Viking Archeological Site and Others Earn World Heritage Status

[Judi Lynn]

The trading center of Hedeby and its surrounding wall are considered one of the most significant Viking sites in Northern Europe



Part of the Danevirk wall surrounding Hedeby (Unesco)


By Jason Daley
SMITHSONIAN.COM
3 HOURS AGO


The Unesco World Heritage Committee is currently meeting in Bahrain, and its major order of business is “inscribing” or adding new areas of natural or cultural significance to the list of World Heritage sites. So far, reports Francesca Street at CNN, about 20 new places have been added to the list, which began in 1978 and contains 1092 with the new additions.

The additions for 2018 include Gobekli Tepe, a Neolithic temple in Turkey known for its carved skull fragments, the well-preserved ruins of the Caliphate city of Medina Azahara outside Cordoba, Spain, and the Aasivissuit-Nipisatan Inuit hunting ground in Greenland.

Another of the additions, which promises to yield more insights into Viking culture in the coming decades, is an area called the The Archaeological Border Complex of Hedeby and the Danevirke in what is now Schleswig, northern Germany, on the Jutland Peninsula. According to Kerstin Schmidt at Deutsche Welle, the Viking settlement of Haithabu, or Hedeby, located at the end of a navigable Baltic Sea inlet, was discovered in 1897 and has been under excavation since 1900. To this day, archeologists are still uncovering new artifacts and data about the people who settled the area between the ninth and eleventh centuries, when it was mostly under Danish control. According to Unesco, though, there are ancient burials and other signs that the harbor was used as far back as the first or second century A.D.

Hedeby wasn’t just any Viking town. It turns out the area near the modern day Danish border was the most significant long-distance trading center in Northern Europe during its heyday, and trade routes from all over Europe and as far away as Byzantium, now Istanbul, converged in the area. Hedeby supported 1,500 to 2,000 full-time inhabitants, besides the boatloads of traders that visited. Fully loaded merchant boats could anchor in the city’s harbor and Viking longboats could stage in the harbor in preparation for raiding season, making it an ideal hub.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/viking-archeological-site-and-others-earn-world-heritage-status-180969496/

[left-of-center2012]

1. Interesting

They made and used bricks.

But now, having googled 'bricks', I see they were used as far back as 4,000 B.C.