iScience peers back through the mists of time to the Viking Age, when a saga describes a dead man being tossed down a castle’s well. Now, archaeologists are pretty sure they’ve found the vic’s body down the same well:
The potential of ancient DNA analyses to provide independent sources of information about events in the historical record remains to be demonstrated. Here we apply palaeogenomic analysis to human remains excavated from a medieval well at the ruins of Sverresborg Castle in central Norway. In Sverris Saga, the Old Norse saga of King Sverre Sigurdsson, one passage details a 1197-CE raid on the castle and mentions a dead man thrown into the well. Radiocarbon dating supports that these are that individual’s remains. We sequenced the Well-man’s nuclear genome to 3.4× and compared it to Scandinavian populations, revealing he was closely related to inhabitants of southern Norway. This was surprising because King Sverre’s defeated army was assumed to be recruited from parts of central Norway, whereas the raiders were from the south. The findings also indicate that the unique genetic drift seen in present-day southern Norwegians already existed 800 years ago.
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A specific passage in Sverris Saga6 describes in detail how in 1197 CE, while King Sverre wintered in Bergen, the Baglers launched a sneak attack against the Birkebeiner stronghold at Sverresborg Castle built by Sverre around 1180 CE (63° 25′ 10.1922″, 10° 21′ 25.4298″) just west of Nidaros (now the present-day city of Trondheim, Norway). The Bagler army entered the castle through a secret door while the residents were dining. They plundered and raided the castle, burning every house inside, sparing the residents only the clothes they were wearing. Crucially for this study, they threw a dead man’s body down the local drinking well inside the castle, subsequently filling it with boulders.6
Early, incomplete, excavations of the well in 1938 unearthed a body of an individual at the base of the well below a substantial aggregation of large stones (Figure 1). New excavations were performed in 2014 and 2016,7,8 and in the southern side of the well additional worked and unworked stones were found, partly sealing new parts of the body not identified in 1938 (Figure S1). The osteological analyses from 2014 to 2016 indicate the remains belonged to a male, aged 30–40 years at the time of death.8,9 A photograph from the 1938 excavation shows the torso belonging to a human skeleton leaning slightly on its left side (Figure 1). Investigations in 20168 revealed additional important details. The left arm was missing, but phalanges belonging to the left hand were found ex situ. The skull was also found ex situ, to the right of the upper part of the torso, and was not connected to the body. The skeleton displays several traumas, but due to the conditions, it has been difficult to differentiate which of these are antemortem or postmortem. A blunt force injury to the rear left part of the skull in addition to two sharp force cuts in the skull are not likely postmortem events.8
Radiocarbon dating of bone from the skeleton produced a conventional radiocarbon age of 940 ± 30 years (Beta-394180, bone).10 We sought to shed further light on the Well-man and the events described in Sverris Saga, by sequencing his genome and making inferences about his sex, ancestry, and physical characteristics. Our study provides an unusual opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of this historical event through the integration of results from isotopic, osteological, archaeological and genetic analyses in the context of information from an 800-year-old text.
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“Visual summary” and other illustrations & photos at the link.
[h/t Mr. Goodstein]