The Vikings’ houses found in Spjald

The Ringkøbing-Skjorn Museum has recently finished up the excavations in the centre of Spjald city. The excavations resulted in finding the Vikings’ houses and twelve graves dated to the Iron Age.

 

The found Vikings’ houses are a part of a large settlement which had been existing for several centuries. The traces of the chief building with the stables and small houses with the workshops were discovered. These new founds are a good proof for the hypothesis that the Western Jutland was densely populated thousand years ago.

The tombs, excavated in this place, are a bit older according to their age, as they date from the Iron Age. They were built in the times of the Roman Empire in the first centuries AD. The traces of the buildings of that epoch were found before in the other sites at the excavations of the foundations of the Spjald  houses. The archaeologists found large tombs with the clay vessels for food and drink. At some graves there was jewelry made of silver and bronze. Several common graves were also excavated, in some of them some little children had been buried. There were traces of the wooden coffins almost in all the graves, in some cases – even the apparent traces of the remains.

The similar serious excavations meant that the museum didn’t use to have an opportunity to implement all the necessary earth-moving work. Therefore, it’s quite pleasant, that the Heritage Agency provided a grant of 223.750 krones for this purpose.

This important discovery gives a new understanding of the Iron Age and of the Spjald of the Vikings’ Age. The name “Spjald” itself used to signify the name of the fields once belonging to the archbishop Ribé. Now there are all the reasons for revising the origin of this name which is likely to date from the Vikings’ Age.

 

Based on Historie-Online materials