New clues from old bones: Norwegian Vikings were very, very violent

We may think the Vikings were all the same, but it turns out that Viking violence wasn’t the same everywhere. New research shows that Norwegian Vikings were buried with 50 times more weapons—and had a lot more injuries—than their neighbours in Denmark. And there were other dramatic differences that researchers were able to uncover, even after the passage of more than a thousand years.

This episode digs into what those differences might mean. Why were Norwegian Vikings more violent? Was something going on in their society? And were swords really the handguns of Viking society?

My guests on today's show were Lisa Mariann Strand, a PhD research fellow at NTNU, Jan Bill, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo and David Jacobson, a sociologist at the University of South Florida.

You can read about Bill's project studying the Gokstad ship here, and you can see picture and description of the ship on the webpages of the Museum of the Viking Age here.

Here are some links to the articles we discussed in the show:

• Jan Bill, David Jacobson, Susanne Nagel, Lisa Mariann Strand (2024)

Violence as a lens to Viking societies: A comparison of Norway and Denmark,

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology,Volume 75, 2024, 101605, ISSN 0278-4165, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101605

• Lisa Mariann Strand, Sam Leggett, Birgitte Skar Multi-isotope variation reveals social complexity in Viking Age Norway, iScience, Volume 25, Issue 10, 2022, 105225,

ISSN 2589-0042, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.105225.

• Margaryan, A., Lawson, D.J., Sikora, M. et al. Population genomics of the Viking world. Nature 585, 390–396 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2688-8

Questions? Comments? You can contact me at nancy.bazilchuk@ntnu.no

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