Vikings Cultivated Marijuana Say Archaeologists

.  Photo: Peter Ryan

Scientists took samples of pollen from a bog during the original dig.

“The samples had been forgotten, so it was really exciting to discover them,” says Catherine Jessen of the National Museum of Denmark.

The data was stored in the museum’s archives.

Stylegar and Jessen presented their discovery in a recent issue of the journal Viking.

Jessen is a geologist with pollen sampling as a specialty. She says that the bog where the samples were taken has now been drained. The peat is drier now and the chances of making a similar discovery today would be much slimmer.

Hemp pollen doesn’t carry far in the wind. So scientists think Viking farmers placed the harvested plants on the bogs pretty much where the archaeological samples were found 1,100 years later.

This would be an easy way to keep them damp, facilitating the extraction of the outer fibres.

  Photo: National Museum of Denmark

The researchers reject the possibility that these were wild plants that had been gathered. This hemp must have been cultivated.

“We don’t know if hemp could have been used as a drug. Most of it was probably used in textile production,” says archaeologist Marianne Vedeler at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo.

Vedeler wasn’t involved in the recent study but she is an expert on textiles from the Viking Age and the Middle Ages.

As with flax, used to make linen, the fibre from the cannabis plant can be used for clothes and other textiles. Hemp, of course, has also been used for rope production right into modern times.

“Hemp has a fibre that can be used like flax, but it is a little coarser,” explains Vedeler.

The challenge for the archaeologists is that ancient textiles made of hemp and flax tend to rot, and thus are rarely well preserved. This makes it hard to say how common it was to use these textiles. Archaeologists know more about the use of wool because its fibres preserve better than plant fibres.

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