Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Korthorn. Today's podcast guest is Yarn Bill.

Yarn is professor of Viking Age archaeology and curator of the Viking ship collection at the Museum of Cultural

History in Oslo, Norway. He's also head of the steering group for the Yellestad ship project, which is the first Viking ship to be excavated for many years.

Our content director, Dave Musgrove, called him to talk Viking ships and to find out what's happening with the ongoing dig.

Welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for joining us.

Well, I'd like to be here, thank you very much.

So first question, a simple question, a stupid question perhaps, but it's my role in these things to ask stupid questions.

What do we actually mean by a Viking ship?

Well I think most people think of Viking ships as those long raiding warships that occurred at the coasts of Europe

but really if you're looking at the material that we have, it's much more than that because we have ships of many different sorts. And I think we should rather think of Viking ships as ships being built by

Scandinavians by Vikings during the Viking Age and then look at the sole range of

seagrafts that was actually in use.

When do we start to sea craft then that we would identify as as Viking?

What's the earliest examples that we're aware of?

Depends on when you decide that the Viking Age begins for you.

So, no, but more seriously.

The first exam that we really have of something that we would call

a Viking ship is probably that from Salma in Estonia. And unfortunately it's not very well preserved, only the iron nails were still

lying in the ground in the pattern that they had been in the boat.

But that is a fine fare which dates to around 750 and the reason that we would call it a Viking ship is perhaps mostly because it was obviously used in a Viking activity.

It was filled with dead warriors who was buried in it.

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