Gjellestad Ship
A Viking-age ship burial discovered at Gjellestad in Ostfold, Norway, first detected with ground-penetrating radar in 2018 and excavated from 2020 to 2021. The oak keel and strakes of the roughly twenty-meter ship survived as a dark imprint in the clay, along with iron rivets, beads, and a soapstone vessel, though the wooden hull itself had largely rotted away. The site sits beside the Jellhaug burial mound and an older cult or settlement area, suggesting a high-status burial landscape of the late Viking age. It was the first ship excavation in Norway in more than a century, and the finds are