This recent satellite snap shows off a multicolored "mosaic" of tightly packed mini farms covering part of Taiwan in the western Pacific Ocean. The sea of fields and shade nets demonstrates the scale of the agricultural challenges facing the densely populated island.

Taiwan is 14,000 square miles (36,000 square kilometers) — about the same size as Maryland — but has a population around four times as large, with approximately 23 million people living there, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. This places a heavy burden on the island's agricultural industry to provide enough food for everyone on the island, especially as large parts of the landmass are covered by mountains and rainforest.

Researchers estimate that there is only around 3,200 square feet (300 square meters) of Taiwanese farmland per citizen, which is around two-thirds the size of a basketball court, according to the Earth Observatory. This is around 10 times less than the equivalent for U.S. citizens.

The majority of the island's food is produced within Yunlin County, which is situated around halfway along the Chianan Plain, a lengthy strip of flat terrain that hugs Taiwan's west coast. Just under half of the county is visible in the satellite image, which spans roughly 15 miles (24 kilometers) across.

The flat ground in Yunlin County, as well as access to water from the island's largest river, the Zhuoshui (visible across the top of the image), makes it an ideal place to grow a variety of different crops, including "rice, sweet potatoes, peanuts, corn, sugarcane, garlic, scallions, coffee, fruit, and leafy greens," Earth Observatory representatives wrote.

The average size of a farm in Yunlin County is under 100,000 square feet (10,000 square m), which is around 90 times smaller than the average U.S. farm. As a result, the region looks like a giant patchwork of tens of thousands of irregular cuboids when viewed from above.

The sizes of Taiwanese farms are restricted by longstanding legislation that limits the amount of land any individual can own, according to the Earth Observatory. Most of the farms are passed down from generation to generation.

While Yunlin County's agricultural mosaic is fairly consistent across this image, two main areas stand out from the rest (see below).

The first outlying region is a swarm of blue and turquoise rectangles surrounding the town of Xiluo in the upper right of the image (just below the river). These farms are covered with plastic shade nets, which shelter them from harsh sunlight in the summer and monsoon-like rains in the wet season

The second and perhaps most noticeable anomaly is a cluster of much larger, lightly colored farms near the town of Baozhong (bottom left of the photo). These are sugarcane fields, left over from when Japan controlled Taiwan between 1895 and 1945.

A large portion of the Chianan Plain was used to grow sugarcane by the Japanese, who also constructed railway lines to move the crop across the island. However, most of these fields have since been repurposed, and all but one of the railway lines have fallen out of use.

In addition to growing crops, these small farms are used to rear livestock, including chickens, cattle and "millions of pigs," according to the Earth Observatory.

See more Earth from space

Lost 'heart' of the Colorado River

A 2016 astronaut photo mosaic highlights a "sunglint" phenomenon that transformed Lake Powell into a winding metallic "river." The artificial reservoir, which is the second largest in the country, is home to many visible and long-lost geological wonders.

Giant 'sponge' dome looms over Brazil

A 2025 satellite photo shows the Caldas Novas dome, a 12-mile-long monolith that towers above the Brazilian state of Goiás. The structure acts as a giant sponge, soaking up water that helps fuel nearby hot springs.

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A 2024 astronaut photo captured an unusual salt patch shining like snow on top of northern Chad's imposing Emi Koussi volcano, which is covered with ancient lava, hidden vents and shadowy waterways.

'> Multicolored 'mosaic' of mini farms surrounds Taiwan's largest river — Earth from space

Laura Geggel: The Vikings are popularly known for being brutish and bloodthirsty pillagers, but the individuals in your book show the rich diversity of people from this time. Why did you decide to write this book and feature their stories?

Neil Price: I think quite simply because of the cliche that you've just mentioned, the idea that the Vikings are all barbarian raiders who go about burning down churches and frightening the English and things. Those raiders were certainly real, but they were only ever a tiny minority of the Scandinavian population, and I wanted to bring out all the different kinds of Viking lives, and that's why this book really came together.

It's divided into chapters, each one of which looks at a different kind of person, you know, a farmer, or an ambassador, or someone who uses magic, or a hunter. And I'm quite pleased that the Viking — the sort of raiding and pillaging Viking — it takes a while to get to him.

LG: How would you define the epitome of a Viking from that age?

The actual Viking, it comes from an old Norse word from their own language: víkingr. And really it's a job description, it means something like pirate — not necessarily negatively. It just describes maritime robbery with violence. So it is the classic image of the Viking stereotype.

But it was never a name for a people. If we could go back in time and just meet some people in Scandinavia and say, "Did you know that you're all Vikings?" — they'd be astonished.

It's a name, a collective name that we've given them. It started in the 19th century, really. So, they wouldn't have called themselves that.

LG: Your book starts with the sea-king, a commander and his crew who were buried in boats with swords and shields in Estonia. Usually, the Viking Age is said to have begun in 793 with the raid on the island of Lindisfarne in the U.K., but you say this burial suggests that the Viking Age started earlier and in another part of Europe. Can you tell us more about this?

NP: When I started studying Vikings at college — so this is back in the early 1980s, a long, long time ago — the Viking Age did start not just in 793; It started on the eighth of June 793 with the Lindisfarne raid.

Obviously it's absurd that an entire period of time starts on an afternoon, you know, not the day before or the day after. So it's obvious that we're talking about something that is really a matter of social processes, things that go on over a long period of time. But the thing that makes the finds that are in the sea-king chapter — they're from this place called Salme in Estonia — really interesting is that they seem to be the remains of, or the traces of a raid.

It's decades before Lindisfarne, it's about 750. And obviously on an island on the Estonian coast, it's going east, not west. So it really pushes that [raiding] behavior a lot earlier and it reorientates it. Even then, we shouldn't see the Vikings in that find as being the first Vikings. Actually the Scandinavians had been raiding all over the place for generations.

LG: I really enjoyed your focus on women, since stereotypically the Viking Age is associated with burly male warriors. What are some roles that women held in the Viking Age that you don't think most people know about?

NP: Something that particularly interests me, which is something I've worked on for a very long time now, is that when we think about Norse religion, everyone thinks about the gods. You know, they're still around in Marvel movies and things — we think of Thor and Odin and Freya and so on.

But actually, the [thing that was] far more present than the gods in people's lives were lots of kinds of local spirits and creatures and the elves that live in the stone behind your house. Getting in contact with that world of supernatural creatures and forces and powers — or whatever we call them — was something that was very much in the domain of women.

And it's a really important thing. So we shouldn't just say, "Oh, and some of them did magic." They're like negotiators, because you want to get on well with all these little creatures. If you don't, they could mess up your life, you know — your cattle could die, your crops could fail, that kind of thing. You could get sick.

So the practice of, it's hard to know what to call it in English. Sorcery or magic — they're not very good words, but there's lots of Norse words for it. To be able to do that is a very powerful thing and it's a very prominent role in society. And this was very much in the domain of women.

I think actually women could take on many of the roles that we conventionally assign to men. In terms of capability, of course they could. There are some, rather few I think, but there are some female Vikings, like actual Vikings, there are women conducting trade, owning property, investing in business ventures, things like that. So they have a very prominent role in Norse society.

We talked about Lindisfarne just now. When I started studying the Vikings, Viking women were one display case in the museum exhibition, next to the display case on pottery or something. Not half the population, and that has really changed. I think we look at Viking Age people now, not just assuming they're male by default.

LG: Actually, to linger, you described a number of women and their professions. Could you tell me more about these two amazing women in your book from Birka: the merchant and the warrior?

NP: Birka is this huge town. It's Sweden's first urban center, and it's absolutely surrounded by burial mounds. So you have the area of the town and then all the people who lived in it. You can wander through their cemetery, which is a pretty spectacular place — there's 5,000 burial mounds.

The merchant woman that you mentioned, she's one of the earlier graves [circa 840s], so she's one of the first people who would have identified as being someone who lives in a town. Today we talk about "I'm a city person" or a "country person," and that's an identity that was only just beginning to be created in the Viking Age, because everybody was country people. With the first towns, people start to live in a different way, and this woman was one of them.

If we look in her grave, she has things that have come from all over the western Viking world, things that I think probably came as loot from the raids, so she knew somebody who was involved in those things.

But you look at the stuff that's there, it seems pretty likely that she is a merchant in her own right, perhaps someone dealing in textiles. This idea of a businesswoman setting up a shop in Birka and maybe importing textiles or making them, having them made, because she's probably not working the loom, you know. It gives us a glimpse of a different kind of Viking life, one that I don't think we're accustomed to seeing and we should.

And then the warrior is about 100 years later than the merchant woman, when Birka has grown; it's quite a big settlement by then that's a really powerful place.

It's become quite militarized, so it has a fortification wall and it has a fortress, and there's a garrison building, which is a really amazing structure actually. It's partly made of weapons. There are weapons in the walls and on the floors. Around the building are a number of burials with lots of weapons in them. It's quite easy to say that a burial with lots of weapons is a warrior, but that's an interpretation. We can't be sure that the things buried with the dead were their possessions. We kind of assume that that's the case, but clearly not always. So there's a bit of a question mark there.

This burial was excavated like most of the ones in Birka in the 1870s, so a long time ago. And this grave is absolutely full of weapons. It's got all the weapons. And out of all the about 1,100 burials that were excavated on Birka, only two have a complete set of weapons, so this is rare. It's a very spectacular grave.

This burial has been reprinted again and again. [Iit's] in like every book on the Vikings. So it's been put forward as a kind of ultimate Viking: This is what proper Vikings looked like, you know, all the gear. And because it was excavated in the 1870s, it's always been assumed that this person was male. It's not hard to see where that assumption comes from, but it's actually been consistent ever since.

Then, between 2011 and 2017, first a series of osteological studies looking at the bones, and then DNA, confirmed that this person was female. And actually the team that worked on it, which included me, none of us were particularly surprised.

It was kind of exciting and interesting, but it's like, "Oh wow, you know, they really did have female warriors." So all the previous interpretations, it seemed to us, were pretty valid, it's just that this is a female, the ultimate Viking.

[Editor's note: Following the 2017 study, there was an intense reaction to the interpretation that the woman in the grave was a Viking Age warrior.]

LG: So you weren't expecting the backlash that occurred afterward?

No, we weren't, it was extreme. I'm not going to go into that in any detail, but some people were very, very happy, and some people were really not, and there we are.

It also highlights that all of these things are interpretations. You very rarely find something that is beyond any doubt what it is. Then there's also things with all of the burials in the book and all the burials that we excavate — people have quite long lives, hopefully. And if you were a warrior when you're 18 and you live to be 70, are you buried with all the weapons? Maybe not. Who knows?

That applies to any other kind of profession. So we don't know [if the different events and professions] in somebody's life course [are] represented in the burial. Is it when they die, or is it somebody who did something famous when they were young, and that is in the grave. We don't know. So there's lots of question marks, but the one thing it does show is the diversity of life in the Viking Age. There's so many different kinds of people, which is not a surprise, really, but it's something I just wanted to bring out in the book.

LG: You don't just talk about Vikings, but about those who lived alongside them. In one chapter, you describe a Sámi burial of a bear that they had killed and feasted on. What do we know about bear burials and why the Sámi did them? [Editor's note: The Sámi are an Indigenous people who currently live in the northern Nordic countries and part of Russia.]

NP: Well, the bear is a holy animal to the Sámi, and it's obviously a massive source of protein and food and pelts, you know, all kinds of useful things. But what I really wanted to get at was the idea of personhood. If you think about all the different kinds of prejudice, some people are sort of "more people" than others. Think about racism, for example.

In the Viking Age, not every human was [seen as] a person, but not every person was human. There are animal persons as well, sentient animals. Everything is sentient actually, and the idea that you converse with animals, that you talk to them, you respect them, they have their personalities.

I wanted to bring out in that chapter a different kind of way of looking at "persons." So the fact that the Sámi bury the bears they hunt with tremendous respect, it's partly to ensure that the bear will come back in the future from the spirit world as another bear, so that the cycle of hunting and life can go on.

LG: You also talk about "thralls," people who were enslaved by the Norse. Can you share some of the archaeological evidence we have for thralls and what their burials look like?

NP: We don't really know whether they have burials at all, actually. The institution of slavery, or thralldom, is absolutely central to the Norse economy, and just putting that back into the picture is very important, I think.

They are a group of people who have been neglected in our studies. There's a lot of people working on this, this isn't just me by any means. When we find them in the burials — well, when we think we find them, because it's extremely rare to find someone buried in their own right that we think might have been enslaved. But there's also the question of how do we tell? Unless somebody's sort of buried in chains or something, it's very hard.

But we do find — not often, but it's not that uncommon — that people have been killed in the course of funerals. You have a burial of a man or a woman, and then an extra body is in the grave, which has clearly been treated very differently. So their hands might be tied or they've been decapitated or something, and there's people who have very clearly been killed at the funeral.

Just the fact of that presumably means that they have a very different kind of status to the primary occupant of the burial. [They're] not necessarily enslaved; they could be prisoners or criminals. But there's been more recent studies looking at the diet of those people. You can use isotopes to study what people have eaten. [Editor's note: Isotopes are variations of elements. When people consume different foods and water, different amounts of certain isotopes are incorporated into their teeth and bones.] And in some cases, the people who've been killed at funerals have a much, much worse diet than other people, which implies that they have a much lower status and poorer nutrition and so on.

So the implication really is that they might be enslaved. So I think that's where we are with the burials of enslaved people.

LG: You spend an entire chapter on Viking Age children. What was it like to grow up in Scandinavia during this time, and what can we learn about their lives from grave goods and skeletal analyses?

NP: The first thing is that an awful lot of people didn't make it out of childhood at all. Putting numbers on this is a bit of a game, but probably less than half the population got past the age of 10. So child mortality is massive.

When we imagine the Viking Age or think back to it, remember that almost every single family will have lost children, with the psychological effects of that and the emotional effects and so on. And we shouldn't be entirely sure what those effects were, because if child mortality is so high, they have different coping mechanisms. But it still must have been utterly awful.

We don't find as many child burials as we should. There are a couple of written sources that mention that dead children are effectively discarded, and maybe this is connected with a coping mechanism for child mortality that people don't become sort of "full people" until they get to a certain age. We don't know.

But there are child burials and, quite often they're buried with scaled-down versions of the things that adults have. So young girls are buried with women's jewelry, but smaller. And they obviously had their possessions; they had their clothes and their jewelry, and we find toys, not in the graves, but on settlement sites — we find dolls, wooden animals, there's a fantastic horse on wheels that you can roll it about, lots and lots of little wooden boats that you can sail down. So they're thinking about boats quite early. I think their lives are quite recognizable up to a point, though very hard.

The age of maturity seems to be somewhere between about 14 and 16. After that, you're an adult, and then you're just out there with the rest.

LG: To us that seems young, but for them to make it that far would have been an accomplishment.

NP: And even in adults — you asked about skeletal analysis — there are an awful lot of adults that are malnourished as children, and it leaves traces in their bones.

There's also a rather grim set of data from a fairly small sample, but still — the proportion of adult women who were malnourished as children is much greater than the proportion of men. In other words, if food was scarce, they gave it to the boys. So it's also a glimpse of their priorities and the realities of their world.

LG: The Scandinavians settled in the Rus' in what is now Ukraine. What do we know about these people? Were they traders, warriors, or a mix of many things?

NP: I think [it's] a mixture. The identity of the Rus' is one of the big questions of the Viking Age. They used to be seen very simply as what the Vikings are called when they go east. And there's some truth to that. They seem to be culturally Scandinavian in the beginning, so we're talking the early ninth century or probably the eighth century.

Over time, as they travel on the eastern rivers, they become much more ethnically diverse. So it's a culture that grows up around an activity, rather than people from a particular place. Probably the closest parallel [is] if you think of the fur trade on the Canadian rivers and some parts of the states as well — the sort of 1600s and 1700s.

They're certainly militaristic though; they're armed traders. There's no doubt about that. And they found trading settlements, together with local people and other incomers as well. And they settle there. After a time, they're not actually [newcomers], they live there. And then, over time, quite late in the Viking Age and on into the Middle Ages, you get this Rus' state, with its capital of Kiev. But they range over a very large part of Eastern Europe and actually I think further east as well.

LG: You focus on this group of Rus' warriors, the Varangians, and you give the example of them leaving graffiti on a marble lion statue that's now in Venice. Can you tell us the story about these runes they carved?

NP: Yeah sure, it's a bit strange that the best monument to these guys is a lion that's much, much older than the Viking Age. It's from classical antiquity. It's outside the Arsenal now in Venice, but it used to stand in the harbor of Athens at a place called Piraeus.

The Varangians were kind of a subset of the Rus', but they're basically Scandinavians who take very clear contracted employment in the armies of Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire. So they're mercenaries, and they were very sought after, and there's lots and lots of written sources about them.

This lion, which once stood in the Athenian harbor, had three inscriptions in runes over its shoulders and legs and things. Two of the inscriptions are very fragmentary, so you can't get much from them. But the biggest one is a memorial to a guy called Haursi. It actually calls him Haursi the farmer, so it really does emphasize that you could be a farmer, but maybe you do a season in the army down in Greece and make a bit of money and go home. So people have professions and they have choices, and they do this for a bit, but then they go back and do what they did before.

This inscription is written by this guy's friends or his comrades, and it specifically says that he was killed before he got paid. And it's kind of a hint. It's "So, pay up, because you owe him, or you owe his family."

You get this little vignette of a soldier's life. And also carving the inscription on this lion is a pretty major job. This isn't like scribbling on a wall or something — they're carving it, and so they're there a long time. And presumably have control of the harbor because you can't just chisel this thing on, you know, people are trying to stop you.

We can think of the Varangians being stationed in Athens or waiting for a ship or something like that. It's this wonderful snapshot.

LG: Your book is loaded with details about Viking Age people. What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

NP: That they were more than actual Vikings. The people of the Viking Age were individuals, every bit as varied and complicated as we are. So that's it.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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'> 'It gives us a glimpse of a different kind of Viking life': Archaeologist Neil Price on the sea-kings, sorcerers and Sámi who lived during the Vik...

In this excerpt from "The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age" (Basic Books, 2026), author and archaeologist Neil Price looks at the horrific lives of the "thralls" — the Viking term for the enslaved. In it, he highlights the inhumane treatment of enslaved people, from the raids to kidnap people into the slave trade to a woman who appears to have been killed as a tribute to a high-status man.

Neil Price interview: 'It gives us a glimpse of a different kind of Viking life': Archaeologist Neil Price on the sea-kings, sorcerers and Sámi who lived during the Viking Age

The vast majority of the Norse population were farmers, but there is another group of people who were almost as numerous, though very hard to find in the archaeological record: the enslaved. They have only recently begun to be properly acknowledged in our histories, partly because of the long-standing neglect of the marginalized and vulnerable in many cultures, but in the Viking world also due to a particular coincidence of terminology. For the Norse, the unfree were þrælar, translated into English as "thralls," which is too mild a word to convey its true meaning.

Today, we can be enthralled by a work of art or even a person, but we do not say that we're enslaved by them. Norse thraldom took many forms, some less severe or permanent than others, but all involved the loss of liberty and rights, and the subjugation of one person to another through servitude. A chapter here, even with tangential references in a few others, is nowhere near enough to do justice to this side of the Norse experience (or rather, often the non-Norse experience, since many of them were kidnapped abroad during raids and other campaigns). Archaeological recognition can at least restore some measure of individual dignity, though more comforting to us than to them.

Slavery, as both a practice and an integrated economic system, was an indivisible part of Viking-Age Norse society and had probably already become established in Scandinavia centuries or even millennia earlier. People could be born into slavery, or be forced into it through kidnap or war, and then find themselves sold on, sometimes through many hands and over great distances. Some free people might even temporarily sell themselves in a form of indenture, as a means of paying off debts or other obligations.

Thralls on Norse settlements were ranked in a hierarchical and quite specific nomenclature of service categories and forced to undertake all the tasks of the farm and household. In a few, rare cases, thralls could take on senior responsibilities of estate management, with a special title — bryti — to match. One such man ran the royal estate at Hovgården opposite the island town of Birka, and was allowed to raise a runestone to himself and his wife, though one wonders who paid for it. Nonetheless, the vast majority of thralls endured lives of drudgery.

The grim reality is summarized with derogatory terminology in the poem Rígsþula, the "List of Rígr" (another name for the god Heimdall, or perhaps for Odin): "They fixed fences, dunged fields, worked at the pigs, watched over the goats, dug the peat." Even their names are shaming, mocking their appearance or hygiene: they translate as Badbreath, Stumpy, Fatty, Bedmate, Craneshanks, Dumpy, and many more. Thralls were extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The textual records of viking raids, coming from every culture that was attacked, emphasize that women were particularly targeted for kidnapping and enslavement.

In the ninth century, as the viking attacks escalated both in Western Europe and on the rivers of the east, the taking of captives came to be one of their prime objectives, feeding the lethal trinity of raiding, trading and slaving. In the words of Ibn Miskawayh, a Persian official who described a viking attack on the city of Bardha'a in what is now Azerbaijan in 943: "They kept the women and boys, whom they raped and enslaved [ . . . ] They dragged the women, boys and girls they wanted with them."

The repetition drives home the point, and little imagination is required to sense the undiluted horror. Some of these raids were informed by advance intelligence gathering and directed against high-profile targets for whom ransom could be demanded, but many were destined for sex trafficking, especially to the Arab world. Enslaved humans, particularly from the Baltic region, were among the main commodities exchanged eastwards along the Silk Roads.

In late ninth-century Scandinavia, the logistical needs of the escalating raids brought new demands on the workforce at an ever-larger scale, especially in all the many industries connected with shipbuilding (including textile production, timber management, tar manufacture, ironworking, and much more). This in turn drove the need for unfree labor to still greater levels.

As economic expansion enlarged the capacity for ship-borne aggression and released the agricultural workforce to crew these expeditions, the increased flow of human victims enabled its continuance in a vicious circle. Enslavement was one of the primary characteristics of the Viking Age: the raids were a key component of it and of the Norse diaspora that resulted.

To what degree these people are visible in the funerary record is hard to know. There were probably no diagnostic items that were used exclusively by thralls, so we cannot perceive them through specific objects in the graves. It also seems unlikely that those without rights and with few possessions, indeed with hardly any legal identity as individuals rather than chattel, would be accorded conventional burials. Ibn Faḍlān says that thralls who died while traveling were simply discarded, but this is unlikely to have been the case in settlements. When we do encounter them, it is often because they were killed as part of funerary rituals and their bodies deposited in burials. One example that we can explore here comes from an excavation at the site of Ballateare, in Jurby parish on the northwestern coast of the Isle of Man — the best preserved of all the Viking-Age graves on the island.

At Ballateare, it is instructive to see just how normal the initial funeral, and its circumstances, appear to have been, albeit for a high-status individual. By Viking-Age standards he was in his prime when he died in the early tenth century, somewhere between eighteen and thirty years old. He may have been among the early Norse settlers on Man. We have no reason to believe that the clothes he was buried in, and the things laid in the grave, are not reflections of his life and the international milieu he came from.

He had been interred in a wooden coffin, dug down quite deep into the ground. A sheathed knife was suspended on a lanyard round his neck and he wore a cloak held by an Irish ringed pin. Inside the coffin was a sword — probably from Norway, but with a belt from the British Isles — that had been cut into pieces before being sheathed in the scabbard; the hilt lay broken off beside it. A spearhead also lay in the coffin by the man's feet, snapped off because there was no room for the shaft. A shield, also deliberately damaged with two heavy blows to the boss, had been slid vertically down the outer side of the coffin; the shield board itself may have been smashed too. This was not battle damage; all his weapons were made unusable for reasons we can only guess. Fragments of the shield also revealed traces of paint: it had been decorated with white gesso, banded with black, with rows of red dots along the stripes. Two more spears had been laid across the top of the coffin.

The burial pit was then filled with fine white sand, and a mound was built on top — about 3 metres [10 feet] high and 22 metres [72 feet] in diameter. It was made of thick-cut turfs, which had been brought to the mound from a wide area rather than simply dug up in the vicinity. The earth of the mound seems to be an offering of the land itself, a territorial tribute to the dead man.

I do not wish to relate what happened next in terms of dramatized reconstruction; archaeological description must suffice. On top of the mound lay the body of a woman aged between twenty and thirty, who had been deliberately killed: the back of her head had been removed by a single blow from a sharp blade, probably a sword. Rigor mortis had set in, and some twelve to seventy-two hours had elapsed between her death and the time when her body was covered. She had either lain exposed on the mound for some time after her death, or been killed elsewhere (perhaps more likely, as the missing part of her skull was not present with the body). The woman seems to have died while kneeling, and had fallen forwards with her hands raised. A post was raised on top of the mound beside her body, presumably a grave marker.

A paragraph is not enough to convey what actually occurred, let alone to extrapolate the life that the woman had led before her death — possibly decades of servitude and enslavement, with all that this implies. Her corpse was covered by a very thick layer of cremated animal bone, including considerable numbers of oxen, horses, sheep and dogs. (Somewhere nearby must have been a truly massive cremation pyre.) The mound was finally sealed with turf, covering her body and the ashes of the animals.

Excerpted from The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age by Neil Price. © 2026 by Neil Price. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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'> 'The back of her head had been removed by a single blow from a sharp blade': Archaeological clues are revealing the horrific lives and deaths of t...