Bones buried in Scandinavian homes show at least 12 people injured violently around the time of death

The unit in this study is the bone: 192 of them, from domestic areas at settlements in what are now Denmark, Norway and Sweden ^[3]. Some of the remains were whole bodies and some were pieces, set into postholes, pits, floors, wells, houses, yards and feasting halls ^[5]. From that collection the researchers identify at least 12 individuals with a violent injury from around the time of death ^[6]. The report does not say how many individuals the 192 bones represent, or compare them with people buried in ordinary cemeteries, so the dozen cannot yet be turned into a rate.

The sample was chosen because it is unusual. Everyone in it was handled differently in death, and the paper's title calls the collection an "atypical mortuary dataset" ^[17]. "The fact is that not all bodies ended up in monumental burial mounds in the Iron and Viking Ages, or even in more modest urnfields and cemeteries," the researchers wrote ^[4].

The firmest part of the record is who was hurt. Most of the injured were adult males, with two females and a child among them ^[7], so three of the at least 12 were not adult men ^[18]. Marianne Hem Eriksen, the first author and an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark ^[1], described the child. "Our DNA analyses show that it is a small boy who has been cut with a sword," she said in a translated statement. "The child's skull was placed on the floor of a house where people continued to live. This means that someone has walked over a child's skull day after day." ^[9]

Putting the skull in the floor was something the household did. Where the boy was hurt is a separate question, because the skull is older than the house by as many as two centuries ^[10]. He may have died well before that floor was laid. The young woman's skull from the well may also have been kept for a long time before it went in ^[11]. "The woman's skull bore traces of blows and was buried in a well," Eriksen said ^[12].

The authors do not settle on one cause. One possible scenario, they wrote, is violent domestic encounters instead of warfare; others are socially acceptable corporal punishment or some other aggression within the community ^[14]. Given rising inequality and violence across the period, they suspect precarious community members were targeted ^[15]. "Not all lives were equally grieved and commemorated in the Iron and Viking Ages of Scandinavia," they wrote. "We may question whether some lives were already considered disposable." ^[16]

In my view the finding that women and a child were among the injured holds as reported, and it adds people to a record of the period that includes elite warrior burials and mass graves from battles ^[2]. The idea that the violence happened inside communities is a reasonable hypothesis, and the find spots support it only in part. Eriksen said the study "opens up a completely new understanding of Iron Age society, of the occurrence of violence and of the handling of the dead" ^[19]. Of those three, the handling of the dead is the one these bones document directly.