Bones from Scandinavian hearths and floors record injuries in 12 of nearly 200 people

Nearly 200 individuals is the denominator, and the 12 injured people in it come to roughly 6 percent ^[2][16]. At least eight show deliberate violence ^[5]. That is about 4 percent of the set ^[17] and two-thirds or more of the injured ^[18]. These are small counts. The phys.org report on the study does not give a trauma rate for conventional cemeteries from the same periods, so there is no control against which to call 6 percent high or low.

The sample is selected by its own definition. Much of the evidence for violence in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia comes from sagas and other written records, and from burial mounds and mass graves where skeletons show severe trauma ^[15]. This set comes from elsewhere. It is made of remains, whole or partial, placed in hearths and under floors ^[1] or in wells and feasting halls ^[10], from people who did not get a conventional cemetery burial ^[9]. The paper's title calls it "an atypical mortuary dataset" ^[11]. Whatever decided who ended up under a floor could also be linked to who had been hurt, so the group cannot stand in for the wider population.

The design is a re-reading of old material. Marianne Hem Eriksen and colleagues on the international BODY-POLITICS project ^[11][14] went back to bones held in museum collections and to earlier excavation reports ^[3], looking for injuries and for healing ^[4]. Four people carried multiple injuries picked up over their lives ^[6], a third of the injured ^[19]. One Viking Age man had survived three separate blows to the skull, plus fractures of the forearm and collarbone, before he died ^[6]. The opposite case is a skull fragment from a child aged 2 to 4, found beneath a floor, who may have suffered a weapon injury around the time of death ^[7].

The domestic setting records where the remains ended up. Where the injuries happened is an open question. The authors give several possible explanations, including violence within the home, fights in the local community, clashes between communities and ritual violence such as human sacrifice ^[20]. Some remains also show fractures, dental problems and signs of chronic physical stress ^[8], and the authors suggest some of these people lived with hardship and violence throughout their lives ^[12]. I think the bones support a narrower reading: people who had been hurt, sometimes more than once, were later handled and placed inside homes. Household violence is one of several explanations on the authors' list ^[20].

The firmest finding concerns what happened after death. Some remains show signs of cutting and other modification after death ^[9]. "Whatever the logic, these bodies were purposefully processed and transformed in and after death," the researchers said ^[13].