By Andrew Paul
Viking life wasn’t just tough, it was often chronically painful. For proof, all you need to do is examine their skulls. That’s what researchers at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg did with the remains of 15 individuals recovered from an archeological site decades ago in Västergötland County’s Skara municipality.
In 2005, an excavation near the town’s historic Varnhem Abbey yielded a trove of early Christian Viking remains, including skeletal and dental specimens of over 300 people living between the 10th and12th centuries. While work has since been done to analyze some of their dental records, researchers had yet to conduct detailed examinations of the well-preserved skulls.
That recently changed thanks to computed tomography (CT) scanning technology. Using the imaging technique, an interdisciplinary team of forensic dental experts, archeologists, and radiologists, looked at the skulls of nine men and six women who ranged in age from 20 to 60 at their times of death. The results, published February 18 in the journal BDJ Open, indicate Vikings at the time endured a host of maxillofacial diseases, arthritis difficulties, sinuses infections, and other maladies. These would likely have presented recurring health issues, many of which may ultimately have turned fatal.
“There was much to look at. We found many signs of disease in these individuals,” Carolina Bertilsson, study lead and University of Gothenburg assistant researcher, said in a statement on Friday. “Exactly why we don’t know. While we can’t study the damage in the soft tissue because it’s no longer there, we can see the traces left in the skeletal structures.”
According to Bertilsson and her colleagues, subsequent examinations showed many people living in the early Christian community “suffered from numerous orofacial pathologies, including sinusitis, otitis, and infection.” Many of these issues are not detectable based on purely visual analysis, and are only discoverable thanks to CT scanning technology.
Of the 15 Vikings, 11 of them displayed evidence of perlaptical lesions caused by bacterial infections and tooth decay. These often result in abscesses when left untreated, and today require procedures like root canals to treat.
“In several cases, the bony borders of the lesions were perforated, creating communication with either the maxillary sinus, or the oral cavity,” the team writes, adding that “in one case a lesion had diffuse borders” while another displayed a cyst-like lesion. Basically, dental hygiene wasn’t great for the Swedish Vikings.
“At a time when antibiotics, or other modern treatments, were unavailable, these conditions must have been highly challenging,” the team explains. They also theorize that some of these infections likely led to death through the spread of bacteria and sepsis.
Researchers were hesitant to draw larger historic conclusions given the small sample size, but hope the project helps highlight the amount of archeological information that can be learned using CT scanning equipment. Apart from anything else, knowing about these chronic health issues allows us to better understand Viking lives.
“Many of these conditions are highly relatable and give a rare insight into the sufferings of these individuals,” write the study authors.
This article was originally published in Popular Science on February 21, 2025.
