The barrow cemetery at Heath Wood, Derbyshire, is the only known Viking cremation cemetery in the British Isles. It dates to the late ninth century and is associated with the over-wintering of the Viking Great Army at nearby Repton in AD 873-4. Only the cremated remains of three humans and of a few animals are still available for research. Using strontium content and isotope ratios of these three people and three animals-a horse, a dog and a possible pig-this paper investigates the individuals' residential origins. The results demonstrate that strontium isotope ratios of one of the adults and the non-adult are compatible with a local origin, while the other adult and all three animals are not. In conjunction with the archaeological context, the strontium isotope ratios indicate that these individuals most likely originated from the area of the Baltic Shield-and that they died soon after arrival in Britain. This discovery constitutes the first solid scientific evidence that Scandinavians crossed the North Sea with horses, dogs and other animals as early as the ninth century AD.

... ship, a Viking ship in a burial mound at the Oseberg farm near Tønsberg, where two women, believed to be a queen and ... funeral pyres that could contain the remains of a slave and a master, the reasoning is interesting. If the ... This volume is the first comprehensive study of the material imprint of slavery in early medieval Europe. While written sources attest to the ubiquity of slavery and slave trade in early medieval British Isles, Scandinavia and Slavic lands, it is still difficult to find material traces of this reality, other than the hundreds of thousands of Islamic coins paid in exchange for the northern European slaves. This volume offers the first structured reflection on how to bridge this gap. It reviews the types of material evidence that can be associated with the institution of slavery and the slave trade in early medieval northern Europe, from individual objects (such as e.g. shackles) to more comprehensive landscape approaches. The book is divided into four sections. The first presents the analyt

... burials , were laid out like elaborate banquets , with eating and drinking ... Viking period beginning in the ninth century , burial mounds became popular , growing ... ancient Persian religion of FUNERARY CUSTOMS , SCANDINAVIAN 149. A cross-cultural look at beliefs surrounding death, burial customs, and the afterlife.

The so-called Kings’ Hows at Upsala in Sweden rival those of Jelling in size and height. In the chamber of one, opened in 1829, there was found an urn full of calcined bones; and along with it were ornaments of gold showing the characteristic workmanship of the 5th and 6th centuries of the Christian era. Along with the calcined human bones were bones of animals, among which those of the horse and the dog were distinguished. Comparing the results of the researches in European barrows with such notices of barrow-burial as may be gleaned from early writings, we find them mutually illustrative. The Homeric account of the building of the barrow of Hector (Il. xxiv.) brings vividly before us the scene so often suggested by the examination of the tumuli of prehistoric times. During nine days wood was collected and brought, in carts drawn by oxen, to the site of the funeral pyre. Then the pyre was built and the body laid upon it. After burning for twenty-four hours the smouldering embers were extinguished with libations of wine.

or 5th century CE. Ship burials are attested in England from around 600 CE and from across Scandinavia and areas where Scandinavians traveled beginning Germanic paganism or Germanic religion was the traditional, culturally significant religion of the Germanic peoples. With a chronological range of at least one thousand years in an area covering Scandinavia, the British Isles, modern Germany, the Netherlands, and at times other parts of Europe, the beliefs and practices of Germanic paganism varied. Scholars typically assume some degree of continui Ritual processions of the idol of a god in some form of vehicle, usually a wagon, are attested in many religions of Europe and Asia. Various archaeological finds indicate the existence of such rituals in Scandinavia as early as the Bronze Age. Ships may also have been used for…