Prehistoric societies from Iceland to the Eurasian Steppe sacrificed horses as part of their burial rituals. These Baltic tribes, known as the Balts, sacrificed horses longer than anywhere else in Europe, until the 14th century. Christians, however, despised the practice, and it quickly fell out of favor once a community converted to Christianity.
Archaeologists have been studying Baltic sacrificial sites for almost 200 years. Two features seemed to be certain: that only stallions were sacrificed and that the Balts obtained their horses from the local population of tarpan horses, commonly known as “forest” or “wild” horses.
However, our team’s latest research challenges these “facts” about the last horse sacrifices in Europe. It shows that around a third of the sacrificed horses were in fact mares – and surprisingly, some of the horses began their lives in Christian Scandinavia and eventually ended up as sacrifices on the other side of the Baltic Sea.
The Balts were a loose group of tribes who spoke a language related to modern Lithuanian and Latvian. The Romans called them Aestii and traded with them in amber. The Balts were illiterate, but we have fragments written about them by outsiders such as the travellers and traders Wulfstan of Hedeby and Ohthere of Hålogaland.
The Balts were skilled horsemen who used equipment such as bridles, saddles and stirrups. The 11th-century German historian Adam of Bremen wrote that the Baltic elite drank fermented mare’s milk and ate horse meat.
Horse sacrifices were always public rituals involving the entire community. Sacrificial pits could contain several or a few complete horses or partial animals, with or without their riding gear. While horses were usually placed in a crouched position or laid on one side, in one notable case in what is now northern Poland a horse was buried upright. We also know from archaeological analyses that some were buried alive with their legs tied, or covered with heavy stones to prevent them from jumping out of the sacrificial pit.
The deposition of partial animals would have been a particularly bloody, macabre public spectacle, with horses being beheaded, skinned, and halved or quartered. Although horses were often buried separately from people, some were buried beneath a layer of cremated human bones and ashes.
But why horses?
It is important to note that other animals were not spared when it came to Baltic sacrifices. We have excavated bone fragments of cows, sheep and goats, dogs, birds, fish and even a domesticated cat from these tribal burial sites.
Horse sacrifices, however, were the most common and apparently also the most important, probably because of their spiritual, social and economic significance to the Balts.
Medieval travelers who visited these people wrote that horses were an important part of funeral ceremonies for elite members of society. In the late ninth century, Wulfstan described elaborate, day-long horse races in which the winners received the property of the deceased. The 14th-century chronicler Peter von Dusburg described horses being run so hard that they could not stand and died.
To learn more about why specific horses were chosen for sacrifice, we collected teeth from 80 horses buried in eastern Baltic cemeteries from around 100 to 1300 AD for strontium isotope and genetic analysis. Strontium isotope analysis can tell us whether horses were raised in the same general area where they were buried, because the saying “you are what you eat” is true on a molecular level.
The chemical element strontium varies from place to place based on local geology, and plants absorb strontium from the soil. When horses eat plants, that strontium is absorbed into their bones and teeth.
Tooth enamel mineralizes only once as teeth develop, and does not change. So by measuring strontium isotope ratios in teeth and comparing them to the burial environment, archaeologists can determine whether horses were bred locally or brought from elsewhere.
For genetic sex determination, horses are like humans. Males have an X and Y chromosome, while females have two X chromosomes. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis tests which sex chromosomes are present in each sample.
Our strontium results show that at least three of the horses came from central Sweden or Finland – probably by boat across the Baltic Sea from as much as 1,000 miles (1,500 km) away. They all date from the 11th to the 13th centuries, meaning that this increase in mobility began in the latter part of the Viking Age and continued thereafter.
Our second major finding was that genetics showed that in all periods up to a third of the horses sacrificed were mares, contrary to the previously accepted view that only stallions were sacrificed.
People were well connected during and after the Viking Age. Trade between neighbours continued regardless of religion. One of the imported horses was even buried with a trader’s weight. Scholars have always known that material goods and slaves were transported along bustling, far-reaching Viking trade routes. Our findings confirm that horses were too.
Although the exact meaning of these rituals remains mysterious, the sex of the horse was not central to the rite, nor was it the reason for choosing a horse. More likely, the determining factor was the high prestige value of an imported animal.
Yet the fact that these horses were brought from Christian lands and sacrificed in an ostentatiously pagan manner may symbolize a powerful act of resistance and resilience by the Balts.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Katherine French has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 893072, the National Geographic Society and the Society for Medieval Archaeology.
Richard Madgwick is not an employee of, an advisor to, an owner of shares in, or a recipient of funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond his academic appointment.