Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
Three mortuary houses in Norway dating to the Iron Age and Viking Age are slowly revealing ancient funerary rituals.
The sites were discovered in 2019 and 2020 when a road was being constructed in the village of Vinjeøra, central Norway. They date between 500 and 950 CE.
Excavations confirmed a pre-Christian cemetery, first seen in a test pit dug in 1996. But more recently, alongside the flattened burial mounds, excavators made the surprising discovery of 3 mortuary houses.
Mortuary houses can contain graves, tombs or be used to store the remains of deceased people. Some were also places where the living could visit, leave offerings and worship the dead.
The analysis of the 3 Vinjeøra mortuary houses is published in the journal Medieval Archaeology.
Excavations revealed the mortuary houses are unique among the 12 others in Norway and 1 in Sweden which have previously been identified.
“I think that the most surprising thing was that we did not find any evidence of a permanent tomb or a buried person inside the houses,” says author Raymond Sauvage, an archaeologist from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “Also, the fact that they had doors and entrances that may have led into the mortuary house and burial mound was something I had not thought of prior to the analysis.”
The presence of entrances suggests that the mortuary houses were always open for living people to revisit. Trampled soil at the entrances confirms this.
“Based on the relationship between the size of the mound and the plan of the house, we must assume that one would have to crouch. The room inside must have been quite small and dark, while the door must have let in some light that illuminated parts of the interior,” Sauvage adds.
One of the structures was built in 450–600 CE, during the Iron Age. At this time, cremation was the primary method of interment of the dead.
A second structure built 600–800, would have come around the time that burials were becoming more common. The third mortuary house was erected 800–950 CE when the local people had shifted completely from cremation to burying their dead.
“Burial practices seem to have been affected by a number of factors, such as influences from travel and contact and changing motivation behind what to amplify in the more public displays seen in burial rituals,” Sauvage says. “The mortuary houses show a more stable continuity in use, probably related to the families’ own tradition of venerating their deceased and ancestors.”
No burials were recovered from the mortuary houses. Other finds include fragments of bone, arrowheads, and nails.
Among the bones were those belonging to horses, possibly from sacrificial killings. Other animal bones show signs of burning, maybe from cooking meals linked to funerary rites.
“Future studies should focus more on the interior to get better data about their use,” Sauvage says. “Our evidence was fragmented, and there are several unanswered questions such as how the interior looked, whether there was a designated space to lay out the body, and how the entrances looked.”
