A recently excavated boat grave from the Viking Age has revealed the burial of a woman with her dog at her feet.

The grave, located on Senja, an island in Northern Norway, lay just 20 centimeters beneath the surface—so close, in fact, that it could easily have been destroyed by ploughing. It was discovered two years ago when a metal detector signaled the presence of something beneath the soil. A small test excavation uncovered two oval brooches and some rib bones.

Oval brooches are distinctive items of Viking Age women’s jewelry, leading archaeologists to believe they had uncovered a previously unknown woman’s grave from around 900–950 CE.

Barely beneath the surface

Archaeologists from the Arctic University Museum of Norway later obtained permission to excavate and secure the grave, concerned that its shallow position left it vulnerable to damage. “It was covered by only a thin layer of topsoil,” says archaeologist Anja Roth Niemi.

The excavation didn’t proceed until the landowner decided to expand a nearby garage. Finally, just last week, archaeologists were able to carefully remove the soil and uncover the remains: a Viking woman and her dog, buried in a 5.4-meter-long boat.

Elite burial with silver-threaded brooches

“This type of burial was reserved for the elite,” Niemi explains. Only one or two people per generation may have been granted such an honor—interred in a boat with high-value items.

The oval brooches found in the grave are especially refined, featuring silver thread, indicating the woman held significant status—perhaps not at the very top of the social hierarchy, but clearly a respected figure in her community.

Vikings and their dogs

At the woman’s feet was the skeleton of a dog. “It looks like it was placed with care,” says Niemi. While dogs have been found in Viking graves before, it’s not an everyday occurrence.

Literary sources, including Norse sagas, suggest strong emotional bonds between people and their dogs. “There are stories of prominent individuals doing everything possible to save a sick dog,” Niemi notes, underscoring how deeply these animals were valued.

A high-status burial site

The grave also contained a number of high-status objects: two beads made from bone or amber, a ring-shaped pendant, and an elongated whale bone object that may have been a weaving sword—used in textile work. The preservation of this item is poor, and it was removed with surrounding soil for further analysis.

Favorable northern conditions for preservation

Parts of the skeleton, particularly the larger bones and rib sections near the brooches, were well preserved. “The metal helps prevent bacterial decay,” Niemi explains.

However, many of the smaller bones were only preserved as yellow stains in the sand. Despite this, preservation is generally good in Northern Norway, where lime-rich shell sand from ancient seabeds provides an ideal environment for skeletal remains. Cremation was also less common in this region during the Viking Age.

Revealing the woman’s life

Further bone analysis is expected to confirm the individual’s sex—though Niemi is confident, as oval brooches have never been found in men’s graves. The analysis will also offer insights into her age, diet, possible illnesses, injuries, and even where she may have lived during different stages of her life.

Advanced DNA testing, while not currently planned, could eventually reveal her eye and hair color.

Clues from the soil

When metal detectorists initially uncovered the brooches, they dug slightly deeper than allowed—but in this case, the plough layer was so thin that the mistake was understandable.

Luckily, they followed proper procedures afterward, notifying authorities and preserving the items with surrounding soil. This allowed archaeologists to recover textile fragments from the woman’s clothing and other organic material, offering a rare glimpse into burial practices.

The dog sets this find apart

Håkon Reiersen of the University of Stavanger calls this a particularly exciting discovery. “Often, brooches are found in ploughed fields where the graves are already destroyed. Here, the grave was mostly intact, which is incredibly valuable.”

He highlights the dog as the most striking feature. Referring to the work of Arild Klokkervoll on Iron Age animal graves, Reiersen notes that dogs were the most common animal buried with humans, seen as companions in both life and the afterlife.

While boat graves are not rare in Norway, such well-preserved skeletal remains are, especially thanks to Northern Norway’s favorable conditions.

A potentially larger burial site

Niemi and her team believe this may not be the only grave in the area. Just a few meters from the main site, they found another oval brooch, suggesting a second, undisturbed grave nearby.

She suspects this location—a low ridge near the shoreline—was a chosen burial site for generations. “We’d love to scan the area with ground-penetrating radar,” she says, “to see what else might lie beneath.”