Gudrun Bartels

In 2008, workers laying electrical cable in a small Estonian village called Salme hit human bones. Archaeologists came out to look. What they uncovered was a pair of ships buried in the ground, and inside them were the bodies of 41 men. The ships dated to around 750 AD. That's roughly 40 years before Vikings famously raided the monastery at Lindisfarne in England, which is usually treated as the start of the Viking Age. So this was a Viking crew, before the Viking Age was supposed to have started. Chemical tests on their teeth showed they grew up in central Sweden. They had sailed across the Baltic to the island of Saaremaa, and they never went home. Many of the skeletons had wounds from blades and arrows. These men died fighting. Their companions buried them right there on the shore, which suggests whoever survived had to leave in a hurry, or couldn't take the dead home. But they didn't just dump them. In the bigger ship, the dead were laid in layers, with shields placed over them. They were buried with swords, many of them decorated. With dogs. With hawks, the kind used for hunting, a sign of high status. And with hundreds of gaming pieces from a strategy board game the Vikings played. These men had brought it along for the voyage. Then came the DNA. When researchers studied it, they found that four of the men were brothers. They had been buried side by side. Nobody knows exactly why they came. A raid. A war. Maybe a diplomatic mission that went badly wrong. There's no written record of it at all. For 1,250 years they lay under an Estonian field. The first chapter of the Viking Age was found by a work crew laying cable.