Salme ships

• 1. Introduction

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  The Salme ships were not found by archaeologists searching for them. They turned up in 2008 when workers were digging to lay infrastructure near the village of Salme on the Estonian island of Saaremaa. What they found beneath the soil had been sitting there for roughly thirteen centuries. Two clinker-built vessels of Scandinavian origin, used as burial ships around AD 700-750, lay preserved in the earth. Inside were the remains of 41 warriors killed in battle, six dogs, two hawks trained for falconry, and hundreds of artifacts including gaming pieces made from whale bone and antler. Who were these men? Where did they come from, and why did they die on a remote Estonian island decades before the Viking Age was supposed to begin?

• 2. Ships Beneath the Soil

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  Archaeologists estimated the two ships were built between AD 650 and 700, most likely somewhere in what is now Sweden. They had not been freshly launched for their final voyage. Signs of repeated repairs and patches showed they had been in service for decades before arriving at Saaremaa. The smaller vessel was 11.5 metres long and 2 metres wide. The larger one ran more than 17 metres long and 3 metres wide. By the time they were found, both ships had shifted significantly from the waterline their crews would have known. They rested about 1.5 metres above the ancient water level, and the present coastline now lies 230 metres away at a height 4 metres below the burial site. The land itself had risen and shifted around them while they lay buried. The larger ship left one particularly striking detail in the soil: the outline of its keel preserved in humus, along with irregular rows of strong rivets on the hull bottom. Together these features indicated the ship had carried a sail, making it the oldest known sailing vessel in the Baltic Sea region.

• 3. The Dead and Their Origins

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  Juri Peets, the lead archaeologist on the site, concluded from the start that the warriors buried in the ships were of Scandinavian origin. Isotope analysis of the men's teeth supported that reading, pointing alongside the design of the buried artifacts toward central Sweden as their homeland. Most of the 41 individuals were men between 30 and 40 years old, and the physical evidence showed they had been killed in combat before burial. The smaller ship held seven sets of skeletal remains; the larger held at least 34, arranged in four distinct layers. Haplogroup testing identified the population through several Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA markers, including R1a1a1b, N1a1a1a1a1a1a, I1-M253, and mtDNA haplogroups including T2b5a and H10e among others. DNA analysis revealed something more personal within that group: four of the men were brothers, and they were related to a fifth individual, possibly an uncle. An entire family unit had sailed together and died together on a foreign shore.

• 4. Weapons and Grave Goods

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  Fragments from more than 40 swords of various types were recovered from the burial, along with remains of shields, spearheads, and dozens of arrowheads. Most of the weapons had been deliberately bent and broken before burial, most likely to deter grave robbers from digging up the site. Smaller objects added texture to the picture of who these men were: a single small socketed axe, knives, whetstones, and a bone comb decorated with ornaments. A bear-claw necklace was also recovered. Hundreds of gaming pieces made of whale bone and antler came out of the burial, along with six dice, suggesting the men passed long hours at sea or in camp with games of chance and strategy. Two dogs had been ritually sacrificed and placed with the dead. The hawks recovered alongside the human remains were birds trained for falconry, a practice associated with elite status and leisure rather than ordinary raiding life. The large number of expensive bronze sword-hilts in the bigger ship, combined with a complete absence of weaponry linked to common soldiers, pointed Peets toward a revised conclusion: the men in that vessel were likely of noble birth.

• 5. Battle and Burial

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  The sides of both ships were studded with embedded arrowheads, and some of those arrowheads were of the three-pointed type designed to carry burning materials to set enemy vessels on fire. Peets reconstructed the likely sequence of events: a war party of Scandinavians came to Saaremaa either to raid or for some other purpose, and Oeselian ships-the vessels of the island's Estonian inhabitants-intercepted them at sea. The archers on the Oeselian side inflicted enough casualties among the oarsmen that the Scandinavians could no longer manage their ships. They ran the vessels aground and attempted to hold a defensive position behind the hulls. After the battle ended, the Oeselians appear to have permitted either surviving Scandinavians or another group to conduct a proper ritual burial for the fallen. That burial was unusual in one specific way: the ships were never covered with earthen mounds. Instead, the site filled gradually with blown sand and vegetation until the local memory of it faded entirely. What happened on Saaremaa that day occurred 50 to 100 years before the raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne in England in 793-the event conventionally treated as the opening of the Viking Age.

• 6. A Saga Connection

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  The 13th-century Ynglinga saga, composed by Snorri Sturluson, describes a Swedish king named Ingvar Harra, son of Osten, as a warrior who regularly patrolled his kingdom's coastlines fighting Danes and Estonians. After making peace with the Danes, the saga says, Ingvar turned his attention to Estonia and one summer arrived at a place called Stein. An Estonian army assembled from the interior, attacked him in a great battle, killed him, and forced his forces to retreat. Snorri places Ingvar's burial mound on the mainland at a location called Stone or Hill fort, on the shores of Adalsysla. A verse from the 9th-century poem Ynglingatal, quoted in the saga, complicates that geography. The scholar Edith Marold reads the phrase "heart of the water" in the verse as a kenning-a poetic compound-meaning island. If Marold's reading holds, the poem quietly contradicts Snorri and places Ingvar's death on an island, not the mainland. Further support for that island reading comes from the early 13th-century Historia Norwegiae, which states that Ingvar died while campaigning on an island in the Baltic called Eysysla-the Old Norse name for Saaremaa, still used in Swedish today as Osel. Whether or not the Salme burial holds the remains of Ingvar himself, the overlapping textual and archaeological trails keep converging on the same island at roughly the same era.