On the Cusp of the Viking Age – The Nabberör Boat Grave Revisited

Beskrivning

Abstract
The importance of revisiting old excavations has long been appreciated in burial archaeology. The application of new perspectives and methods continuously reveal new data, which in turn revise and expand our knowledge. In this paper we present a re-analysis of the Swedish boat grave Nabberör on the Baltic island of Öland, excavated in 1938. It was dated to the 8th century CE and has long held a particular position in scholarship due to its anomalous nature with multiple buried individuals. This study presents a transdisciplinary reassessment of the grave resulting in new data and a new interpretation of the find. By adopting a multiproxy approach to the whole grave—employing archaeological, bioarchaeological, zooarchaeological, isotopic, and aDNA analyses—the human and animal remains as well as the artefacts are carefully re-assessed and re-contextualised. We are thus able to shed new light on the grave itself as well as expand our understanding of the boat grave custom on the cusp of the Viking Age.

Period	2024 maj 28
Evenemangstitel	41st Interdisciplinary Viking Symposium: Tracing transitions
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Lund, SverigeVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell