The mystery of
Rakni's Mound

Sometime around the year 550, the largest man-made mound in the Nordic region was built in Romerike in south-eastern Norway.

It was 95 metres long and 19 metres high. And it was built during a time of great unrest.

"An absolutely extraordinary mound"

A volcanic eruption in 536 had exposed the world to a climate shock. In Norway, many petty kings were competing for power.

The people who built the mound created three distinct layers of timber with several-metre-thick layers of clay, sand, and soil in between.

Archaeologists have estimated that there were 25,000 logs in the top layer of the mound alone, and that between 400 and 600 people must have been involved in its construction. The construction is said to have been quite fast – they finished it within a single summer.

“It’s an absolutely extraordinary mound,” says Lars Gustavsen, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research.

“From an archaeological perspective, it's completely unique. There's nothing comparable anywhere else,” he says.

Most archaeologists believe the mound is a high-status burial mound.

But according to Gustavsen, the archaeological evidence does not support that theory at all.

Looking for King Rakni

“When we've been searching for ‘King Rakni' for 150 years without finding any trace of either the man or his grave, it’s time to think a little differently,” he says.

The Norwegian name Raknehaugen points to the explanation that has long seemed the most obvious:

That King Rakni from the legend of Rakni's Mound was buried there.

But the first excavations of the mound in 1869 and 1870 found no trace of the burial chamber they expected to find. There was just a massive amount of timber.

The next excavations, in 1939 and 1940, opened up even more of the mound, but still found no trace of any grave.

A royal tomb – or a cenotaph?

Sigurd Grieg, the archaeologist who led the excavation, believed the mound was a cenotaph. This is a kind of memorial monument for someone who has died, but there is no body to bury. It’s a symbolic grave. Some cremated bone remains were found, but it was not possible to say whether they were from animals or humans.

Around 50 years later, in the 1990s, new technology was finally able to establish that the cremated bones were actually parts of a human skull. So perhaps it really was a burial mound.

But then another couple of decades passed, and even more detailed analyses revealed that these bones were from the Bronze Age, 1,300 years before the mound was built.

So perhaps it was a cenotaph after all.

Or could it have been something else entirely?

The surrounding landscape

Gustavsen studies the landscape around the many man-made mounds in Norway. He uses laser-scanning data from aircraft, so-called LiDAR data, to get an overview of what it looked like when the mounds were built.

“I discovered that there was a gigantic landslide just south of Raknehaugen,” Gustavsen said tells Science Norway.

It is well known that the area has experienced a number of landslides, the archaeologist explains.

“But no one has linked them to the mound. Everyone has been focused on what is or isn't inside the mound. Not on what surrounds it,” he says.

When Gustavsen began to unravel the mystery of Rakni's Mound, a new theory emerged.

The climate crisis of 536

It starts with the volcanic eruption in 536, which affected the way people cultivated the land. The effects of this crisis have been somewhat exaggerated, Gustavsen points out, but many people switched from growing grain to raising livestock. And with the climate crisis came more rainfall.

“The livestock and all the rainfall created unstable soil conditions, especially in the area south of the mound. I believe that’s the reason for the landslide,” Gustavsen says.

The event must have been dramatic.

“We're talking about a one-kilometre-wide quick clay landslide. The ground takes on the consistency of soup. Everything disappears,” he says.

He believes it must have been deeply traumatic for the people who lived there.

“It destroys everything nearby, taking people, animals, and houses with it,” he says.

A kind of religious response?

The people who witnessed the landslide lived before the age of scientific understanding, Gustavsen points out.

“They had no understanding of why something like this happened,” he says.

And to prevent it from happening again, they would have felt compelled to do something.

“Perhaps they built the mound to appease the gods or the forces of nature,” Gustavsen suggests. “This would be as a collective response to the disaster and to restore things to the way they had been before it happened."

Coarse, rough, and ugly

Gustavsen doesn’t have a date for the landslide he identified with the LiDAR data. So he doesn’t know exactly when it happened.

But we do know that the mound was built during a period of increased rainfall and a shift from growing grain to keeping animals.

And then there is the condition of the timber inside the mound.

There are many strange aspects to the timber in Rakni's Mound. These have been described in previous studies of wood recovered during earlier excavations.

“This isn't neatly prepared timber. It's not a building as such. It's coarse, rough, and ugly timber piled up in these layers,” says Gustavsen.

That's not how you fell trees

Several of the logs were cut at chest height, about one metre up the trunk, the archaeologist explains.

“You don't do that when you cut trees. It prevents the forest from growing back,” he says.

The timber was also not properly limbed. Instead, branches and twigs were left attached.

Some of the trees had been pulled up by the roots. Others look as if they have been broken in half.

They were also all brought down at the same time and showed no signs of having been stored outdoors before being quickly placed into the mound.

“The prevailing theory is that large numbers of people were sent into the forest to cut down huge quantities of trees, and that this demonstrates the importance and power of the person buried here,” says Gustavsen. “I think that the way these trees were felled is more in keeping with being uprooted by natural forces. It’s very similar to what you see happening in similar landslide zones."

“We’re thinking about these mounds the wrong way”

Rakni's Mound is not the only man-made mound where archaeologists have failed to find artefacts.

“I think we’re thinking about these mounds the wrong way. When we see a mound, we immediately assume it's a burial mound. But if  that's our starting point, it becomes difficult to explain the mounds that contain no graves,” the archaeologist says.

Burial mounds are often interpreted as symbols of power. And as the largest mound in the Nordic region, most people have thought that Rakni's Mound must have been a royal burial or the grave of a powerful chieftain.

Gustavsen says that there are fewer small mounds and more large ones, which is typical for the period. This has been interpreted as there being fewer petty kings and more centralisation of power.

“My interpretation of Rakni's Mound goes against that. I don't see that kind of symbolism here. It has nothing to do with a demonstration of power,” he says.

He emphasises that it remains only a theory.

“I do not have any hard evidence. But my theory is no more uncertain than the established interpretation of the mound as a high-status grave. A conclusion that the archaeological evidence itself does not support,” he says.

Probably erected in memory of a deceased

“I think it's great that such a remarkable monument is being reexamined,” says Dagfinn Skre.

The experienced archaeologist conducted a small excavation at Rakni's Mound in 1993. Among other things, Skre helped determine the mound's true height and calculated how many people would have been required to build it.

Rakni's Mound is not easy to interpret because it is so unique, Skre agrees.

“But I’m still in favour of the burial mound theory,” he says.

The strength of Gustavsen's interpretation is his analysis of the landscape, according to Skre. But Skre points to the other mounds with which Rakni's Mound can be compared.

"Every mound we know from this period in Scandinavia is either a burial mound, or there are good reasons to believe it is a cenotaph," says Skre. "The fact that there is no burial in Rakni's Mound is not sufficient reason to conclude that it was not built in memory of someone who had died."

The rough timber stabilised the mound

Skre believes the biggest problem with Gustavsen's theory is that we do not know when the landslide identified through LiDAR actually occurred.

“There have been countless landslides in Romerike from the Ice Age right up until the Gjerdrum landslide a few years ago. So for that particular landslide to have occurred at exactly that time would be quite a coincidence,” he says.

He also doesn’t completely agree with Gustavsen's description of the timber and the suggestion that it indicates trees swept away by a landslide.

“The lower parts of some trees were found, but I can't see that they found actual root systems,” he says.

Instead, Skre believes the timber was deliberately left rough so that the protruding branches would stabilise the mound.

“Most of the soil in the area is clay and sand. Those aren't stable materials for building a mound. So I think the wood was incorporated to stabilise the ground,” he says.

The climate crisis of the 6th century was not that bad

Archaeologist Ingar Mørkestøl Gundersen is not convinced either.

He believes it's valuable to bring forward new and fresh perspectives, but that Gustavsen's study has certain methodological weaknesses.

Like Skre, he points to the lack of a date for the landslide.

For a time, many archaeologists believed that the volcanic eruption in 536 caused a widespread catastrophe. But later research, including Gundersen's own, has shown that not everyone was affected equally. There is evidence in Romerike that people successfully adapted to the new conditions, he explains.

More recent research also suggests that the climate in the mid-500s did not become colder and wetter as previously thought – it actually became drier. In his view, that makes it less likely that the landslide happened at that time.

“That weakens the hypothesis that Rakni's Mound is evidence of a collective trauma, at least from a climate-historical perspective,” he says.

One of a kind

According to Gundersen, archaeologists are probably too quick to interpret mounds as burial monuments.

“That has probably contributed to considerable academic confusion about how Rakni's Mound should be understood,” he says.

It's entirely possible, Gundersen argues, that the mound has nothing to do with the burial customs of its time.

“Regardless of how we interpret it, we are still left with an explanatory problem, because it's the only known monument of its kind. It truly is unique,” he says.

———

Translated by Nancy Bazilchuk

Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no

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