Down on the quayside in front of Oslo’s fabulously functional City Hall, a small queue of tourists gather to catch the ferry that will take us to see some rather older boats – more than a thousand years older, in fact. As we scud across the steely waters of the fjord, past the forbidding walls […]
Category: Norway
Gustafson at Oseberg
Gustafson’s excavation had provided an extraordinary window into the material culture and public appearance of the world represented by the Norse Sagas at the beginning of the Viking Age.
Norway: The First Oil Age
The jagged coast of Northern Scandinavia is littered with strange stone-lined pits once thought to be ancient graves. In fact, they are evidence of Norway’s first oil boom, and archaeologist Gørill Nilsen has the proof. Susan Zimmerman reports.
Norway: Searching in Veien
There is a field in Veien where horses’ teeth have been found in cooking pits, and a series of massive long-houses have been reduced to nothing. Why? Emma Nielsen reveals the latest to Nadia Durrani.
Norway Oseberg ladies
In August 1903 Gabriel Gustafson, director of the University Museum of Antiquities in Kristiana (now Oslo), received an unexpected visitor. The caller, Oskar Rom, had travelled nearly 100km from his farm at Oseberg to tell tales of a Viking ship burial there. But the museum was in the process of moving, and the director had […]
Recycling the past
Iron-Age people had a conscious relationship with objects from earlier times that connected them to their past, says Olle Hemdorff at the University of Stavanger’s Museum of Archaeology and Eva Thäte of the UK’s University of Chester. They have been studying the contents of graves in southwestern Norway and have discovered a clear pattern in […]
Ohthere’s Voyages
Ohthere was a Norwegian seafarer, who visited the court of Saxon King Alfred during the 850s AD. He was an honoured guest, who regaled the court with stories of his voyages along the coast of Norway, as far south as Hedeby at the base of the modern-day Danish peninsula, and deep into the Baltic as […]
Kaupang in Skiringssal
Kaupang in Skiringssal (Kaupang Excavation Project Publication Series, Volume 1 – Norske Oldfunn XXII) edited by Dagfinn Skre Aarhus University Press, £39.95 (hb) Chosen by Prof. Richard Hodges, Williams Director, University of Pennsylvania Archaeology & Anthropology Museum. The greatest compliment that can be paid to this volume is that it bears comparison with Holger Arbman’s […]
Norway: Medallion and Silver Bead Found
Two boys discover artefacts dating between AD 900-1100 Tromsø, Norway