The Viking warrior grave discovered by homeowners in their backyard in Setesdal, southern Norway, is even richer than it first appeared. When the grave first emerged late last month, a sword, lance, a few gilded glass beads, a fragment of a brooch and pieces of belt buckles were unearthed. Archaeologists from the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo called to the site were not expecting to find much more than a few additional beads, maybe human remains if they were lucky.

But it turns out those initial finds weren’t even half the contents of this grave. In the past two weeks, an axe head, a shield and some knives have been discovered, making up a complete set of armature for a Viking warrior. Instead of a few more beads, they found about a hundred more from multiple necklaces. They also found a sickle, an iron oval with an elongated handle that may be a cooking pan, two spindle whorls and fragments of four large oval brooches, one of them almost intact.

Domed oval brooches like these were typically worn in pairs by Viking women to fasten the back straps of their gowns to the front straps at the shoulders. The two highly decorated cast bronze brooches were often joined by strands of beads. Viking men used brooches to fasten their cloaks, but they are not domed ovals, usually, and they don’t come in pairs. This opens up the possibility that two people, a man and a woman, were buried in the grave, either at the same time or one spouse interred in the other’s reopened grave after their death.

The style of the sword hilt dates the grave to the late 9th, early 10th century. A grave with similar contents was discovered at a neighboring farm in the early 20th century, and two or three other area graves contain swords, brooches and glass beads of the exact same type. These wealthy graves are indicators of the area’s prosperity in the Viking Age.

Some of the largest iron extraction sites from this time period are found a bit further north in the valley. Extracting iron was something the farmers could do during the wintertime, and iron was exported by the Vikings in massive quantities to Northern Europe and England.

“These exports were so huge that somebody must have gotten quite wealthy from it. And these finds make it tempting to connect the iron extraction business to Valle,” [Museum of Cultural History archaeologist Jo-Simon Frøshaug] Stokke says.

“It’s a captivating thought to imagine such an aristocracy here in Valle, a group of people that have had a style and identity markers that have shown that they belong to this segment of society. Not simply that they are part of the upper echelons because they own swords and such, but that they actually make up a small aristocracy. They’ve dressed in similar ways and brought the same items with them in the grave.”

Homeowners in Setesdal, southern Norway, have discovered a Viking warrior burial in their backyard. Oddbjørn Holum Heiland was digging a little to get the jump on an addition he and his wife Anne are planning on building when he encountered an oblong stone just under the grass and top soil layers. He kept going, and in his next pail full of top soil, he spotted an iron object that looked a lot like a sword. Because it was a sword blade. When he dumped out the soil from the digging bucket, a sword hilt fell out. A little Googling revealed that the shape of the sword suggests it was of Viking origin.

Heiland stopped digging and alerted the county to his potential find. The next day, county archaeologist Joakim Wintervoll and Jo-Simon Frøshaug Stokke from the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, came to view the sword in person. They confirmed it was Viking, and that Heiland had likely excavated a tomb in his own backyard.

The two pieces of the sword that were found make out a 70 cm long sword, and the blade is 5 cm at the broadest point.

“But it’s the hilt that tells us this is a sword from the Viking Age,” Wintervoll explains.

The hilt of a sword is an object of fashion, and the style of the hilt found in Setesdal places it at around the end of the 800s and the beginning of 900.

“We have datings for different styles of hilts from year zero, so we have a pretty good overview of how these hilts have changed from the early Iron Age and into the Middle Ages,” Wintervoll says.

The house dates to 1740 so the grave was lurking under a few inches of sod for a thousand years and by a complete fluke, construction of the house just missed it. The grave also contains a lance, gilded glass beads, a brooch and a belt buckle which was probably also originally gilded. This is an intact, integral assemblage of luxurious grave goods. The person buried must have been someone of high status. There is no evidence that there was ever a mound marking the grave, but the large oblong stone that covered the grave may have been standing originally, only to topple over later. In that case it would have been highly visible in the landscape. If it was deliberately laid horizontally as a headstone, its location would have been significant to the people who lived there at the time.

There used to be a collection of smaller farms just 100-150 metres away from where the grave is located. It is reasonable to assume that these farms existed back at that time, or perhaps even further back in time, according to the archaeologist.

“A pattern that we see is that you bury those who have owned land near the farm, and often in a spot that is easily visible from the nearby roads. People who passed by would then see the grave and know that the people who live here have ancestors who have lived here for a long time. These are our relatives; we lay claim to this land and have done so for generations. This is the function of the visible grave,” Stokke says.

No human remains have been discovered yet, and archaeologists are not optimistic they’ll find any when excavations resume next week, especially since cremation was common at this time, leaving only fragments of charred bone to be found today, if anything.

A cylinder of metal bought at a flea market for less than $25 has been identified as an extremely rare medieval hand cannon and sold at auction last Thursday for more than $2,500. The cast bronze cylinder is 17 cm (6.7 inces) long and 4 cm (1.7 inches) wide at its widest end. The bore is 1.7 cm (.7 inches) in diameter. It is a triple-ring cast cannon with a flared muzzle.

“It really is a remarkable find,” said Charles [Hanson, owner of Hansons Auctioneers]. “Originally this cannon would have been mounted on wood with a powder bag and ram rod. It evolved to become a match-lock firearm with trigger.

The seller found the bargain of their lifetime at a flea market in Hertfordshire. They spent less than £20 for it, thinking it would make a cool decoration for their garden rockery (which it most certainly would). It was spotted in the rockery by appraisers from Hansons Auctioneers who recognized it as a metal barrel firearm made in Europe between 1400 and 1450.

Gunpowder was invented in China in the 9th century, and weapons that utilized it were widespread by the 12th century. Most of them were forms of bombs, but the fire lance, a spear with a barrel strapped to it capable of firing projectiles, was the precursor to the hand cannon. The oldest confirmed hand cannon, the Heilongjiang hand-gun, dates to 1288. At almost eight pounds, it was a heavy device for a hand weapon and the fire lance remained the more popular firearm until the invention of the musket in the early 16th century.

From China, gunpowder and powder-based weapons migrated to Europe, likely introduced by the Mongols during their invasion of the Turkic states and Eastern Europe in the mid-13th century. The earliest known hand cannon from Europe is the Loshult Gun, a cast bronze gun dating to around 1330-50 discovered in Sweden. Its bottle shape and flared chamber suggests it shot iron bolts or arrows rather than stone or metal balls. It’s also far heavier than the earlier Chinese iterations, weighing in at 22 pounds.

The first written record of hand cannons in England dates to 1473, but there are records of their use in France in the late 14th century and surviving examples going back to the 1380s. The Hundred Years’ War saw to it that the English were thoroughly exposed to the latest and greatest weaponry available in France. The rock garden hand cannon predates the English written account and is closer in age to the French examples.

A round soapstone game piece discovered in an archaeological survey in advance of sewer pipe repair in Trondheim, Norway, is inscribed with runes. This is only the second known game piece with a runic inscription ever discovered in Norway.

The excavation uncovered a sunken pit with archaeological layers dating to the Middle Ages. The deepest part of the pit, more than 12 feet below today’s street surface, has been dated to between 1000 and 1150 A.D. A coal layer above it was only slightly more recent, dating to 1030-1180 A.D. The soapstone game piece was found between the two layers.

Archaeologists first thought the lines incised on the round piece’s surface could be stylized floral motifs, but the geometry was also reminiscent of runic inscriptions albeit laid out in artistic fashion.

The team sent high-resolution images of the piece to runologist Karen Langsholt Holmqvist. She was so intrigued she was compelled to view the object in person. That’s when she conclusively identified the decoration as runic writing.

“When you first look at the playing piece, it may look as if it only has a slightly uneven geometric pattern, perhaps a snow crystal. But when I examined the piece more closely, I saw that the lines were not random patterns, but a carefully planned runic inscription. As the inscription follows the curvature of the playing piece, the inscription is a bit odd and strange, but there is no doubt that these are runes.

“And in the microscope I also discovered that there are guide lines drawn, so there is no doubt that the runic maker has planned well to make the inscription follow the round shape of the piece. There are fields on the playing piece that do not have runic inscriptions, and here the shaker has filled the void with a pattern,” Holmqvist continues.

The runes read “siggsifr.” This is likely a name, which is common in runic inscription on small objects like the game piece. “Sig,” meaning “struggle” in Norse, is a name prefix for both male and female names. The “r” at the end indicates this was a male name. “Sifr” is a poetical metaphor meaning “brother,” so perhaps this name meant “brother in arms.” The name could refer to the person who owned the game piece or the person who inscribed it. It could also be an oblique reference to the piece itself, the name of the role it plays, like the equivalent of a knight or a bishop in chess.