Scandinavia's largest prehistoric mound may have been constructed as a memorial to a natural disaster, according to a study published in early March in the European Journal of Archaeology, challenging previously assumed claims of it being a tomb. 

For over 150 years, archaeologists assumed that Rakni's Mound (Raknehaugen), a large, earthen mound located about 40 kilometers north of Oslo, was the burial site of an Iron Age leader as is usually assumed for structures of this kind.

“The mounds [are] viewed as constructed for, and by, a societal elite and interpreted as material expressions of status or power,” the study explained. “Their size has been held as a measure of the deceased’s standing in life, and a near-linear relationship is essentially claimed between the energy expended on their building and the prestige of the person interred.”

Using LiDAR, however, researchers recently discovered that the mound sits on the southern end of a massive landslide “scar,” seemingly acting as a boundary between the forested areas to the north and the unstable, clay-rich terrain prone to landslides to the south.

Raknehaugen has been dated to 550 CE, a period of severe climate change caused by a series of volcanic eruptions beginning in 536 CE, named by researchers as the “Dust Veil” or the “Volcanic winter of 536.”

Archaeological excavations that have taken place at Raknehaugen between 1869 to the 1990s, have all failed to discover evidence that would typically indicate a burial mound, such as a grave, human remains, or grave goods.

A cremated bone fragment found in the 1940s had initially interpreted as evidence of a possible burial, but later disregarded as it radiocarbon dated to circa 1300 BCE, over 1,800 years before the mound was constructed.

What the excavations did find, however, was that the mound is constructed of three elaborate layers of approximately 25,000 logs, carefully interspersed across deposits of clay and sand.

The trees had also not been neatly cut down, the researchers noted, adding that many of them had simply been broken or pulled up by their foots.

According to the study, this worsening sixth-century climate triggered a catastrophic "quick clay" landslide that devastated local communities, and the broken, uprooted trees buried within the mound could have been debris from the catastrophe.

Rather than a royal tomb, Raknehaugen’s construction is theorized to have been an act of communal healing, a way to rebuild a sense of order after a terrible natural disaster, similar to Ngundeng's Mound in Sudan.

Prehistoric mounds such as this were not simply markers of power, but "ritual structures built for ritual purposes, mediating the relationship between humans, their environment, and the cosmological realm."