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With a diameter of 60m, the burial mound of Herlaugshaugen is one of the largest in Norway. New research has now revealed that it is older than was previously thought.
The site on the island of Leka was excavated on several occasions in the 18th century, producing discoveries including part of a wall, several iron nails, a bronze cauldron, animal bones, and a human skeleton with a sword. Unfortunately, by the 1920s all of these finds had been lost. In summer 2023, archaeologists and metal-detectorists from the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage, in collaboration with NTNU University Museum and Trøndelag County Authority, returned to Herlaugshaugen to carry out a small survey. Their goal was to date the mound and to confirm whether it once contained a ship burial.
Although very little wood survives, the archaeologists recovered several large rivets, confirming that the mound almost certainly housed a substantial ship burial. Thanks to radiocarbon dating of wood preserved on some of the rivets (below) and layers of charcoal in the mound, it was also revealed that the structure was built around AD 700. This places the burial not in the Viking Age, as expected, but in the Merovingian period (AD 550-800), which preceded it. There are a few examples of other Nordic boat burials that date to earlier in the Merovingian period, but these are significantly smaller. Geir Grønnesby, who led the recent research, stresses that the Herlaugshaugen mound represents the earliest dated example of an ocean-going ship burial (categorised as a vessel more than 12m long) ever found in Scandinavia.
This discovery has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of shipbuilding and the tradition of ship burials, revealing that both were taking place on a large scale in Scandinavia even earlier than previously thought. Significantly, the AD 700 date also means that Herlaugshaugen bridges the gap between the 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo in the UK and the large Viking Age ship burials seen a few centuries later in Scandinavia.
Text: Amy Brunskill / Images: Hanne Bryn & Freia Been Please send your images to cwa@world-archaeology.com. They must be high resolution (300 dpi) and in landscape format, ideally 20cm high by 30cm wide.
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