"A previously unknown graveyard with thousands of well-preserved skeletons, some of them dating as far back as to the Viking Age, found in a well-researched area, has baffled Swedish archaeologists, providing them with unique research material." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The sensational discovery was made outside of Medieval Vreta Abbey, north of the Swedish city of Linkoping.
"Despite plenty of research and excavations performed in the surrounding area over the years, a new graveyard with Viking-era graves was found during pipe-laying, national broadcaster SVT reported."
"During the Corded Ware Culture period, Finland, Estonia and Sweden received skillful female artisans, who had learned to create fashionable and innovative pottery in the eastern region of the Gulf of Finland. The Baltic Sea countries also had a close network for trade in pottery." Source: Science Daily (2018).
"...Finland, Estonia and Sweden had at least five different manufacturing areas for Corded Ware pottery which engaged in active pottery trade across the Baltic Sea approximately 5000 years ago. Häme in Southern Finland had a manufacturing hub of Corded Ware pottery which can be described as quasi-industrial in Neolithic terms, and spread its products along the Finnish coast and into Estonia.
"...In traditional societies it is usually women who are in charge of the pottery craft and it is also common for women to relocate upon marriage. Corded Ware burials show that females were more likely to receive pottery as burial gifts, and analyses from European cemeteries show that the women were more likely to relocate during their lifetime."
"The church as it stands today has not kept its original appearance, but represents the result of constant extensions and alterations up to the 19th century. Each century added something. Thus the church has become a beautiful yet strange example of the way in which architectural styles and decorative art of many ages may merge into one rich, harmonious whole." Source: StaveChurch.com.
Note: "A stave church is a medieval wooden Christian church building once common in north-western Europe. The name derives from the buildings' structure of post and lintel construction, a type of timber framing where the load-bearing ore-pine posts are called stafr in Old Norse (stav in modern Norwegian). Two related church building types also named for their structural elements, the post church and palisade church, are often also called 'stave churches'." Source: Wikipedia.
"The wooden church of Urnes (the stavkirke) stands in the natural setting of Sogn og Fjordane. It was built in the 12th and 13th centuries and is an outstanding example of traditional Scandinavian wooden architecture. It brings together traces of Celtic art, Viking traditions and Romanesque spatial structures." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.
"The church was built around 1130 or shortly thereafter, and still stands in its original location; it is believed to be the oldest of its kind. The 1956 excavation revealed that there are two prior churches built on the same site. The first church was built during the period transition to Christianity with the palisade style, which structural members were embedded into the ground. The second on was built in the latter half of the 11th century." (Wikipedia)
The body of Bishop Peder Winstrup (1605-1679 AD). Video from 2015.
"When Anthropologist Caroline Arcini and her colleagues at the Swedish Natural Historical Museum discovered small calcifications in the extremely well preserved lungs of Bishop Peder Winstrup, they knew more investigation was needed. 'We suspected these were remnants of a past lung infection,' says Arcini, "and tuberculosis was at the top of our list of candidates. DNA analysis was the best way to prove it.'" Source: Science Daily.
The DNA analysis made it possible to compare a relatively modern strain of tuberculosis with a much older strain. The results suggest that tuberculosis emerged back in the Stone Age. According to one researcher, this is "the strongest evidence available to date for this emergence having been a Neolithic phenomenon."
Note: As described in the videos below and above (1:25), the bishop was interred with the remains of a baby:
"For almost 350 years Bishop Peder Winstrup lay quietly in his coffin in the crypt of the magnificent cathedral at Lund in Sweden, concealing a secret: the body of a tiny baby, tucked in under his feet." (The Guardian, 2015)
"The little corpse, believed to be of a baby born several months prematurely, was revealed for the first time when scientists scanned the coffin and the mummified body of Peder Winstrup, believed to be one of the best preserved 17th-century bodies in Europe."
"Scientists have discovered extinct strains of smallpox in the teeth of Viking skeletons -- proving for the first time that the killer disease plagued humanity for at least 1400 years [1]." Source: Science Daily (7/23/2020).
[1] - "...Historians believe smallpox may have existed since 10,000 BC but until now there was no scientific proof that the virus was present before the 17th century."
The researchers can't say if the Vikings they studied died from smallpox, but they "certainly died with smallpox in their bloodstream for us to be able to detect it up to 1400 years later. It is also highly probable there were epidemics earlier than our findings that scientists have yet to discover DNA evidence of."
The chances are good that the Vikings spread the disease during their raids and migrations, but as far as I know there isn't any direct evidence of this.
Note: Smallpox has been eradicated, or so we're told, but who knows how many vials of the live virus are stored in research labs around the world? And who knows how many of these vials have been misplaced or completely forgotten?
"Archaeologists discovered the man's skull, as well as the remains of at least 10 other Stone Age adults and an infant, in 2012 at the bottom of what used to be a small lake in what is now Motala, a municipality in eastern-central Sweden. However, only one of the adults had a jaw; the rest were jawless, and two of the skulls had been placed on stakes sticking out from the lake's surface.
"Now, a 3D facial reconstruction reveals the likeness of one of those jawless skulls. Oscar Nilsson, a forensic artist based in Sweden, used this skull as well as genetic and anatomical information gleaned from it to create a bust of the man — a blue-eyed, brown-haired and pale-skinned individual in his 50s."
"A Viking Age excavation in East Iceland is revealing a more nuanced history of the settlement of Iceland, involving seasonal settlements, wealthy longhouses, and walrus hunting long before the island was settled permanently. The site, known as Stöð and located in Stöðvarfjörður fjord [next video], shows human presence in Iceland decades before AD 874, the accepted date for when Iceland was permanently settled." Source: Archaeology News Network.
The modern village Stöðvarfjörður with views of the fjord.
Note: "According to both Landnámabók and Íslendingabók, monks known as the Papar lived in Iceland before Scandinavian settlers arrived, possibly members of a Hiberno-Scottish mission. Recent archaeological excavations have revealed the ruins of a cabin in Hafnir on the Reykjanes peninsula. Carbon dating indicates that it was abandoned sometime between 770 and 880. In 2016, archeologists uncovered a longhouse in Stöðvarfjörður that has been dated to as early as 800." (Wikipedia)
"Swedish Viking explorer Garðar Svavarsson was the first to circumnavigate Iceland in 870 and establish that it was an island. He stayed over winter and built a house in Húsavík. Garðar departed the following summer but one of his men, Náttfari, decided to stay behind with two slaves. Náttfari settled in what is now known as Náttfaravík and he and his slaves became the first permanent residents of Iceland."
Vikings is a great show (until recently, anyway), but like all historical dramas it has to play fast and loose with its own timeline, not to mention the actual history of the events it depicts. It's also inaccurate in various details such as its depiction of the armor that the Vikings wore in battle, but all of this is to be expected due to time and budget constraints as well as the fact that the series mixes mythology and real history for dramatic effect.
One of the show's most popular characters, Lagertha, a female warrior or shieldmaiden, is also a source of controversy since it's unclear whether shieldmaidens ever existed. Strictly speaking, of course, the question is irrelevant because Vikings is a fictional drama, not a documentary, but it would be interesting to know if characters like Lagertha actually fought alongside the men in real life.
Like her husband, Ragnar Lodbrok, the character of Lagertha is taken from Viking mythology. "Her tale, as recorded by the chronicler Saxo in the 12th century, may be a reflection of tales about Thorgerd .., a Norse deity," according to Wikipedia. Shieldmaidens in general appear in the Sagas and the female Valkyries may have been based on them.
"Few, if any, scholars nowadays believe that women warriors led war bands in Viking-age Scandinavia; they have either been relegated to the world of amazon myths or explained away in other ways," according to Medievalists.net (2015). On the other hand, there is some archaeological and documentary evidence that Viking women fought in battle, at least in certain situations:
"There are few historic attestations that Viking Age women took part in warfare, but the Byzantine historian John Skylitzes records that women fought in battle when Sviatoslav I of Kiev attacked the Byzantines in Bulgaria in 971. When the Varangians (not to be confused with the Byzantine Varangian Guard) had suffered a devastating defeat in the Siege of Dorostolon, the victors were stunned at discovering armed women among the fallen warriors." (Wikipedia)
Taken by itself, this Byzantine account doesn't prove that female warriors were a standard feature of Viking society. After all, the women killed in this battle could have been wives or daughters forced to fight by a desperate situation. If the story's accurate, however, it does show that Viking women -- some of them, at any rate -- were capable of taking part in battles. How often this happened is another matter.
Ultimately, the question boils down to the interpretation of burials. Recent findings suggest that women accompanied the Viking men (in England, at any rate) in greater numbers than previously assumed, but whether these women--or the men, for that matter--were raiders is another question. Some of the sources I've seen claim that "almost half" of the Viking burials discovered in England belonged to women, but calling them warriors may be a misinterpretation of the original study (see Related links below). As it turns out, these Vikings were probably colonists rather than raiders as such, so it would have been natural for them to take their families along with them. Some of the women were buried with weapons, though, and the question is why?
Here are two examples from the stories about the burial study:
"Viking women accompanied their male partners to Britain in far greater numbers than had been previously thought," according to the Daily Mail (2011). "Almost half of all bodies in burial grounds researchers examined were those of women - with some carrying swords and shields." (Emphasis added)
The women buried in these graves may have been under-counted in earlier studies. "A study has revealed that previous research examining the gender ratio of Vikings in Medieval England may have underestimated the number of Viking women because they assumed that graves showing individuals buried with a sword and shield were men. According to USA Today (2011), the newer study, which determined sex by analyzing the skeletal remains, showed that nearly half the examined remains were female, including one of the ‘warrior’ skeletons buried with a sword and shield." Source: Ancient Origins. (Emphasis added)
Even if half of the bodies discovered were women, it sounds like only a few of them were buried with swords and shields. Whatever the case, these grave findings suggest that female warriors did exist. After all, if a male skeleton is found buried with weapons, it would be natural to assume that he was a warrior of some kind, so the same thing could be assumed about a female skeleton. I'm not sure why a woman would be buried with weapons otherwise (unless they had some kind of symbolic value). Even if there were female Viking warriors, however, this still wouldn't prove that shieldmaidens as such actually existed as a distinct warrior caste in Viking society.
Shieldmaidens are a classic example of what I would call hidden history. Maybe they were real. Maybe not. The question, as far as I can tell, is still up in the air and will probably never be resolved conclusively until more archaeological or documentary evidence is uncovered. If shieldmaidens did exist, I have my doubts that they were as gorgeous as Katheryn Winnick, the actress and martial artist who plays Lagertha in Vikings. Most likely, they were hard-bitten characters with nasty tempers when they were crossed. One way or another, it doesn't help that the whole issue has become so mixed up in contemporary identity politics.
"On a cliff overlooking a narrow strait in western Norway, archaeologists have discovered rare game pieces, including odd-looking, elongated dice inside a burial mound dating to the Roman Iron Age, between A.D. 1 and A.D. 400." Source: Live Science.
"The game pieces, with bulls-eye-like markings that stood for various numbers and 18 circular pieces, may have been made from rare material such as antlers.
"The pieces were likely used in a board game inspired by the Roman game Ludus latrunculorum, precursor to the famous Viking board game Hnefatafl, which was played hundreds of years later, according to a statement from the University Museum of Bergen."
Note: These game pieces were discovered during the excavation of a "small Early [Roman] Iron Age grave cairn at Ytre Fosse, Western Norway," according to the university's statement:
"The location is spectacular, overlooking Alversund and the 'Indre Skipsleia', a part of the old shipping lane, Nordvegen, – which gave Norway its name. The whole area is dotted with monumental grave mounds on both sides of Alversund, symbols of an Iron Age political landscape and the power and control of goods and travels along the Norwegian coast."