Archaeologists in Denmark have lifted scraps of cloth roughly 1,300 years old out of a woman's grave, a class of find that almost never survives.
The burial lies at Skonager, a site near the old market town of Varde in south-western Jutland. A team from Arkaeologi Vestjylland found the textiles clinging to two oval brooches. Clothing from the Viking Age is scarce in the ground. The National Museum of Denmark says the physical record consists mostly of "small pieces of material preserved by chance".
The metal did the preserving. As the brooches corroded, they released salts into the material touching them. Those salts held off the microbes that would otherwise have eaten the fibres. Gizmodo notes that the soil in western Jutland is strongly acidic, which makes the survival harder still to explain. The excavators called the preservation "absolutely magical" in a post on Facebook.
Fabric on both sides
The brooches are skaalspaender, or scoop brooches. Viking women wore them in pairs to fasten an overdress. Traces of cloth sit on the front and the back of both pieces. Their position may show whether the fragments come from different layers of clothing, and how those garments were arranged on the body.
Rather than pick the grave apart in the field, the team removed it whole in a block of soil. The analysis now runs in the laboratory. Lise Raeder Knudsen, a specialist in ancient textiles, will examine the weave and any pattern. Ulla Mannering and Charlotte Rimstad of the National Museum of Denmark will search the samples for surviving pigment, work that belongs to their project on Viking Age textile colours. Anthropologists at the University of Southern Denmark will study the woman's teeth for evidence of her age, diet, health and movements.
One of the brooches has been repaired. That may make it a family heirloom, older than the cloth around it. Excavations at Skonager in 2024 had already exposed a cemetery holding people of all ages, buried with grave goods such as iron knives and glass beads.
The age of the textiles is not yet fixed. Archaeology Magazine places the burial in the eighth century, which would set it before the conventional start of the Danish Viking Age around 800. Radiocarbon dating of the fragments is still to come.