Sebbersund: isotopes and mobility in an 11thÀ12th c. AD Danish churchyard T. Douglas Price a , Jens N. Nielsen b , Karin Margarita Frei c , Niels Lynnerup d, * a Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States b Aalborg Historiske Museum (retired), Aalborg, Denmark c Center for Textile Research, Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark d Laboratory of Biological Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark article info Article history: Received 29 March 2012 Received in revised form 18 June 2012 Accepted 19 June 2012 Keywords: Strontium Mobility Christianity Medieval Isotopes abstract The important Viking Age and early Medieval site of Sebbersund in northern Jutland, Denmark, contains a large churchyard from the 11the12th century AD. Sebbersund was an important trading center in this period and the location of one of the first churches in Denmark, perhaps an entry point for the intro- duction of Christianity to the country. Excavations have exposed almost 500 graves of an estimated 700 individuals in the cemetery. Here we report on the analysis of strontium isotopes in human tooth enamel from burials in the cemetery as a signal of place of birth. Some 19 samples have been measured and at least three non-local outliers identified. Futhermore, six archaeological fauna samples had been analyzed in order to define the local bioavailable strontium isotope baseline range and these values were compared to the more general bioavailable baseline range values for Denmark. The burials are evaluated in light of the available archaeological, chronological, anthropological, and isotopic information. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Viking Sebbersund The former Viking site of Sebbersund lies on a small headland, adjacent to its modern counterpart, in the eastern Limfjord in northern Jutland, Denmark (Fig. 1). From about AD 700 to 1100 this place was an important trading and handicraft center in the Viking world, peaking after AD 1000. At that time the western end of the Limfjord was open to the North Sea and offered a shorter and safer passage to the Kattegat to the east, without exposure to the dangers of the passage around Skagen, the northernmost tip of Denmark. Furthermore, a channel (Sløjen) connected the Limfjord with Ska- gerrak. This would have been the preferred route from the Limfjord to Norway and England. Indeed, the location and the find material from archaeological excavations indicate that trade and handicraft production were the mainstays of the site. It was apparently a seasonal place, with only a very small permanent settlement, if any (Christensen and Johansen, 1992; Nielsen, 2004, 2008, 2011). This is further attested by the complete absence of long houses, which otherwise denote typical Danish villages in that period. Thus, the archaeological evidence points to Sebbersund as an important trading place in northern Denmark with overland contact to the rest of the country and overseas contact to Norway, Sweden, England and the European continent. Furthermore, with one of the earliest churches in Denmark, Sebbersund may have been an entry point for Christianity coming from England or continental Europe into Scandinavia. We thus found it of interest to investigate whether Sebbersund was mainly a trading place run by non-locals, or rather was a location where a local populace concentrated, probably seasonally. To investigate further the evidence for trade in both commercial goods and religious faith, we examined the human remains interred at Sebbersund in terms of place of origin by means of strontium isotope analyses to better understand the context of this important place. 2. The site Archaeological excavations in the 1990s, revealed several distinctive areas of the site (Fig. 2). To the north lay an area with an estimated 300 pit houses, of which about 70 have been excavated. Finds in the houses included pottery, loom weights, spindle whorls, beads and metal artifacts of iron and bronze. Fishing equipment, fish bones and shell evidence the importance of the marine resources of the Limfjord. The pit houses were small working houses for the production of various crafts. The only finds in situ, in at least half of these structures, are loom weights and spindle whorls, documenting the production of textiles. South to the area of pit houses there were numerous postholes, pits and a few other * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ45 35327239; fax: þ45 35327215. E-mail addresses: tdprice@wisc.edu (T.D. Price), jens.nikolaj@tdcadsl.dk (J.N. Nielsen), kmfrei@hum.ku.dk (K.M. Frei), nly@sund.ku.dk (N. Lynnerup). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jas 0305-4403/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2012.06.015 Journal of Archaeological Science 39 (2012) 3714e3720