Scar boat grave
Coordinates: 59 ° 17 ′ 38 " N , 2 ° 34 ′ 38" W.
On the island of Sanday , one of the northern Orkney islands, John Dearness found bones near the beach after a storm in 1985, which, as it turned out later, belonged to the Viking Age boat grave of Scar (also called Quoy Banks or The Crook Beach) .
The bones and the small round object made of lead that he took with him were initially forgotten. In 1991 archaeologist Julie Gibson identified it as a lead weight used by Scandinavian traders to weigh gold and silver . Julie Gibson and Raymond Lamb discovered an iron rivet at the site , which indicated a boat. Before the next "Gore Vellye", the notorious autumn storm of the Orkney, destroyed the site, a team of archaeologists hid a Viking Age boat burial.
The finds
The rust spots from over 300 iron rivets traced the shape of the boat in the sand. The 6.5 m long rowing boat made of plank is also a Færing type . It was in a stone-lined pit. A chamber had been built inside the boat containing the remains of a man, a woman, and a child. Among the additions were a golden fibula and a decorated whale bone plaque known as the "Scar Dragon Plaque". Such plates were found in women's graves in Denmark , Norway (Lilleberga, Namdalen) and Sweden ( Birka ). Next to the man lay an iron sword , a quiver with eight arrows , a bone comb and a set of 22 game pieces . Next to the woman lay a comb , a sickle , a weaving sword , scissors and two spindle whorls . Based on the typological classification of the artifacts and the C14 investigation , the grave was dated between 875 and 954 AD.
interpretation
The man was over 1.85 m tall and probably around 30 years old. The woman was over 70 years old. The child, whose gender could not be determined, was between ten and eleven years old. Most of the Viking boat burials found so far contained only one person.
There is evidence that the three buried were more or less buried at the same time. It is therefore clear that they died or must have been killed within a short time. It was considered that the man and the child might be killed to accompany the deceased woman on the journey to the afterlife.
literature
- Olwyn Owen, Magnar Dalland: Scar. A Viking Boat Burial on Sanday, Orkney. Tuckwell, East Linton 1999, ISBN 1-86232-080-2 .
See also
Web links
- Location of the island of Sanday
- Norwegian-Swedish parallels
- Scheduled Monument - entry . In: Historic Scotland .
- Entry on Scar's boat grave in Canmore, Historic Environment Scotland database