ArticlePloS one2022
Palaeoproteomics identifies beaver fur in Danish high-status Viking Age burials - direct evidence of fur trade.
Article in PloS one, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unveiling the Xianbei cavalry: a multidisciplinary approach to restore and analyse the first horse-cavalry armour set in China.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Clothomics: a practical guide to understand the opportunities and challenges of omics-based methods in archaeological cloth research.NPJ heritage science · 2025Review
- Article
- Automated High-Throughput Biological Sex Identification from Archeological Human Dental Enamel Using Targeted Proteomics.Journal of proteome research · 2024Article
- Development of a Combined Protein and Dye Extraction Approach for the Analysis of Keratin-Based Textiles.Journal of proteome research · 2024Article
- Paleoproteomic identification of the species used in fourteenth century gut-skin garments from the archaeological site of Nuulliit, Greenland.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Human and animal skin identified by palaeoproteomics in Scythian leather objects from Ukraine.PloS one · 2023Article
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9 authors.
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Abstract
Fur is known from contemporary written sources to have been a key commodity in the Viking Age. Nevertheless, the fur trade has been notoriously difficult to study archaeologically as fur rarely survives in the archaeological record. In Denmark, fur finds are rare and fur in clothing has been limited to a few reports and not recorded systematically. We were therefore given access to fur from six Danish high status graves dated to the Viking Age. The fur was analysed by aDNA and palaeoproteomics methods to identify the species of origin in order to explore the Viking Age fur trade. Endogenous aDNA was not recovered, but fur proteins (keratins) were analysed by MALDI-TOF-MS and LC-MS/MS. We show that Viking Age skin clothing were often composites of several species, showing highly developed manufacturing and material knowledge. For example, fur was produced from wild animals while leather was made of domesticates. Several examples of beaver fur were identified, a species which is not native to Denmark, and therefore indicative of trade. We argue that beaver fur was a luxury commodity, limited to the elite and worn as an easily recognisable indicator of social status.
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