Archaeologists May Have Found Traces of a Viking Marketplace in Norway

Ground-penetrating radar found evidence of a trading hub buried near the island of Klosterøy’s historic monastery

Sonja Anderson
Daily Correspondent

March 4, 2024 5:10 p.m.



Researchers have found that a tiny Norwegian island may have been home to a thriving marketplace during the Viking Age.

Klosterøy—located off Norway’s southern tip, around 200 miles from Oslo—was already historically significant: The isle is home to the country’s best-preserved medieval monastery and several Iron Age burials. But now, using ground-penetrating radar, archaeologists from the Norwegian University of Stavanger’s Museum of Archaeology have located a cluster of pit houses and piers where Viking Age locals might have shopped and traded 1,000 years ago.

Håkon Reiersen, an archaeologist at the museum, and his team conducted the survey in late 2023. As he tells Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou, the team had “long predicted” that employment of ground-penetrating radar around Utstein Monastery would yield historic results.

“We have received numerous metal detector finds from [the monastery] in recent years, including items associated with trade such as weights and coins,” says Reiersen in a statement from the museum. “One of the things we wanted to investigate … was whether there could be additional traces of trade activity. I am therefore not surprised that the results now indicate that Utstein was indeed a marketplace in the Viking Age and early Middle Ages.”



Archaeologists drive the radar-eqipped vehicle over the remains of a possible pit house. Grethe M. Pedersen / University of Stavanger

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-found-traces-viking-marketplace-norway-180983886/