Comment by Tor3
16 hours ago
Indeed - though the article doesn't really state the boats weren't in existence before the Vikings, it's about ship burials which apparently weren't supposed to exist in Scandinavia until the practice was imported from England. A theory I'd never heard before, but I guess that's on me. In any case, the find in the article seems to contradict that theory.
As for boats, the Viking age has been connected with acquiring sail technology, not so much with boats as such (which have existed for a long time, the rock carvings you linked to show depictions of boat designs which have actually been found in archeological digs, and that indicates that older, different carvings are also true and that boats were used for long distance trade and expeditions a millenium or two, at least, before the Vikings).
If the appearance of efficient sail technology really coincided with the beginning of Viking raids is still in the open I believe.
Stone ships had been burial sites for two thousand years before the Vikings came to Lindisfarne. And long distance trade has been established and given the extent of the Battle of Tollense contact between tribes must have stretched far and deep. And Britain was an important source of tin so trade routes both started and ended there.
Two thousand years! I thought of the stone ships too (these are burials marked by stones laid out in the shape of a ship), but I went searching for an old example and it seemed like the oldest persuasively dated one is from around 600.
Tjelvar on Gotland are presumed to be from 750BCE, and I don't think that is the oldest in Scandinavia.
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I had to look into this again. In Valsgärde, close to Uppsala, Sweden you have confirmed ship/boat burials from 600CE. At the same time as the ship burials at Sutton Hoo in England. The "Swedish" (at the time national borders were different) had more in common with "Denmark" that in turn had closer relations to England. Tröndelag Norway had less of international trade leading up to the Viking age, at least compared to Denmark/Jutland and the Baltic.