In 1942, a peat cutter digging in a Danish lavatory crunched his shovel right into a horned bronze helmet. Long, curving bull’s horns topped a spherical cap adorned with the beak and enormous eyes of a chicken of prey. Fittings on the headgear could have made it potential to connect feathers and maybe even a mane of horse hair.
Subsequent excavations revealed the exceptional adornment had an almost equivalent twin—one which was intentionally positioned within the lavatory on a wood platter. But the horned pair isn’t proof that the Vikings who as soon as lived within the space wore helmets, a contemporary fantasy; as a substitute, they’re far older, a examine now reveals.
Researchers present the helmets had been deposited nearly 3000 years in the past—about 900 B.C.E., greater than 1500 years earlier than the primary Vikings arose within the space. The staff additionally argues that the décor of the headpieces could have been impressed by related symbolism in far-off Sardinia. The connection would hyperlink for the primary time two elements of prehistoric Europe separated by hundreds of kilometers, suggesting there could have been a beforehand unknown sea route alongside the Atlantic coast connecting Scandinavia with the Mediterranean.
“It’s a great paper,” says Flemming Kaul, an archaeologist on the National Museum of Denmark who was not concerned with the analysis. “It’s part of this eye-opening story where we see long-distance cultural contacts in the Bronze Age.”
After the helmets had been found, researchers steered they had been made in Scandinavia’s Late Bronze Age, a 3-century interval of creative, political, and non secular change that started round 1000 B.C.E. But with out exact dates for the steel helmets, it was arduous to attach developments in Scandinavia with different cultures in Europe on the time.
In 2019, whereas taking detailed images of one of many helmet’s curved, hole bronze horns, Moesgaard Museum archaeologist Heide Wrobel Nørgaard noticed black natural residue, maybe from birch tar used to anchor ornamental plumes to the tip of the horn. She was in a position to select two samples and radiocarbon date them. The Viksø helmets had been deposited within the lavatory round 900 B.C.E., Nørgaard and her co-authors report at the moment in Praehistorische Zeitschrift.
Organic residue in one of many helmets’ horns yielded a pattern giant sufficient thus far.Roberto Fortuna og Kira Ursem/National Museum of Denmark
The headgear has parallels inside historic Scandinavian artifacts, together with one other helmet discovered elsewhere, bronze collectible figurines sporting equivalent caps, and warriors with horned helmets depicted in rock carvings. Meanwhile, on the island of Sardinia and in western Iberia, rock artwork and collectible figurines relationship to the identical time interval generally depicts warriors with practically equivalent horned helmets. “There are huge similarities between them,” Nørgaard says.
Aarhus University archaeologist Helle Vandkilde argues the similarities between Scandinavian and Sardinian iconography exhibits merchants from the Mediterranean started to make their method up the Atlantic coast to Scandinavia 3000 years in the past, somewhat than utilizing arduous overland routes throughout the Alps. Bronze Age Scandinavia had nearly no steel sources, so demand for copper and tin in all probability fueled long-distance commerce, with cultural alternate following shut behind.
“These [helmets] are new indications metals were traded further than we thought,” says Vandkilde, the paper’s lead creator. “Ideas were cotravelers.”
The date additionally locations the helmets at a time when a political elite in Scandinavia was consolidating its energy and non secular concepts had been transferring from Sun worship to particular gods with animal attributes. More ritual headgear than battle garb, the helmets are full of animal symbolism. “You have a helmet which represents all the cosmological religious powers,” Kaul says. “It’s the most impressive religious power hat of the Bronze Age.”
Vandkilde and her colleagues counsel the “power hat” and its horned cousins communicated otherworldly authority by calling on imagery and concepts imported from the Mediterranean together with the copper and tin used to make bronze. The helmets had been in all probability used for generations by the reigning leaders, they suggest. “In my head, it’s a new dynasty that pops up contemporary with the helmets,” Vandkilde says. “They’re using the divine to sharpen and legitimize their power.”
Not everyone seems to be satisfied. Georg August University of Göttingen archaeologist Nicola Ialongo says the examine leaves heaps unexplained. If there was a closely trafficked Atlantic commerce route linking the Mediterranean to the far north, he argues, why are horned helmets and different iconography present in Sardinia and Scandinavia, however not in Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, or the Netherlands? “Even if you assume seafarers went directly from Sardinia to Scandinavia, they must have stopped along the way.”
Kaul says the analysis exhibits the Vikings weren’t the one Scandinavian society with far-flung connections previously. “You can see trade networks and religious ties over long distances already in the Bronze Age,” Kaul says. “The Bronze Age is much more interesting than the Viking Age.”