Cutting-edge science sheds new light on Scandinavia’s maritime past

Radical changes occurred in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age. Those changes laid the foundations for the maritime society that was to characterize the region for much of our history.

Starting between 1,000 and 2,000 years B.C.E., powerful chieftains began to make long voyages across the Baltic Sea and farther west, bringing foreign riches and new ideas back with them to the Nordic region. This maritime culture centered on a completely new type of boat – the plank-built boat, which made long journeys possible, but also required more materials and labor than earlier dugouts and reed boats. 

The researchers in the project will be testing the hypothesis that control over both the know-how and the materials used in making the canoes was essential so that early chieftains could bolster and extend their power. They will be using ground-breaking techniques to date prehistoric canoe fragments and map the economic networks involved in the building of these canoes.

Intact finds of plank canoes from the Bronze and Iron Ages are extremely rare. But dozens of small canoe fragments have been found throughout Scandinavia, and are kept at museums in the region. Many of these fragments have not been studied for over three decades; most of them have not been dated. Modern scientific techniques enable researchers to extract much more information from these archeological canoe fragments than was possible when they were first discovered.

Digital dendrochronology can be used to determine when and where canoes were built. Microscopic tar samples can also be examined to study how the canoes were built and whether their construction was organized at local or regional level. Advanced carbon dating methods can also date woods using much smaller samples than previously possible.

The researchers will be using these techniques to date all boat fragments potentially originating from the Bronze Age or early Iron Age, with the aim of ascertaining the origins of the wood and tar used to build the boats. Their findings will provide important clues in recreating the economic network used by early boat builders.

Building complex boats demands considerably more work, materials and know-how compared with the construction of the earlier simple dugouts or reed boats, so the introduction of plank-built canoes is likely to have required a much greater degree of cooperation and organization. 

Controlling the construction of these boats may also have conferred control over their use. This would have enabled chieftains to create a means of accumulating wealth by trade and pillaging. Plank-built canoes were also used by many other early maritime chieftains around the world, in places such as East Asia, Polynesia and North America.

The project teams wants the project to pave the way for a global dialogue on plank canoe technology, which will place Scandinavian prehistory in the center of international research into the origins of social complexity in maritime societies.