Orkney’s Buried Vikings

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I'm Dr Kat Jarman and this is Gone Medieval from History Hit. Today we're once again going to be talking about the Viking Age. In 2015 human remains were discovered on the north east coast of Papa Westeray in Orkney. Soon became obvious that these graves were, in fact, the remains of Viking Age burials. And not only that, one of them was a very rare Viking boat burial, and a second grave was richly furnished with weapons, including a sword.

Of course, the big question is who these people were and where they came from. Now, Historic Environment Scotland has just announced that work is starting on the analysis of these two graves, which means we might finally get some answers. We're going to bring you updates on that project as soon as we can but for now I wanted to find out more about the original burials and excavations and this really very extraordinary site.

It's special not just because of the finds, but also because the graves were found right underneath somebody's house. So today, I'm delighted to be joined by Fieldwork Project Manager Lindsay Dunbar from AOC Archaeology Group. So, welcome to Gone Medieval, Lindsay. Thank you. Glad to be here.

So I'm really excited to hear more about this grave. Obviously, the main discovery was made a few years ago and you were actually part of that team that oversaw and managed. In fact, you managed the excavations, didn't you? Yeah, I was the start project manager for when the project... first arrived on our desk and it was done over probably four separate excavations and I was lucky enough to be involved hands-on in three of them so it was an interesting project from start to finish.

Fantastic. I'm very, very envious. But before we go into the actual burials, I was hoping you could just sort of set the context a bit because some of our listeners might not be that familiar to the location.

Can you just describe where the site is for me, sort of geographically, and why that's quite unique? Right, yeah, the site itself lies on the Orkney Islands, which are to the north of Scotland, the Scottish mainland. And when you get to the Orkney Islands, you're looking at a series of... smallish and largest islands and the one that we were on was Papawestri which is actually one of the northernmost of the Orkney Islands and it lies

close to the larger island of Westray. In Papawestray I think there's only a population of about 60 people on the island and there's only ferry crossings twice a week so it's not easy to get there. time-wise and it's not easy there to get equipment and obviously on the island you're quite limited with the materials you've got so there was quite a lot of pre-planning involved to make sure we had everything with us that we needed for the works.

and then when you get to where the actual site is itself it lies on the would be the eastern side of Papawestri and it has amazing views across to another smother island which is called the home of papa and where it sits on the home of papa you can see There's three chambered cairns, neolithic chambered cairns there that you can see exactly from where our site is. And the site itself, it lies on top of a large north-south aligned sand gin.

right on the coast so on what you can imagine on one side you've got maybe a six seven meter drop down onto the seashore and then you have this sort of flattish sort of 10 meter wide plateau and then inland the ground falls away by a couple of meters again and it's on top of this ridge that there was an 18th century farmsteading and effectively that farmsteading was renovations to that property were the reasons that we were called to site in the first place.

So it's really quite a spectacular location by the sound of it. It is amazing views, like I say, of down onto the seashore and then across to the home of Papa as well. So you can see all these monuments, which are sort of early Neolithic, most of those. but yeah it's quite an archaeologically rich area and stuff from the neolithic onwards and because of lack of settlement there's a great number of the

prehistoric burial mounds, our chambered cairns, our standing stones, our stall in situ. There's also a lot of settlement from that period onwards all the way through from out Viking and medieval stuff. where you can see the remains all over the Orkney Islands, basically. So these sites, some of these monuments, would have been visible to people in the Viking Age as well, which I think is quite an interesting point.

absolutely yeah there's uh i think it's like at my house with the chambered cairn on orkney where they've got viking graffiti inside of unique graffiti inside the chambered cairns obviously and there's a number of examples of viking burials where they have buried them on sites of ancient burials basically prehistoric burials that probably predated the vikings by a thousand years 1500 years even more in some cases

Okay, so let's get straight on to these particular Viking burials. And I know that in this case, they were actually found quite accidentally, not as a planned excavation, but... by the landowner through some building walls. So tell me how that first happened. Yeah, okay, I would say the 18th century farmsteading had fallen into disrepair over about the last, I don't think it'd been inhabited since about 2000.

and there was a couple who was retiring from the north of england and they had bought the property and were looking to renovate it and orkney council were very keen for people to be able to come in and renovate effectively what dilapidated or ruinous buildings because there was very little new excavations to be required for the works, most of it was renovation works. There was no archaeological mitigation put on as part of the planning.

So the owners started on their works and during some of the building works they needed sand and they went to extract some sand from the far end of the plot and it was there that they thought they found some human bones and then contacted the Orkney Council archaeologist.

she was able to come out and confirm that they were human but because it wasn't part of the planning condition or there was no mitigation in place she then informed historic environment scotland and as part of their human remains call of contract they have a fast response unit that's supposed to be there within 24 hours and luckily at that point AOC were the company that held the contract so we were then forwarded the details and were up on the island within about.

Well, it wasn't quite 48 hours, but as quick as we could get there. And that was in early 2015. Okay. And that early burial, though, didn't turn out to be a Viking one. That first one was actually quite a bit older, wasn't it? Yeah, what you're looking at was... but when our guys got up there on the site

the burial had been disturbed by a small excavating machine that had dug it so the first instance was to clean up the sites best they could establish which bones were in situ which bones had been disturbed and it turned out that you were looking at a very simple uh

So a roughly square grave measuring only about 1.2 meters by 1.2 meters and quite shallow. There was no sign of a coffin, there was no stones marking the grave, there was no stone linings or capstones over the body. It looked like it was a very simple cut into the beach sand and in the beach sand. replaced on top. The body looked like it was crouched in humation.

There was obviously some of the bones were damaged, but it looked like it was an adult male. There was obviously staining in the bottom of the pit where you could see where the body had decomposed. So it was obviously of a fair age.

There'd obviously been some disturbance to it previously before. There was no grave goods, so therefore you're just left with the body. And it could be prehistoric. There was also the idea that there was a tradition of burying bodies that had been washed up on the shore.

burying them within just beyond the sort of high tide mark and again giving them a very simple burial especially for 18th 19th century uh bodies like that and in actual fact we'd been called out the home of papa which is island just across about two months before that because human bones had been found on the beach there and that was expected the same.

discussions were had and we interpreted those bones as having been washed out from a sailor's burial and it was presumed that we were possibly looking at the same thing with that first burial. But then you've had some radiocarbon dates, I believe. Yeah, since then we have had some radiocarbon dates directly off the body and it's placed it to be 1st or 2nd century AD, so a very late Iron Age and predating the Vikings by...

four or five hundred years. So this is some of that earlier archaeology, but a grave in itself like that, just on its own, can't necessarily tell us that much. However, the landowner, this wasn't the last that he would find on his property, because a little bit later...

He did some more building work, didn't he? And came across something else. Yeah, a matter of months later, so further into 2015, he was doing renovation works within... what he was calling the boiler room which was a small building at the very end of the steering and whilst trying to underpin the walls there he again disturbed some human remains and we were quickly dispatched back again back up to the island

and in this instance we got what turned out to be although disturbed it seems to be sort of a classic viking boat burial fantastic yeah very much unexpected yeah So this was essentially underneath one of his buildings or inside one of his buildings, really. Actually, the boat was, because it was such a small annex building, the actual boat was probably slightly larger than the building and extended out.

either side of it slightly so i know the stern of the boat came out underneath where the doorway was into the building but the steady had quite shallow foundations hence the need for the underpinning which is what they were doing and it looked like that building when it had gone in would have partially disturbed the top

of the boat but substantially the boat was intact under the building but then obviously unfortunately when he'd gone in to do some of the underpinning before he realized it was only the human bone that made him realise it was a burial he was disturbing. He'd spotted the odd nail in the material he was moving and these were obviously boat nails from, they were the remains of the boat. It was in better condition than we first imagined.

So what was actually left then of that boat? How much remained of it? Well basically it's a wooden boat so it's like a clinker boat so most of these ones... and the other examples have been found very little of the boat survives and what you really have is the shadow of where the boat is and the most crucial part of that is the boat nails that held the timbers of the boat together and it's effectively those which then if you can plot out

all these are and carefully excavate down through them if you look at the plan of the nails it will show you the plan of the boat and some of those it's quite impressive because you have the sides of the boats coming up as well so if you can plan it in 3d you effectively have the outline of what was a boat whereas in the ground it's a little bit of staining and then like I say the nails and we recovered about 230 boat nails from it and the boat itself is probably

about five metres long by about one and a half metres wide. There were sort of traces of where the keel was. And then within the boat, the body had placed in a crouch position within the centre of the boat. And on top of the body had been placed a... or probably a leather covered wooden shield and all the remains of that is the sort of metal central boss that survived so it was that and the combination of the boat nails are your definite signifiers for a viking boat burial

Fantastic. And there are a few of these, aren't there, from other sites in Scotland. Do you know roughly how many sort of graves like that are we looking at in Scotland? For the boat burials, you're looking at about maybe 10, I think. I'm not entirely sure of the exact figure, but I suspect it's about 10 boats that have been found to date. Most of these were excavated in the 19th century. So in terms of recent discoveries, as far as I'm aware, ours is only 21st century.

boat burial that's been found so obviously when it's come for our sort of recording in the field there's a few bits and pieces that we've managed to do that were open to other after the earlier excavations mostly doing sort of 3d pinpointing of finds

and stuff like that. The methods have come on quite a long way since a lot of those early boats were discovered haven't they? Oh absolutely yeah. And what's so interesting about this as well though is that this burial right this way of burying people is quite unique to Scandinavia at this point in time.

and also it's quite regional in Scandinavia. So actually that is showing us potentially some quite clear links. Oh, absolutely. I can say that is your classic ballpark. You only really get, as far as I'm aware. I'm not sure that there's any been found in mainland Scotland. I think they're all restricted to the Shetland and the Orkney Islands. So this is definitely a really, really important thing.

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I have to say, I feel a little bit sorry for this landowner because I know that when you're doing building work, the last thing you want is to have a team of archaeologists come in. But as it happened, even this was not the last thing that was going to come up on this farm because there was one more burial discovered later.

yeah probably the most impressive of the three in terms of artifacts and preservation was the last burial and in this one this was the only time where he was doing excavations out with the footprint of the existing building and he had to run a service i think it was a wastewater service from the house all the way to the far end of the plot to the new septic tank and it was whilst he was cutting this deeper narrower trench

that in the base of his trench he got the handle of a sword basically sticking out the side of the bottom of his trench and when you saw the pictures of it there was no mistaking that that was a sword handle which In 20 years of archaeology I've done, I've never found a sword. No, me neither. He found one literally two yards from his front door. So, yeah. Wow.

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. But it wasn't just a sword, was it? It was actually a lot more when you came back again. The difficulty we had here was that the burial was probably about one metre, 1.2 metres below the current ground surface.

And it was effectively lying in a sort of two and a half metre wide gap between a very small outbuilding and the actual property, the actual standing steadying. So there was some, we had to get a structural engineer involved to ensure that our excavations didn't collapse. They were effectively all cut through sand as well.

so that was a bit difficult to organise. But once we managed to get the excavation safely, in a safe manner to undertake, you were looking at a pretty much undisturbed burial. The grave cut itself was probably about 2 metres by about 0.8 metres. and it was covered with a variety of large stones which it probably would have had a small cairn on top of it demarcating its location and under the stones.

there was the unarticulated skeleton in a crouched position sort of lying on his right hand side. Quite a large adult individual. The preservation of the bones was particularly good considering it was sand that it was in as well.

And you could clearly see that he was lying with his, like I say, on his right hand side, his knees sort of tucked up a bit and then his hands in front of him together up in front of his face. And then the sword, the handle that you'd seen extending out was actually resting on his thigh.

just by his knee, the handle, and then the tip of the sword was resting just on his cheek. So they'd laid the sword across him. And then on top of his right shoulder, there was a shield boss where they'd obviously laid a large shield down on top of the sword. And this was all in pretty... pretty amazing levels of preservation from you know other examples i've seen or pictures i've seen of similar age burials this was quite good and it was obviously it had been undisturbed

They are really very unique. So you have a boat burial and a weapon burial like this and so well preserved. This doesn't happen every day at all. No, no. And there was probably evidence of... But in front of the sword there was a series of possible arrowheads and a knife and it looked like there was possible textiles remaining on those as well. And because we knew there was obviously a sword on sight.

We'd come up with the head conservator from AOC as well. She was on site the entire time to ensure that everything was done in the correct manner. I know sometimes archaeologists are accused of... just trying to get to the treasure and dig it out quickly to have a look at it. And the Conservatives are always saying, you shouldn't have done that, you should have done this. So she was on site to ensure that everything was lifted correctly. In the end, we actually had to lift.

the skull and the sword as one because the tip of the scabbard had fused to the cheek and part of the forehead where it had been resting on the skull. Right, okay. So that sounds definitely like quite a challenge to do. Yeah, it was technically quite difficult and it was quite, like I say, it was quite a small hole and we couldn't extend it out too far because of the constraints of the standing buildings either side of the excavation as well. So it was a tricky and time-consuming effort.

Fantastic. Now, the good news now that's just come out is that you've got lots of new funding for this new project to actually really investigate these graves. So tell me about the new work that's just starting now. The post-ex is continuing as we speak, so obviously there's conservation on all the artifacts that came out, so there's a lot of information there that can be gathered.

Like I say, there was potential remains of textiles. There was a scabbard itself and then the sword itself. And I know from looking at, I saw a couple of x-rays of the handle when it first came back and you could tell there's quite a lot of detail and information that can be garnered from that, which isn't readily apparent when you look.

it in its current condition or its condition when it was lifted so there's a lot of work to be done with that i've also been told that with regards to the bodies Obviously, we'll do our standards of human bone, whether it's sex, age, look for pathologies or anything like that. But also other stuff to do is like isotope analysis, looking at whether these people are incomers to the island or whether they're part of a mixed population. Yeah.

basically follow along those lines of trying to work out exactly where these people derived from. Yeah, and that's really exciting because we've now quite recently got quite a lot of new information. There's been some new ancient DNA studies that are showing a mix of migrants coming in, a lot of them from Scandinavia, and mixing into marrying with the local population.

that was there before. So that, seeing as these are buried in a very typically Scandinavian or Viking fashion with a boat and the artefacts, then that could be really important, couldn't it? I think that's one of the key research agendas of the whole post-ex programme. We'll be trying to derive as much information about that as we can. I suppose the only other thing to mention would be that when we were...

on site after the excavation had finished of the sword burial. We then excavated the rest of the service track and there was probably remains of a further two or potentially two cairns also on the site. One directly under the house, the entrance to the house, and then one lying to the side. But obviously because they weren't under any threat from the works that had been carried out and the renovations, they'd been left in situ. So we're probably looking at a larger cemetery.

than has been shown by the two burials that we have. Well, the two definite Viking burials we have. I suspect there's a good evidence for the chance of being another two. And given the size of the mound, if there were burials all the way along, you could be looking at another couple on there quite easily. So it could be quite a substantial Viking Age Scandinavian possibly cemetery, which is essentially sitting right underneath somebody's house.

Directly over his house, yeah, or directly under his house, sorry. It's one of those ones is that I'm not even sure that people constructing the house in the first instance would have been aware.

of what they were on. I've done a few jobs where you could tell the burials must have been known about by the people constructing the building. They must have hit them and they've just decided to carry on the building anyway. But I don't suspect these guys who built this one were completely unaware of the significance of the mound. It's a beautiful location.

If you're going to put a house somewhere there, it would be a prime spot. And is there any sign of a settlement or a village or some Viking Age houses around there? If you're looking at Papawai Street, there is... a couple of potential...

eroding settlement sites which are undated their provisional dates have possibly been medieval but there's some of those may well be viking in date they've just never been subject to excavation they're recorded as known sites they're down in the historic environment scotland databases settlement sites but they're undated but there was a very good chance that there would have been associated settlement either close to where we are or at least on Papa Westray and like I say Westray itself

only a few miles away the home of Papa I think there's maybe one possible settlement site which is undated on it as well so yeah further opportunities to examine any of those sites I think would throw up one or two that would be vikingian age

That would be fantastic. Well, I'm really excited to follow this project as it continues. And I know that we are going to be checking in with you all and we will hopefully be getting some updates along the way. Is there anything else you wanted to say about it? Are you happy to wrap it up there? The important bit, I suppose, is that the fieldwork is really just the first element.

in what is a really large project and there's so much more information that can be gleaned from the post-tech stage and there's new techniques and developments and research that are happening all the time so I know there's older sites have been revisited and they've gone back in with more modern techniques and derived a whole wealth of new information and we're lucky enough with our site that there's a lot of different techniques that we can now attempt which I think will bear fruit.

Fantastic. Well, I can't wait to hear more about that. And I think we're going to be getting some updates from you and your team as things happen later on. So we'll be checking back in with you. But Lindsay, thank you so much for coming to talk to us here today. No problem. It was enjoyable. Thank you. so hopefully we'll bring you some updates on this project in the not too distant future but for now thanks for listening I'm Dr Kat Jarman and this has been Gone Medieval from History Hit

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