Europe, located on the Île de Groix off the south coast of Brittany (Müller-Wille 1976 ;
Price 1989 ).
The ships have usually been dragged into position within a trench dug to hold them,
afterwards covered by a mound. In some cases the mast seems to have been left standing,
protruding out of the top of the barrow. The burial monuments themselves can be
augmented with other features, such as the circle of standing stones surrounding the
Groix ship grave, and the line of stone uprights that appear to form a ‘processional way’
leading up to it (Müller-Wille 1976 ). There is also evidence that some of the burials,
as at Valsgärde and Oseberg, may have been left open and accessible for some time
(see below).
Typical features of ship burials include the deposition of at least one and sometimes
up to three or four bodies, often interred in a small chamber built amidships, or simply
laid out on the deck timbers. Many ship graves also contain very high numbers of animal
sacrifices – up to twenty decapitated horses, for example, accompanied the Oseberg
grave. As well as domesticates and household animals, exotic creatures such as peacocks
and owls have also been found.
A massive range of grave goods can be found, including the full complement of items
noted in other contexts above. At graves such as Oseberg in particular, we are able to see
the variety of organic containers, baskets, boxes, chests and textiles that were present in
very large quantities alongside much larger wooden items such as furniture. Sometimes
subsidiary ‘ship’s boats’ may be included, as well as a variety of land and ice vehicles
(Brøgger et al. 1917 – 28 ).
Here too we find regional variation, sometimes startlingly so as in the case of the
island of Gotland. No ship graves have been found on the island but instead Viking Age
(and earlier) burials are sometimes marked by large ‘picture stones’ covered with
engraved images and occasionally runic texts in the later examples (Lindqvist 1941 – 2 ).
Common to many of these stones is a depiction of a ship under sail that occupies most of
the lower section of the memorial, above which are a variety of scenes either laid out in
horizontal fields or more informally arranged. The latter can sometimes be identified as
motifs from Norse mythology, such as scenes from the life of the famous hero Sigurðr,
but are equally often of unknown meaning. It has been suggested that these picture
stones are in effect the Gotlandic equivalent of ship burials, but with their message
content expressed through images rather than the physical objects that are customary on
the mainland (Andrén 1993 ).
The exact nature of this meaning has been subject to long debate, focusing princi-
pally on the ship as means of transport for a symbolic journey or as a high-status
possession either of the dead or of their wealthy relatives (Crumlin-Pedersen and Munch
Tyhe 1995 ). While this question is not easy to resolve it is clear that the ships
often contain deliberate markers of ethnicity, religion and power, and may also hold the
clue to remarkable cultural interchange. One example comes from the Uppland graves
as a whole, in which the presence of Sámi objects has been found in some profusion,
including whole sheets of decorated birch-bark tent covers that seem to have been laid
over the ships at both Vendel and Valsgärde (Price 2002 : 237 ). DNA and dietary work
at the Tuna in Alsike grave-field has also suggested that the dead interred there may
have had Sámi ancestry (Price 2002 : 237 ), raising the question of whether some of the
ship-burial occupants may actually have actively maintained Sámi identities. Similarly
startling results were recently obtained from new work on one of the two women from
–– chapter 19: Dying and the dead––