Child’s Skull Set Into a Danish Iron Age House Floor
For some Iron Age families in Scandinavia, daily life went on directly above a child’s skull. Archaeologists now say the bones in these houses tell a darker story about violence at home.
Researchers led by Marianne Hem Eriksen of the National Museum of Denmark analyzed 192 human bones from people buried in domestic areas at settlements in what are now Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Their study, published on September 28 in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, covers the Iron Age and Viking Age, from roughly 500 B.C. to A.D. 1050. Bodies, or pieces of bodies, were placed in postholes, pits, floors, wells, houses, yards and feasting halls, not only in grand burial mounds or cemeteries.
At least 12 victims
The team found that at least 12 individuals had suffered a violent injury around the time of death. Half of those cases involved head trauma, and four people had multiple injuries. Most were adult males, but two females and a child were among them.
The boy under the floor
In an Iron Age house in Denmark near Aalborg, built between 500 and 1 B.C., archaeologists found a frontal bone from the skull of a child who died between 2 and 4 years old. Eriksen said DNA analyses show it was a small boy who had been cut with a sword. The skull was placed on the floor of a house where people continued to live, so, in her words, someone walked over a child’s skull day after day.
Radiocarbon dating showed the skull is older than the house by as many as two centuries, which suggests the bone may have been kept for some time before it went into the floor.
Other cases, and what they might mean
At a Viking Age site dated to about 750 to 1050, a young woman’s skull with traces of blows was found in a well near four small houses. At Gammel Lejre, a royal feasting hall some experts consider the inspiration for the poem Beowulf, the team found a man with numerous blunt force injuries, several of them healed.
The researchers do not know why these people were targeted or buried this way. One scenario is violent domestic encounters rather than warfare, and the deaths may also reflect socially accepted corporal punishment or aggression within the community. They suspect precarious community members were targeted, and they ask whether some lives were already considered disposable.
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