- the location of the earlier grave must therefore have been carefully remembered.
Within the boat lay a man and a woman laid out head-to-head along the keel line,
furnished with high-status clothing and equipment; a baby lay by the woman’s hip. The
body of the boat was filled with objects and animals, the latter including a horse and a
dismembered and butchered dog whose body parts had been carefully placed on a variety
of items. Seated in the stern was a second woman, possibly with the tiller in her hands
and with the severed head of the dog either in her lap or resting on an adjacent bronze
cauldron. Buried with costly jewellery and dressed unusually in what appears to have
been an outfit of leather, beside her on the deck lay the kind of iron object interpreted
at other sites as a staff of sorcery. An axe and shield were deposited next to her and seem
to be associated with this woman rather than the man on the boat floor (Stylegar 2007 :
95 – 100 ). A similarly complex sequence at Klinta on Öland involved a double male–
female cremation on board a boat, with the later separation of the ashes from the man,
woman and animals and their deposition in separate graves nearby, all with secondary
rituals over an extended period (see Price 2002 : 142 – 9 for a detailed review of the
process). These examples are far from unique.
The chamber graves in particular also exhibit a complexity that must reflect an
intricate series of actions during their construction, such as the burials of possible
sorceresses on Birka (Price 2002 : 128 – 41 ; Figure 19. 4 ). One of these, Bj. 834 , contains a
double chair burial as described above, and a lance has been thrown across the seated
figures in order to strike deep into the wood of the platform upon which rests a pair of
draught-harnessed horses. Other burials also exhibit weapons being either stuck into
chamber walls or else plunged vertically into cremation deposits (Nordberg 2002 ).
Figure 19. 3 A reconstruction of the Oseberg ship burial as originally built, with the ship left
partially uncovered and accessible. (Drawing: Morten Myklebust, after Gansum 2004 .)
–– Neil Price––
