00:00A team of archaeologists recently found the bones of a Viking nobleman in Denmark.
00:04But they didn't find the bones at a dig site.
00:06They found the bones in a mislabeled box in a Danish museum.
00:10And those bones had been missing for nearly a century.
00:18Now, these remains were found in Bjerringhout in Denmark in 1868.
00:23And they weren't even found by archaeologists then.
00:26What happened was a local farmer was digging up some soil to fill in a pit.
00:32And he uncovered a burial mound with a wooden chamber and a coffin.
00:38And what looked like a very richly appointed burial, there were beautiful ornate fabrics wrapped around the remains.
00:47There were a pair of axes, one of which was inlaid with silver.
00:52What happened was the farmer basically told all his friends and they all helped themselves to what was in the
01:01grave.
01:01And it wasn't until nearby archaeologists heard about the find, came to the town and gathered everything back together and
01:09then just tried to reconstruct what the site looked like before it was essentially looted.
01:15The remains, which were bones wrapped in fabric and the other artifacts, were then brought to the National Museum of
01:23Denmark in Copenhagen.
01:24And where they were, where they were catalogued and analyzed.
01:29But at some point, and it's not clear exactly when this happened, the bones and the fabric that was wrapped
01:37around them got separated from the rest of the artifacts.
01:40And then efforts to locate them were unsuccessful.
01:44What likely happened is that after they got separated, they were then filed with a similar group of artifacts, also
01:52from the Viking Age.
01:53But there was no clear trail as to where that was.
01:57So there were two efforts to locate these missing remains in 1986 and in 2009, and both of them were
02:05unsuccessful.
02:06And so it was thought that the bones were lost forever.
02:11However, recently, a team of scientists was looking at Viking remains from another site.
02:19And there was a box that was together with all of these other boxes from that site.
02:26And what was in it just looked like it didn't quite belong.
02:30There was something about the textiles that was a little different in style from the rest of the materials from
02:39this other site.
02:40And what's more, the bones were male bones.
02:44They looked like male bones.
02:45And the burial that they were looking at, that they were investigating, the burial was a female.
02:50So something there wasn't quite right.
02:52So they looked at the remains a little more closely.
02:56They looked at the textiles a little more closely.
02:58And they saw that there were structural details in the textiles that matched the Viking burial from 1868, where the
03:10remains had gone missing.
03:11And so they did a series of tests for the bones and for the fabric.
03:17They did dye tests and fiber tests to confirm what they suspected.
03:20And they were able to show that the box that they had found was, in fact, the box from the
03:281868 burial.
03:29And it had been mislabeled and filed with another Viking-era dig site.
03:35One of the details of the fabric in the box of remains that they thought was especially interesting was that
03:44there were these almost like rolled tubes of fabric that were around the lower part of the leg bones, around
03:51what would have been the ankle.
03:52And the researchers, from their experience working with fabrics and textiles and Viking costumes, they recognized these as what were
04:02likely the cuffs of a pair of pants.
04:05Now, Viking women did not wear trousers, but Viking men did.
04:11That was another clue that these bones were likely from a different burial entirely and had not been filed away
04:20where they belonged.
04:21And then, another piece of evidence, in the Beringholt burial, there were a pair of very well-preserved sleeve cuffs.
04:31And the style of these sleeve cuffs was very, very similar to the cuff that the researchers thought came from
04:38a pair of pants.
04:39So this was just another piece of evidence that helped them bring these things together and reunite these long-lost
04:47bones with the burial where they came from.
04:49The scientists who located the missing remains were working on a project called Fashion in the Viking Age.
04:56And recently there have been some really interesting discoveries of textiles, fabrics, little details showing the ways that Vikings dressed.
05:07And what's really interesting about this is that all of these, all of these little pieces, maybe in and of
05:14themselves, aren't going to tell you much.
05:16You know, here's a little bit of detail of a cuff or a little bit of embroidery.
05:21But bringing them all together the way that this project does offers a whole new perspective on clothing.
05:28Thousands of years ago during the Viking Age.
05:30And this particular man, the one whose remains were recently found, was likely a wealthy, important person, judging by the
05:42richness of the detail in the fabrics that the bones were wrapped in.
05:47And those pants that he was wearing were probably quite fancy.
05:51They were they were stitched with gold and silver thread.
05:54There were elements of silk in the fabric.
05:56So that's the story of the recovery of the long lost bones of a fancy pants Viking.
06:03So.
06:10That's what we're going to do.
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