Vikings

Here's our Viking Family (Mum, Dad, Children, Grandparents, Uncle, Aunt and Cousins) sitting around the hearth in their home. They live together on the island of South Uist in Scotland where the weather is often cold and wet and so they are glad that they can warm themselves by the fire. When night comes, they will sleep as close to it as they can - just behind the seating area where you see them now - on beds made of straw.

Because there are no trees on the island, the family are burning peat to warm the house - and they also use it on the small fire you can see marked out at the back of the picture to cook their food. Their house is built of stone and turf and has a low sloping roof so there are no windows and it's quite dark inside.

The family use the house for many things. As well as cooking and sleeping, they like to play games such as chess and pray regularly because they are Christian. They also have a weaving loom to make their own cloth but there is a seperate building for ironworking.

Our Viking family are very clean: they brush their hair once a week with bone combs, go to the toilet outdoors and keep the house tidy by sweeping all their rubbish outiside - it's been done so often that the dirt floor is starting to wear away! Let's have a look at their rubbish.

Sam brought in some finds collected by the archaeologists working in South Uist from the middens (rubbish tips), backfill and cleaning for us to clean and sort. Apart from the archaeologists, we were the first people to touch the remains for over 900 years!

We found that the finds bags contained bones from animals like sheep, cows, horses, fish and birds as well as shells, pottery, waste from iron smelting and stones. We used this chart to try and identify the bones we had found:

	Mammal	Fish	Bird
Is the bone heavy or light?	Heavy	Light	Light
Is the bone shiny and smooth?	No	Yes	No
Can you see through the bone if you hold it up to the light?	No	A bit	No
What shape is the bone?	Rounded	Angular	Angular
If the bone is hollow, is it thick or thin?	Thick	N/A	Thin
If the bone is hollow, is the space inside big or small?	Small	Absent	Large
Does the inside of the bone look like a sponge?	Yes	No	No
Does the bone feel woody or smooth?	Either	Woody	Smooth

Sam explained that bone combs were carved from antlers. This is a piece of antler that was cut off and thrown away while someone was making a comb.

We found a number of bones like the one above which clearly had cut marks on them. Sam explained that this was because the Vikings sometimes cut their meat from the bone before they cooked it.

Laura explained that this bone had been deliberately split in half so that the marrow (which is very nutritious) could be removed and eaten. A peg would have been hammered into one end of the bone causing it to split down its length.

We found many pieces of pottery but this one was particularly special because the rim of the pot was still intact. Jenny was able to tell that this fragment of pottery would have come from a very large cooking vessel.

In one sample bag there was a large amount of industrial waste like the piece of slag shown here. This told us that someone on the site had been making iron pots, tools and weapons.

We found lots of teeth in the finds bags but it took us a little while to work out which animal this tooth had come from (either a human or a dog) and how it had ended up in the middens. Sam noticed a dark spot on the tooth and guessed that it had been giving someone toothache so it had been pulled out and thrown away.