Please join us on Sunday,
February 11 at 2 pm for a lecture - “Dragons
of the North: The World of Viking Longships” - by Dr. John R. Hale, archaeologist
and Director of Liberal Studies, University of Louisville.
The lecture will be held at the Penn Museum, 3260 South St.,
Philadelphia, PA
Admission to the lecture is free.
Viking ships are among the
most remarkable artifacts in the entire realm of archaeological discovery,
dominating European history for the three centuries between 800 and 1100
AD. As warships they terrorized coasts
from Scotland to the Mediterranean; as trading craft they ventured down the
rivers of Russia to Byzantium, and as vessels of exploration and colonization
they crossed the open Atlantic to Ireland, Iceland, Greenland and ultimately
America. Yet all these amazing
achievements were accomplished by open, undecked ships with a few oars and a
single square sail.
The 19th century
witnessed dramatic finds of royal Viking ships in Norwegian burial mounds along
Oslo fjord. More recently, underwater
archaeologists have recovered virtually intact Viking ships from harbors in
Denmark. The most ambitious project in
the field of experimental archaeology has involved the reconstruction and sea
trials of many Viking ship types. John
Hale has traced the ancestry of Viking ships all the way back to sewn-plank
canoes of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, and shows the links between these
remarkable ships and the watercraft of the Pacific and central Africa.
Program sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America
Philadelphia Society.
https://www.penn.museum/calendar/eventdetail/773/dragons-of-the-north-the-world-of-viking-longships
Oseberg Viking Ship (Oslo, Norway)
