"These are new indications metals were traded further than we thought,” Vandekilde tells Science. Thomas Bredsdorff / National Museum of Denmark Researchers believe people may have decorated the helmets with feathers and horse hair at a time when the worship of animal-like gods was on the rise. Cultural exchange, such as the shared horned helmet theme, would have gone along with the trade in materials. The connection with southern Europe suggests that this exchange involved travel along the Atlantic coast, rather than travelers making their way overland across the Alps. The researchers say in the paper that the Near East and eastern Mediterranean “boast a deep history of horned-helmeted figures connected with divine rulership and with warfare.”Īs Andrew Curry reports for Science magazine, people there would have been eager to get copper and tin from afar since Scandinavia had almost no metal resources at the time. The motif likely reached Europe from the East thanks to Phoenician travelers from the eastern Mediterranean coastal area, reports Sana Noor Haq for CNN. The helmets are similar to depictions of headgear found in rock art and figurines produced around the same time in western Iberia and the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. The research also points to ties among Bronze Age civilizations across Europe and beyond. Vankilde’s new study, published in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift, used radiocarbon dating of birch tar found on one of the horns to confirm their age more precisely. Researchers had previously suggested that the two helmets, decorated with curved horns, originated in the Nordic Bronze Age, dated from 1700 to 500 B.C.E. According to, the legend likely originated with Scandinavian artists in the 1800s, who popularized portrayals of the nomadic raiders wearing the equipment in their works. Viking society only developed in the 9th century C.E., and there is no sign that Vikings really wore horned helmets. The horned theme is from the Bronze Age and is traceable back to the ancient Near East.” “For many years in popular culture, people associated the Viksø helmets with the Vikings,” Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. But new research finds that the famed helmets discovered in Viksø, Denmark, 80 years ago actually date to about 900 B.C.E., nearly 2,000 years before the Vikings. Some of the most common depictions of Vikings show large warriors wearing helmets affixed with horns.
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