Archaeologists discover a child's skull built into the floor of a 2,500-year-old Scandinavian house

Archaeologists have unearthed evidence that men, women and children were subjected to violence within their communities in ancient Scandinavia — and that these victims were buried in unusual places, such as pits or wells or under a family's house or yard.

During the Scandinavian Iron Age and Viking Age (from roughly 500 B.C. to A.D. 1050), violent encounters between individuals and communities steadily increased, resulting in archaeological evidence of elite warrior burials and mass graves from battles.

To better understand the context of violence in the Iron and Viking ages, researchers analyzed 192 human bones from people buried in domestic areas at settlements in what are now Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

"The fact is that not all bodies ended up in monumental burial mounds in the Iron and Viking Ages, or even in more modest urnfields and cemeteries," the researchers wrote in a study published Sept. 28 in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Rather, some bodies — or pieces of bodies — were placed in postholes, pits, floors, wells, houses, yards and feasting halls.

The archaeologists discovered that at least 12 of the individuals had sustained a violent injury around the time of death. Half of those cases involved head trauma, while four people suffered multiple injuries. Most of the victims of violence were adult males, but there were two females and a child as well.

In one Iron Age house in Denmark, built sometime between 500 and 1 B.C., archaeologists discovered a frontal bone from the skull of a child who died between the ages of 2 and 4 years old.

"Our DNA analyses show that it is a small boy who has been cut with a sword," study first author Marianne Hem Eriksen, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark, said in a translated statement. "The child's skull was placed on the floor of a house where people continued to live. This means that someone has walked over a child's skull day after day."

Radiocarbon dating revealed that the child's skull is significantly older than the house itself, by as many as two centuries, suggesting the bone may have been kept for some time before being placed in the house floor, according to the study.

At a Viking Age site dated to around 750 to 1050, archaeologists found a young woman's skull in a well near a cluster of four small houses. "The woman's skull bore traces of blows and was buried in a well," Eriksen said. She may have been cut or slashed with a sword or ax and, like the child, her bones may have been kept for a significant amount of time before being buried in the well. "These glimpses of lives lived from the past show how fascinatingly different people must have thought about life and death," Eriksen said.

And at the Viking Age site of Gammel Lejre, a royal feasting hall that many experts consider to be the inspiration for the epic Old English poem "Beowulf," archaeologists found the burial of a man whose skeleton bore numerous blunt force injuries, several of which had healed, and which attested to a difficult and likely painful life. His skeleton was discovered directly south of the feasting hall.

The study of bones in domestic areas "opens up a completely new understanding of Iron Age society, of the occurrence of violence and of the handling of the dead," Eriksen said. "The results show a much greater complexity in the everyday life and world of imagination of the time than we often attribute to Iron Age people."

But it is unclear exactly why these particular people were the victims of violence and why they were buried in such unusual ways. One possible scenario, the researchers wrote in the study, is that these were victims of violent domestic encounters rather than warfare. Their deaths may also have been the result of socially acceptable corporal punishment or some form of aggression within the community.

Given the increase in social inequality and rise in violence in the Iron and Viking ages, the researchers suspect that precarious community members may have been targeted.

"Not all lives were equally grieved and commemorated in the Iron and Viking Ages of Scandinavia," the researchers wrote. "We may question whether some lives were already considered disposable."

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