Ardnamurchan Viking boat burial discovery 'a first'

[xchrom]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-15333852


The UK mainland's first fully intact Viking boat burial site has been uncovered in the west Highlands, archaeologists have said.

The site, at Ardnamurchan, is thought to be more than 1,000 years old.

Artefacts buried alongside the Viking in his boat suggest he was a high-ranking warrior.

Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb said the "artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain".

Dr Cobb, from the University of Manchester, a co-director of the project, said: "This is a very exciting find.

[AngkorWot]

1. How is this different than Sutton Hoo?

[Codeine]

2. Was Sutton Hoo a Viking burial?

I'm fuzzy, but I thought it was Anglo-Saxon.

[14thColony]

3. The Anglians of Sutton Hoo were a different people

The Sutton Hoo burials date from the 6th and 7th centuries, prior to the beginning of the Viking Era in the early 9th century. The native Anglians, while they shared a number of cultural-linguistic similarities with the 'Norse', were very probably a different people entirely and had merely adopted a shared North Sea culture more often associated with their northern neighbors.

Presumably the people here in this burial, based on time and location, were either Scandinavian settlers or within a generation or two of the first settlers during the Viking Era. While an Anglian would probably have been pretty familiar with their habits, lifestyle, customs and culture, they weren't the same people genetically.

[AngkorWot]

4. I thought they had found a couple of burials in Sweden very similar to Sutton Hoo.

Around the same period.

[14thColony]

5. Yes, eastern Sweden

And in fact the main burial at Sutton Hoo (probably King Raedwald of the East Anglians) is considered the most lavish of these 'Scandinavian boat burials' even though that one's not in Scandanavia as we know it today, although there's some evidence they might have seen the region's geography quite differently back then. The close similarity between Sutton Hoo and east Sweden could be a) close kinship ties due to intermarriage of dynastic houses or fostering of royal children back and forth between the courts, as was fairly common around the North Sea back then, or the importation of a royal house from Sweden (I think there's some evidence the two royal houses had blood ties).

I'm no expert on this stuff, just an avid reader, but I get the idea that 'Viking', 'Viking Era', 'Norse' and all that might be more our own perceptions than anything that would have existed back then. Even the Romans wrote about their navies having to deal with Germanic North Sea pirates who raided coastal villages using shallow-draft long boats with unusually high sterns and prows in the 2-3rd c.AD. Sounds kinda like 'vikings' to me, but at least 500 years before the 'Viking Era.'

So I tend to subscribe to the idea that the Anglians from the Thames up to Scotland had probably long been part of the same North Sea culture that would later be called Viking, and in the case of East Aglia just had really close ties to another part of the same cultural area.

But then I might be full of crap too.