Viking chieftain`s burial ship excavated in Scotland
Baku, October 21 (AZERTAC). A Viking ship, which for 1,000 years has held the body of a chieftain, with his shield on his chest and his sword and spear by his side, has been excavated on a remote Scottish peninsula - the first undisturbed Viking ship burial found on the British mainland.
The timbers of the ship found on the Ardnamurchan peninsula - the mainland`s most westerly point - rotted into the soil centuries ago, like most of the bones of the man whose coffin it became.
However the outline of the classic Viking boat, with its pointed prow and stern, remained. Its form is pressed into the soil and its lines traced by hundreds of rivets, some still attached to scraps of wood.
An expert on Viking boats, Colleen Batey from the University of Glasgow, dates it to the 10th century.
At just 5m long and 1.5m wide, it would have been a perilously small vessel for crossing the stormy seas between Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland. But the possessions buried with him suggest the Viking was a considerable traveller.
The fragments of wood clinging to the rivets should reveal what trees were felled for his ship, and possibly where it was built.
The Ardnamurchan Transitions Project brings together students and academics from several universities working with CFA Archaeology and Archaeology Scotland.
The most famous ship burial in Britain, Sutton Hoo - found heaped with treasure and excavated in Suffolk in the shadow of the second world war - looks like anyone`s idea of a Viking burial but proved to be Anglo-Saxon, centuries older than the seafaring Scandinavians.
There is an intriguing rumoured Viking ship under a pub car park on the Wirral, and there are many claimed earlier ship burial finds - including one almost a century ago on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.
But all of these had been disturbed or were ransacked by the people who stumbled on them, so none was properly recorded by archaeologists.
Years of work will follow on the new find, and may reveal whether the man who lay quietly in his ship for 1,000 years was a local resident, a sailor taking shelter from a storm or whether his body was brought specially to the beautiful site for burial.
Other news in this section
