This Week in Archaeology: A Viking Giant, a Toddler from 9000 BC, and AI Cracks an Ancient Board Game
Every once in a while you get a week where every story makes you stop scrolling. A 6'5" man in a Viking Age execution pit who survived ancient brain surgery. A three-year-old girl who just rewrote the timeline of northern Britain. And researchers using AI to crack a Roman board game that's baffled experts for a century. Let's go.
The 6’5” Man Who Had Brain Surgery in the Viking Age
University of Cambridge students on a training dig at Wandlebury Country Park made the kind of discovery most archaeologists spend careers hoping for. They uncovered a pit containing the remains of at least 10 people—four complete skeletons, a cluster of skulls without bodies, and what researchers described as a “stack of legs.” Some had clearly been tied up before death.
But here’s what caught my attention: one of the young men was 6 feet 5 inches tall. For context, the average male height in ninth-century England was around 5’6”. He would have towered over everyone he met. His skull has a 3-centimeter oval hole that shows clear signs of healing—meaning someone drilled into this man’s head while he was alive, and he survived it.
Dr. Trish Biers from Cambridge suspects he may have had a pituitary tumor, which would explain both his unusual height and the surgery. A growing tumor creates pressure in the skull, leading to severe headaches. Trepanation—the technical term for boring holes in skulls—was sometimes attempted to relieve that pressure. It’s essentially the same logic behind modern neurosurgery.
The pit dates to between 772 and 891 AD, a period when Cambridge was a frontier zone in the Saxon-Viking conflicts. The Great Army sacked Cambridge around 874-875. But interestingly, none of the bodies show combat injuries. Researchers suspect this was an execution site, possibly connected to Wandlebury’s use as a meeting place. DNA analysis is underway to determine whether these men were Vikings, Saxons, or a mix of both.
Meet the “Ossick Lass”: Northern Britain’s Oldest Known Person
When archaeologists first found 11,000-year-old human remains in a Cumbria cave back in 2023, they assumed they belonged to a man. Turns out northern Britain’s “oldest northerner” was actually a little girl, somewhere between two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half years old.
An international team led by the University of Lancashire extracted enough DNA to determine both age and sex—a first for remains this old in Britain. They’ve named her the “Ossick Lass,” using the local dialect word for Urswick, the village near the cave.
What makes this more than just a footnote: shell beads found at the site have been carbon-dated to the same 11,000-year-old period. According to Dr. Rick Peterson, “Dating the jewelry to the same time frame as the remains provides more evidence that this was a deliberate burial.” Someone in the early Mesolithic carefully laid this child to rest with grave goods.
The cave was used for burials across thousands of years—the Bronze Age, the Neolithic, and now we know, the earliest Mesolithic. At least eight other individuals were buried there. Peterson suggests that “modern hunter-gatherer groups often see caves as a gateway into the spirit world,” which might explain why this spot kept drawing people back.
AI Figures Out How to Play a 1,700-Year-Old Board Game
A carved limestone slab sat in a Dutch museum for over a century, and nobody knew what it was for. Archaeologist Walter Crist took one look at it in 2020 and thought: that’s a game board. The wear patterns, the precise carving—it looked like something people had played, not just decorated.
The problem? No one knew the rules. The pattern didn’t match any known ancient game.
So Crist’s team did something clever: they used an AI system called Ludii from Maastricht University to have two virtual players compete against each other using over 100 different rule sets drawn from ancient and medieval European games. Then they compared the AI’s moves to the actual wear patterns on the stone.
The result? The board was used for a “blocking game”—a type where you try to prevent your opponent from moving, like modern Go or Blokus. Before this, blocking games in Europe had only been documented from the Middle Ages. This pushes the evidence back several centuries to Roman times.
The stone was found in Heerlen, Netherlands—once the Roman settlement of Coriovallum. The team named the game “Ludus Coriovalli.” They think it was probably played at a tavern, since the stone is thick and well-finished, possibly fitted into a table surface. Gambling and games were, apparently, a favorite Roman pastime. Some things don’t change.
The 5,300-Year-Old Egyptian Drill That Got Overlooked for a Century
Here’s one that shows why museum collections still matter. A tiny copper-alloy tool, only 63 millimeters long, was excavated from a cemetery in Upper Egypt in the 1920s. The original description? “A little awl of copper, with some leather thong wound round it.” And then everyone forgot about it.
Researchers at Newcastle University took another look. Under magnification, they found wear patterns that don’t match puncturing or scraping—they match rotary drilling. The leather “thong” is actually the remnant of a bowstring used to spin the drill rapidly back and forth.
This makes it the oldest known rotary metal drill from Egypt, dating to about 5,300 years ago—before the first pharaohs. The best-preserved bow drill sets we had before this came from the New Kingdom, over two millennia later. So Egyptian craftspeople had mastered precision rotary drilling way earlier than anyone thought.
The tool was also made from an unusual copper alloy containing arsenic, nickel, lead, and silver—a recipe that would have produced harder, more distinctive metal. This hints at early experimentation with metallurgy and possibly trade networks extending across the eastern Mediterranean.
Quick Hit: The Rutland Mosaic Wasn’t Homer After All
Remember the incredible Roman mosaic found in a Rutland field during lockdown? New research from the University of Leicester confirms it doesn’t depict Homer’s Iliad as everyone assumed. Instead, it shows scenes from Phrygians, a lost tragedy by Aeschylus. The key giveaway? In Homer, Achilles accepts a ransom for Hector’s body. In the mosaic, Hector’s corpse is literally weighed on a scale against gold—a detail from Aeschylus that doesn’t appear in Homer at all. The villa’s owner apparently wanted something more niche than the mainstream version.