The large mound of Herlaugshaugen, on the island of Leka off the coast of Norway, has long been associated with the legendary storeroom (and burial place) of Herlaug, a pre-Viking king of the region Namdalen. Excavations at the site in 2023 recovered iron clinker nails and wooden fragments, identifying one of the earliest ship burials in Scandinavia. Here, the authors detail these findings and explore the significance of Herlaugshaugen in expanding our understanding of the region and its maritime connections in the seventh and eighth centuries AD, arguing that Leka may have been a node in a much wider network.

Logboats are widely known as the earliest form of water transport and continue to be used today. How then can such a ubiquitous phenomenon be useful in demonstrating maritime networks between distant places? A reassessment of the European, and especially Scandinavian, examples of logboats has revealed that technological and decorative aspects of their design demonstrate a connection between Western Europe, Scandinavia and Britain and Ireland. Here the details of this skeuomorphism are used to argue for a North Atlantic, European maritime network in the Bronze Age.

The authors raise spatial analysis to a new level of sophistication – and insight – in proposing a mathematical model of ‘imperfect optimisation’ to describe maritime networks. This model encodes, metaphorically, the notion of gravitational attraction between objects in space. The space studied here is the southern Aegean in the Middle Bronze Age, and the objects are the 34 main sites we know about. The ‘gravitation’ in this case is a balance of social forces, expressed by networks with settlements of particular sizes and links of particular strengths. The model can be tweaked by giving different relative importance to the cultivation of local resources or to trade, and to show what happens when a member of the network suddenly disappears.