Viking queen exhumed to solve mystery
Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife.
"We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don't know of any Viking skeletons that have been analyzed as we plan to do," Egil Mikkelsen, director of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History, told Reuters at the graveside...And new chemical analysis of bones can also tell what people ate. In Viking times meat, such as elk, was prized while poorer people ate fish.
"If they were mother and daughter they would probably have had the same food. If one woman was a maid they would have had different diets," Mikkelsen said.
...Mikkelsen said he saw no ethical objections to opening the grave, partly because the two were buried so long ago and no one even knew their names.
But I have thought it worthy of mention since Judaism teaches us respect for the dead.
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This dude has a very interesting understanding of what it means to respect the dead -- respecting the grief of the people they leave behind?
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