Kenneth Glad
New traces beneath a planned building site are changing how one settlement is viewed. The finds point to skilled craft, trade goods and a busy world beyond the local area.
Before a new industrial area is built near Søften, a village in eastern Jutland in Denmark, archaeologists have uncovered remains of a much older production site. According to DR, citing Moesgaard Museum, the excavation north of the city of Aarhus has revealed 82 pit houses.
Aarhus was known as Aros during the Viking Age and was an important trading town. The Søften discovery suggests that life around Aros was not limited to ships, warriors and merchants in the town itself. Work was also taking place in nearby settlements that may have helped supply goods and labour to the trading centre.
Pit houses were partly sunken buildings often used as small workshops. At Søften, the findings point strongly toward textile work. Archaeologists have identified objects connected with spinning, weaving and finishing materials, suggesting a site where craft was repeated on a notable scale.
Liv Langberg, excavation leader at Moesgaard Museum, told DR: “We have found loom weights, spindle whorls, glass beads and whetstones. All in all, a lot of objects from both the first and last part of textile production.”
The finds show more than isolated craft work
Loom weights helped keep threads stretched during weaving, while spindle whorls were used to spin fibres into thread. These tools suggest a practical chain of work, from raw material to finished textile. The number of workshop huts makes the site more than a small household activity.
Similar objects have been found at other Viking Age sites, but Moesgaard Museum regards Søften as unusual because of its size and layout. The discovery gives researchers a clearer view of how a major town such as Aros may have depended on activity outside its centre.
Langberg said the scale of the settlement is what makes it remarkable. In her view, the excavation shows that areas beyond Aros helped create the conditions for the town to grow.
For Kasper H. Andersen, a historian at the same Museum, the site is an important clue to eastern Jutland during the Viking Age:
“It tells us that the Viking Age was not just such an uncivilized, barbaric, backward time, as there has otherwise been a perception of. It was a society with orderly conditions, at least in some parameters.”
Coins carried distant places into Søften
The excavation has also produced silver fragments and coins from areas now in Germany and France, as well as Arabic coins from caliphates in the Middle East and Central Asia. Those finds place Søften in a wider commercial world, even if the work at the site itself was local and practical.
Andersen said the people working in Søften would have understood that the world reached far beyond their own region, from Iceland to Muslim kingdoms in Asia. The finds therefore add a broader dimension to the story of a workshop settlement beside Aros.
The discoveries do not erase the familiar image of Viking voyages and raids, but they do add another layer: People making textiles, handling imported silver and working in a settlement tied to trade, craft and growth.
Sources: DR, Moesgaard Museum
