Bodies exhumed from Viking burial mound by Delia Cruceru

Yesterday archaeologists from Norway opened a Viking burial mound to determine if the two women buried there were related. The bodies of the women were found in 1904 in the Oseberg Viking longboat which is now exposed at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. One woman was at her 60s and the other one at 30s. They believe that the older woman was a royalty. The ship was 65 foot and it was buried in 834 as a grave ship for a powerful Viking woman, according to officials of the museum. Per Holck from the University of Oslo said that the older woman might be the powerful Viking Queen Aasa and the younger one her daughter. "We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don't know of any Viking skeletons that have been analysed as we plan to do," Egil Mikkelsen, director of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History. Other specialists think that the younger one might be a maid and she was killed to be a companion into the afterlife. With the technology today they can do chemical analysis of bones that will reveal what people ate. Long times ago in the Viking era the poor people ate fish while the richer ate meat such as elk. "If they were mother and daughter they would probably have had the same food. If one woman was a maid they would have had different diets," Mikkelsen said.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070910/ap_on_re_eu/norway_viking_grave;_ylt=Al3a2.A5qc3HG81CAaRklXOs0NUE

by Delia Cruceru for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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