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The evaluation of spectacular headpieces, lengthy believed to be Viking, led researchers to a shocking new discovery
Two horned helmets found in a bathroom within the Danish city of Viksø within the early ’40s that had been considered Viking have been discovered to be much more historic – about 3,000 years outdated and from the Nordic Bronze Age, analysis suggests.
Housed within the Nationwide Museum of Denmark, they characteristic bull-style horns and two eye-like bulges, and seem to have allowed the attachment of decorations similar to feathers and horsehair.
In 2019, the archeologist Heide Wrobel Nørgaard – one of many authors of the groundbreaking analysis, printed within the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift – observed natural residue on one of many helmets. Radiocarbon evaluation of it led the researchers to ascertain that the helmets had been positioned within the bathroom, doubtless as an providing to the gods, at round 900 BC – which was about 1,500 years earlier than the Vikings got here to Viksø.
In keeping with the analysis, the flowery fashion of the helmets corresponds to that of artifacts from the identical interval discovered on the island of Sardinia, suggesting “their wearers wielded energy, whether or not perceived as god, human, or one thing in between.” The truth that certainly one of them was discovered on a tray of ash provides to the speculation that the headgear had a ritual quite than navy operate.
The similarities of the helmets’ look with collectible figurines from Sardinia have prompted the researchers to counsel that “the Bronze Age was reliant on coveted metals traded in huge quantities and infrequently lengthy distance, therefore connecting metal-rich tracts with areas poor in metals” – a standpoint supported by the “latest many years of analysis.”
Previous to Nørgaard and her co-authors’ research of the helmets, the one supply of data on their origin had been their typology: their fashion and the symbols used for his or her ornament. Subsequently, the institution of the period when the helmets had been positioned in a bathroom, in addition to the invention of a potential, beforehand unknown sea route that apparently linked prehistoric Scandinavia with the Mediterranean and was “unbiased of the in any other case flourishing transalpine buying and selling route” represents an thrilling new chapter in historic analysis.
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