3,000 Year Old Helmet Found in Demark Bog

Archaeology is an amazing field, and every day we uncover things that tell us about the world past. Today's blog is about a helmet found in a bog on Denmark that dates back over 3,000 years!! Here's the story:

 

Bronze helmet with horns Organic residue in one of the helmets’ horns yielded a sample large enough to date.ROBERTO FORTUNA OG KIRA URSEM/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DENMARK

Bronze Age ‘power helmets’ unearthed from Danish bog 

Headgear suggests cultural exchange across thousands of kilometers

21 DEC 20218:00 AM 

 BY ANDREW CURRY, SCIENCE MAGAZINE 

 In 1942, a peat cutter digging in a Danish bog crunched his shovel into a horned bronze helmet. Long, curving bull’s horns topped a round cap adorned with the beak and large eyes of a bird of prey. Fittings on the headgear may have made it possible to attach feathers and perhaps even a mane of horse hair.

Subsequent excavations revealed the remarkable adornment had a nearly identical twin—one that was deliberately placed in the bog on a wooden platter. But the horned pair isn’t evidence that the Vikings who once lived in the area wore helmets, a modern myth; instead, they are far older, a study now reveals.

Researchers show the helmets were deposited almost 3000 years ago—about 900 B.C.E., more than 1500 years before the first Vikings arose in the area. The team also argues that the décor of the headpieces may have been inspired by similar symbolism in far-off Sardinia. The connection would link for the first time two parts of prehistoric Europe separated by thousands of kilometers, suggesting there may have been a previously unknown sea route along the Atlantic coast connecting Scandinavia with the Mediterranean.

“It’s a great paper,” says Flemming Kaul, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark who was not involved with the research. “It’s part of this eye-opening story where we see long-distance cultural contacts in the Bronze Age.”

After the helmets were discovered, researchers suggested they were made in Scandinavia’s Late Bronze Age, a 3-century period of artistic, political, and religious change that began around 1000 B.C.E. But without precise dates for the metal helmets, it was hard to connect developments in Scandinavia with other cultures in Europe at the time.

In 2019, while taking detailed photos of one of the helmet’s curved, hollow bronze horns, Moesgaard Museum archaeologist Heide Wrobel Nørgaard spotted black organic residue, perhaps from birch tar used to anchor decorative plumes to the end of the horn. She was able to pick out two samples and radiocarbon date them. The Viksø helmets were deposited in the bog around 900 B.C.E., Nørgaard and her co-authors report today in Praehistorische Zeitschrift.

The headgear has parallels within ancient Scandinavian artifacts, including another helmet found elsewhere, bronze figurines wearing identical caps, and warriors with horned helmets depicted in rock carvings. Meanwhile, on the island of Sardinia and in western Iberia, rock art and figurines dating to the same time period commonly depicts warriors with nearly identical horned helmets. “There are huge similarities between them,” Nørgaard says. FULL 

STORY: https://www.science.org/content/article/bronze-age-power-helmets-unearthed-danish-bog?utm_campaign=news_daily_2021-12-21&et_rid=79882128&et_cid=4043441