Abstract
The human remains recovered from the famous Bjerringhøj Viking Age burial in Denmark have been missing for more than 100 years. Recently, an assemblage of bones resembling those recorded at Bjerringhøj—some with adherent textiles—were discovered in a misplaced box in the National Museum of Denmark. Here, the authors use new skeletal and comparative textile analyses, along with radiocarbon dating, to confirm that the bones are indeed those from the Bjerringhøj burial. This rediscovery offers new data for interpreting Viking Age clothing, including the presence of long trousers, and emphasises the importance of reinvestigating old archaeological collections housed within museums and archives.
Highlights
The nineteenth-century excavation of the Bjerringhøj mound, at the village of Mammen in Jutland, recovered one of the most iconic Danish Viking Age burials
He observed fragments of textiles, clumps of down feathers and human bones scattered in the soil, with nothing left in situ
The Fashioning the Viking Age project is a collaboration between the National Museum of Denmark, the Centre for Textile Research at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, and the Land of Legends Centre for Historical-Archaeological Research and Communication in Lejre
Summary
Charlotte Rimstad1,*, Ulla Mannering, Marie Louise S. The human remains recovered from the famous Bjerringhøj Viking Age burial in Denmark have been missing for more than 100 years. An assemblage of bones resembling those recorded at Bjerringhøj—some with adherent textiles—were discovered in a misplaced box in the National Museum of Denmark. The authors use new skeletal and comparative textile analyses, along with radiocarbon dating, to confirm that the bones are those from the Bjerringhøj burial. This rediscovery offers new data for interpreting Viking Age clothing, including the presence of long trousers, and emphasises the importance of reinvestigating old archaeological collections housed within museums and archives
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