Viking queen exhumed to solve mystery
As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834.
"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.
The women and the 22-metre (70 ft) longboat, with its curling oak prow still intact, were unearthed in 1904 in the 5-metre high mound, surrounded by cornfields, in one of the archaeological sensations of the 20th century.