Scar - A Viking Boat Burial on Sanday
by Olwyn Owen and Magnar Dalland

In 1991 Sanday was the backdrop for a frantic archaeological race against time.

There on a north-west facing shore archaeologists battled with wind and sea to rescue what they could from the Viking boat burial at Scar in Burness.

The story of the seven metre long rowing boat and its otherworld-bound cargo – an old woman, a man and a child – is now retold in a new book dedicated to the excavation of the pagan Norse grave.

Scar – A Viking Boat Burial on Sanday, Orkney, by Olwyn Owen and Magnar Dalland sets out to piece together the clues unearthed at the site and with little archaeological detective work paints an intriguing picture of the three people found within the grave.

Beginning with background information on Viking Sanday – including an excellent section written by W. P. L. Thomson on the landscape of Burness in the Viking Age – the authors overlay the story of the the Scar boat’s discovery in 1985 by Sanday farmer John Dearness, the survey and excavation work of 1991 and subsequent analysis of the finds.

The collaborative work is meticulous in detail and, although containing some fairly hefty technical segments, does not fall into the trap of being a purely academic publication. It remains extremely readable.

In this era of television programmes such as Channel Four’s ‘Time Team’ and the BBC’s ‘Meet the Ancestors’, archaeology has opened up to new group of armchair enthusiasts who seek a more tangible, human link to the past. The authors of Scar manage this ably but not at the expense of the excavation details. Fleshing out the bones of pure archaeological data, they paint a vivid picture of a time long gone. All of a sudden these people are no longer a collection of bones dug from a sandbank in Sanday but are restored to living, breathing people with their own history and tales to tell.

Of particular interest in this respect is the chapter by Daphne Home Lorimer that deals specifically with the analysis of the remains and the information that can be gleaned from them. Close study of the bones would seem to indicate, for example, that the old woman habitually sat cross legged and the condition of her finger bones shows that she probably spun flax. Her male companion on the other hand would appear to have spent some time in his youth crewing a rowing boat, much like the one he was finally buried in.

Each of the grave goods is covered in considerable detail, their origins and significance discussed. Not only the “major” discoveries such as the man’s sword or the woman’s sickle but every item found within the boat carefully examined and discussed.

But when it comes to the grave goods, one object in particular has become synonymous with the Scar Boat Burial – the whalebone plaque. Although this item may have simply been a piece of domestic equipment, it is now thought that these highly decorated plaques had symbolical and religious significance. The book explains this idea thoroughly explaining that the plaques were connected to the Norse fertility goddess Freyja and speculates that the inclusion of such a fine plaque in the grave might mark the old woman as someone of some status within the cult – a priestess perhaps? An interesting idea to bear in mind when thinking of some of Sanday’s old folklore and traditions.

The excavation of the Scar boat burial in 1991 raised a number of questions that in many cases this book now answers. Among others, we can now say with a degree of certainty where the people were from and when they died. But although some of the jigsaw pieces have slotted together to provide answers, others raise more questions that simply cannot be answered. For example, what was the relationship between the three people? How did they die? In cases such as this a range of possibilities is suggested.

Appendices deal with topics such as the cataloguing of box fragments, an inventory of the human remains and soil analysis. These along with broader chapters such as the one on Viking graves in Britain and Ireland makes this fully illustrated tome the complete reference guide to the Scar boat burial.

ST