Together with freshwater biologist Trygve Hesthagen, Marstein managed to get a fair overview of the poles before the lake was again filled with water over the summer.

At least three trapping chambers with guiding fences have been identified at the bottom of the lake. The guiding fences have probably led the fish into the traps, after which the catch could be collected from a boat or by somebody wading out into the water.

The fish trapping constructions in Tesse are among the oldest of this type from Northern Europe.

The wood is well preserved, and the archaeologists hope to get detailed information about the exact age of the fish traps, how many years they were in use, how often they were repaired and during which time of the year such repair work was carried out.

This piece of wood has been dated to be 7000 years old. (Photo: Reidar Marstein)

Hunters, gatherers, and fishermen

Previous excavations around lake Tesse have found remains from the Stone Age all the way back to 7,000 years BC. It would have largely been the reindeer that drew hunters and gatherers to these mountains.

Traces of the reindeer hunting have been found en masse by the glacial archaeologists in the Secrets of the Ice programme who secure finds that melt out of glaciers in the mountains. The more the ice melts, the older the items they find – from the Bronze Age and recently also from the Stone Age.

“There have however been great insecurities around whether or not Stone Age people came to the mountains just to hunt and gather, or if they indeed were also catching trout,” the press release reads.

Well, now we know. They were definitely catching some trout.

Excavations in 2013 and 2014 revealed extensive Stone Age activity on the shores of the mountain lake Tesse, including from the time when the fish traps would have been in active use. (Photo: Birgitte Bjørkli/KHM)

Full excavation next spring

During the summer, lake Tesse has again been filled with water. The fish traps are now around 2-4 metres below the water surface. Divers from the Norwegian Maritime Museum have recently secured more samples and measurements from the poles, and also covered up some parts of the construction.

“Examinations of these wooden poles can give us knowledge about the Stone Age which we otherwise just dream of when excavating a Stone Age settlement,” the archaeologists write excitedly in the press release.

“In a Norwegian and Scandinavian context, this is a remarkable find. It’s a gift,” archaeologist Axel Mjærum from the Museum of Cultural History says to NRK.

A complete excavation is planned for spring next year.

The first of its kind? Mystery ax discovered off the coast of Arendal

Researchers have discovered a find that could be a first for Norwegian archaeology.

A hollow ax, which researchers believe dates from the Bronze Age, was discovered at a depth of 12 meters near Arendal.

The hollow ax, also known as the Celtic ax, was the main ax type of the Nordic Bronze Age (1800-500 BC). The hollow ax is attached to an angled wooden shaft, which is inserted into the opening at the end of the ax. This structure provides a functional ax and uses minimal precious metals.

“This is very exciting. We have no known shipwrecks from the Bronze Age, and if this find is dated to that time, it will be the first in the country,” archaeologist Frode Kvalø told Agderposten.

This heavy bronze ax weighing 327 grams is described as “well preserved” and maybe the first prehistoric metal object found in Norwegian waters.

The ax was discovered during connection with cultural routine registration by the Norwegian Maritime Museum.

Now, researchers are working to determine when and how the ax landed on the seabed. A theory called the ballast hypothesis is that the ax is part of a ship that is only a few hundred years old, which will still make it an important discovery in the sailing ship age.

However, the second and more exciting hypothesis is that the ax sank more than 3,000 years ago, and there was a ship passing through from southern Scandinavia, or a local ship sailing along the coast. vessel. If correct, this will make it the first known shipwreck site of the Norwegian Bronze Age.

“This could be front-page news, or it could be uninteresting, depending on what further research shows”, Sven Ahrens of the Norwegian Maritime Museum said.