"This will be exciting for all of us, regardless of whether you are an archaeologist or just have a medium interest in our past," says Viking ship expert Knut Paasche.
NIKU is an independent institute within the wider field of Cultural Heritage in Norway and beyond.
Projects
We have expertise in the field of cultural heritage and perform large and small projects on behalf of private and public actors.
Research
Here are some examples of NIKUs research both past and present.
News
First Viking ship excavation in a 100 years starts now
Mass grave mystery in Oslo
NIKU's archaeologists have made an exciting find in Oslo - a grave containing three individuals displaying weapon cuts to the head and neck. The individuals may have been combatants in Norway’s civil war (1130-1240).
Curbatheri – A toolkit for conceptualizing heritage values in city planning
An international research project aims to develop methods to assess the value of historical structures in urban planning. The unusual name is an abbreviation of ‘Curating Sustainable URBAn Transformations through HERItage’ – CURBATHERI.
A new article brings the Tune Ship to the world
The Tune ship was found in 1867, but what it looked like and how it was used for has long been a mystery. 150 years after the discovery of the ship, archaeologist and researcher Knut Paasche has created a digital reconstruction of the ship that has revealed many of its mysteries.
New CULTCOAST article
Coastal Erosion Affecting Cultural Heritage in Svalbard. A Case Study in Hiorthhamn (Adventfjorden)—An Abandoned Mining Settlement
The Gjellestad Ship confirmed to be from the Viking Age
The Gjellestad Ship is quite clearly from the Viking Age, the Museum of Cultural History said today. “The investigations happily confirm our hypothesis from 2018, when we found the ship by ground-penetrating radar (GPR),” says Knut Paasche, head of NIKU’s department of digital archaeology.
New ship burial found in Norway
A high-resolution georadar has detected traces of a ship burial and a settlement that probably dates to the Merovingian or Viking Period at Edøy in Møre and Romsdal County in Norway.
Monumentalizing refugee heritage: Vietnamese boat people memorials
In November 2019 NIKU researcher Torgrim Sneve Guttormsen spent two weeks as a visiting scholar at Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. As a part of this he held a seminar at Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies about on the heritage produced by the Vietnamese refugee diaspora following the Vietnam War.
Critical Digital Heritage 2020: Call for Papers
We urge contributors to demonstrate how the sessions’ topics may be discussed through a variety of methods and theoretical approaches from different disciplines.
Scientists stumble upon an unknown grave in Svalbard
But the grave and the story behind it is already disappearing in the fjord.