Author Archives: Jules William Press

How a 17th-century illustration is helping archaeologists find Viking ships

To see more Viking articles, click here. Danish antiquarian Ole Worm conducted the first survey of the Kalvestene in 1650. By JENNIFER OUELLETTE  In 1650, a Danish physician and antiquarian named Ole Worm conducted the first survey of a Viking cremation burial site known as the Kalvestene. Worm created a map of the locations of all the “shipContinue reading “How a 17th-century illustration is helping archaeologists find Viking ships”

Viking Age Iceland: Turf Housing

This is Part 19 of our ongoing series about Viking Age Iceland. For centuries, this island country, unique in Medieval Europe, operated with no king, no great lords, no foreign policy, and no defense forces but which developed legal and judicial systems to limit the violence of bloodfeud and protect the rights of freemen. Far out in the North Atlantic, Iceland was where theContinue reading “Viking Age Iceland: Turf Housing”

Two Viking burials, separated by an ocean, contain close kin

To see more Viking articles, click here. Two Viking Age warriors from the same family died hundreds of kilometers apart. By KIONA N. SMITH  Roughly a thousand years ago, a young man in his early 20s met a violent end in England. Eight hundred kilometers (500 miles) away, in Denmark, an older man who hadContinue reading “Two Viking burials, separated by an ocean, contain close kin”