Ancient Scandinavians may have used boats made from animal skins for fishing, hunting and trading, according to a new study.
Known as the Pitted Ware Culture (PWC), this group of Neolithic water hunter-gatherers lived in Scandinavia between 3500 and 2300 BCE, according to research published August 26 in Journal of Maritime Archaeology.
This group is perhaps best known for their pottery, which features flat-bottomed vessels that are stylized with horizontal lines scratched into the clay before it is fired. They were also adept marine hunters, especially when it came to hunting seals.
Archaeologists suspect PWC may have used the skin of these webbed-footed aquatic mammals to make boats, and oil from seal blubber to help maintain the boats.
“We know that these people hunted a lot of seals, as evidenced by the large number of seal bones we found at the sites they occupied,” said the study’s lead author. Michael Fauvellea researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University in Sweden, told Live Science. “Seals are also one of the best animals for building boats, as we know that the Inuit [an Indigenous group living in Canada, Greenland and Alaska] using seal oil as an important step in waterproofing their boats. We know that PWCs had large amounts of seal oil, which can be found in their pottery. [at archaeological sites]”.”
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Researchers analyzed the insides of some of the pots and found traces of lipid residue from seal oil, Fauvelle added.
Access to boats is vital to the survival of the PWC; their culture relies on fishing due to living in an area bordered by several large bodies of water, including the Baltic Sea and the North Sea.
“They moved across the environment and traded quite frequently with other groups, often traveling from Gotland [an island in what’s now Sweden] to Aland [an archipelago to the south] “That’s a long way off,” Fauvelle said. “They must be out at sea, across a vast expanse of water.”
Researchers think more primitive boats, such as canoes made from hollowed-out logs, would have been inefficient for traveling hundreds of miles across open water.
“These people had to paddle far and wide to hunt, fish and trade,” Fauvelle said, adding that boats made of sealskin would have been sturdy enough for the job.
In fact, the boats — depending on their size — may have been large enough to carry up to a dozen people at a time, as well as animals, including deer, bears and cattle, the study says.
However, the researchers admit that they have found little physical evidence of the boats themselves, apart from a few small fragments found over the years at various sites in northern Sweden that “may constitute direct evidence for the use of bark boats in the Neolithic,” the authors wrote in the study.
Perhaps the “strongest evidence” is rock art depicting people traveling in boats. Some depictions include details of boats equipped with spearheads that resemble animal heads, Fauvelle said.
“We found images comparable to ethnographic bark boats made at this time and depictions of rectangular boats that are translucent and show the ribs or frames of the boat,” he said.
These images, plus possible boat frame fragments, provide evidence that the PWC people were accomplished boat builders who understood “nautical technology” and would have used “advanced boats” to travel between islands.
“If PWC peoples used skin boats, the question arises as to why the technology may not have persisted into the recorded historical period,” the authors write.
