ELSE NORDAHL VALSGÄRDE 14 ACTA SEPULCRETI VALSGAERDIAE REGIAE UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS I EDIDERUNT JOHN LJUNGKVIST ET NEIL PRICE VALSGÄR DE 14 BY ELSE NORDAHL This volume is published by generous grants from the Swedish Research Council, Berit Wallenberg Foundation, and the Royal Patriotic Society. © Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University 2018 Cover illustration by Olof Thunman Language editing: Elisabet Green, Ben Raffield Edited by: Kent Andersson, John Ljungkvist, Neil Price Series editors: John Ljungkvist, Neil Price Layout: Martin Högvall, Graphic Services, Uppsala University Main text typeset with Adobe Caslon Pro Distribution: Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Box 626, 751 26 Uppsala, Sweden ISBN 978-91-506-2707-7 Printed in Sweden by DanagårdLiTHO AB, Ödeshög 2018 Contents Preface – The Valsgärde cemetery: excavations and publications .............. 7 Foreword ................................................................................................. 15 Description of the burial .......................................................................... 17 The contents of the grave ........................................................................ 23 Animals in the burial .............................................................................. 59 The dating of the grave ............................................................................ 61 The textiles ............................................................................................. 63 The boat .................................................................................................. 69 Catalogue of artefacts ............................................................................. 89 Field notes on the finds .......................................................................... 97 Bibliography .......................................................................................... 133 Preface – The Valsgärde cemetery: excavations and publications Neil Price and John Ljungkvist The Valsgärde hilltop cemetery is situated three kilometres north of Gamla Uppsala in central Uppland province, Sweden. During the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries, a handful of artefacts had been collected there which appeared to be of late Iron Age date, but the site’s true character was first recognised in 1926. In that year Petrus Hübinette, a clerk, and E.E. Eriksson, a district judge, showed Valsgärde to two archaeologists working nearby on the excavation of Gamla Uppsala church. These were Sune Lindqvist, newly appointed to the Chair of Archaeology at Uppsala University, and his amanuensis Karl-Alfred Gustawsson, who together examined the numerous elongated depressions that were clearly visible in the mo- raine hillside. They concluded that in all likelihood they were the remains of boat graves, a suggestion that gained support the following year when gravel extraction exposed a horse cranium complete with bridle. In 1928 the systematic excavation of Valsgärde began under Lindqvist’s direction, staffed by his archaeology students and assistants. The first boat grave to be investigated proved to be of Viking-Age date, and in the course of two years some four examples from the same period were excavated. Sune Lindqvist and his team quickly understood the close parallels with the famous boat grave cemetery at Vendel, and in consequence hoped to discover spectacular and unplundered Vendel-period boat burials at Valsgärde too. Their expectations were fulfilled when features of this type began to emerge from the hillside, includ- ing four especially outstanding examples. These graves are still the most dramatic burials known from the site, and it was around them that the rest of the Valsgärde project took shape. While this Vendel-period focus was understandable, in retro- spect it can be seen to have distracted scholarly attention from the wider archaeolo- gy of the cemetery as it continued into the rest of the later Iron Age. Following the first excavation seasons, in 1936 a dispute arose concerning which museum – in Stockholm or Uppsala – would be assigned the finds from the site. As a result the excavations came to a halt, and were further delayed by the Second World War. Fieldwork resumed in 1946 and was completed in 1952, these later sea- sons being directed by Bertil Almgren and Bengt Schönbäck (1957). 7 8 VALSGÄR DE 14 The complete inventory of burials from the hillside then stood at 15 boat graves, 15 other interments of differing types (principally chambers and coffin burials), and 62 cremation graves. Other features of more uncertain character had also been re- corded, such as a boat-shaped setting made of raised timber posts, together with traces of settlement. The documentation of the Valsgärde burials is of varying qual- ity, but in general it is very good indeed, not only by the standards of the time but even by comparison with some of today’s recording. This is in large degree thanks to the efforts of individuals such as Else Nordahl, who maintained order in the field and in the records’ subsequent archiving. As a result, though methods have un- doubtedly developed and improved, today’s archaeologists can still study the Vals- gärde material with minimal problems. Although they are not the subject of the present reports, in the mid-1990s new excavations were begun at Valsgärde by Svante Norr and Anneli Sundkvist (1995), which this time focussed on the settlement remains adjacent to the cemetery hill. Publishing Valsgärde The publication history of the Valsgärde excavations is a complex one. The first synthetic account of the discoveries appeared soon after excavations -be gan (Lindqvist 1929). Shortly thereafter, three of the Viking-Age boat graves from the earliest investigations were quickly published in article form (Dyfverman 1929; Fridell 1930; Odencrants 1933). Work on the Vendel-period boat burials began more or less immediately with a preliminary account of grave 7 (Arwidsson 1935), and several specialist papers appeared on these and other subjects (Lindqvist 1932, 1934; Arwidsson 1932, 1934). A second, more comprehensive synthesis was published by Lindqvist in 1940, and while this need not concern us further here, the problematic context of its appearance should not be ignored*. The planned publication programme of full re- ports quickly fell behind schedule. The Vendel-period burials in particular were very complicated indeed, containing hundreds of artefacts and detailed stratigraphic in- formation, while the specialists involved often had many other demands on their time. Research nonetheless persisted through the years of the museum dispute and throughout the War, and a special publication series – Acta Musei Antiquitatum Septentrionalium Regiae Universitatis Upsaliensis – was inaugurated by Uppsala * Lindqvist’s 1940 paper was published in Germanen Erbe, the official archaeological magazine of the Nazi Party. His relationship with the Third Reich was complex and ostensibly sympathetic, resulting in lifelong damage to his reputation. However, in the early 2000s when the Swedish state security files for the war years were declassified, it was revealed that the reality was quite different: Lindqvist had been an intelligence agent operating against the Nazis at great personal risk, and had also been responsible for saving several Jewish families. As these operations re- mained secret, he maintained cover until his death in 1976. PREFACE 9 University’s Museum of Nordic Antiquities (now the Museum Gustavianum). Eventually three of the four Vendel-period boat graves appeared there in book form, in the sub-series Die Gräberfunde von Valsgärde. Lindqvist’s former student and col- league, Greta Arwidsson, published boat grave 6 in 1942, boat grave 8 in 1954, and boat grave 7 in 1977. Outside this series, the Migration-period chamber grave 20 was partially published by Anna-Märta Tjernberg in 1948. Alongside the burial reports, a second sub-series of artefact analyses was also launched as Valsgärdestudien, within the main Acta series. Two doctoral theses appeared here, on the enamel and glass (Arwidsson 1942b) and swords (Olsén 1945, a work that was planned for multiple volumes but of which only the first was completed). All these reports were published in German, according to the academic conventions of the time. As the publication of the major Vendel-period boat graves was delayed, by exten- sion the same fate unfortunately befell all the other burials – in boats or otherwise – excavated between 1946 and 1952. The greater part of this material is not especially complex but nonetheless it is of considerable value. Fragments have appeared in academic papers, but the bulk of the burials have not been published at all despite their research potential. Many decades later in 2013, another series was inaugurated by the Museum Gus- tavianum Archaeological Research Group, titled Acta Musei Gustavianum Regiae Universitatis Upsaliensis (despite the name, it was never formally constituted as an Acta series with the university, and is thus a freestanding endeavour). The series also carried the subtitle of Valsgärde Studies but with volume numbers re-starting at one. Only a single book appeared in this series, translating and reprinting the early papers on the Viking-Age boat graves 1, 2 and 4 together with a number of new analyses (Munktell 2013). In addition to the actual excavation reports referenced above, the years since the Valsgärde excavations