Possible Viking canoe found in Norway
A dugout canoe that may be up to 2000 years old has been found in south Norway, giving valuable clues to the lives of ordinary people at the time.
The pine vessel was dragged from Royraas lake in south Norway this week following a tip-off by the family of two elderly men who first spotted the boat when they swam in the lake as children in the 1930s.
"We believe it dates from the Viking times or perhaps from the early Middle Ages," Snorre Haukalid, the county archaeologist for Vest Agder, told Reuters. He put its likely age at between 800 and 1,200 years.
"If we're really lucky, it could be even older, perhaps 2,000 years," he said. A splinter had been taken for carbon dating tests that would take several weeks.
"A lot of archaeology in the Nordic region looks at burial mounds and the lives of the rich," Haukalid said. "The special thing here is that this is an isolated lake so the boat was probably used by ordinary people, perhaps for fishing."
Haukalid said the remains were about 3.5 m long, suggesting the boat was originally about 4 to 5 m long - or big enough for several people.
Ancient dugouts have sometimes been found in other Nordic countries, including some dating back to the Bronze Age about 3,000 years ago.
"When we were boys, we dived down to it," Anders Tveit, one of the men who found the canoe in the 1930s, told the south Norwegian daily newspaper Faedrelandsvennen. "When we've been out rowing we've shown it to our grandchildren...You could see it on the bottom," he said.
A son-in-law was responsible for eventually alerting the authorities.
