Helene Wilhelmson

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at Lund University

During the last decade, the application of strontium isotope analysis ( ⁸⁷ Sr/ ⁸⁶ Sr) has increased rapidly. The understanding of the strontium isoscape and the construction of a strontium isotope baseline in southern Scandinavia are biased toward Denmark and southwestern to eastern Scania. We report the results of new baseline samples in Halland a...

Today, Germanic languages, including German, English, Frisian, Dutch and the Nordic languages, are widely spoken in northwest Europe. However, key aspects of the assumed arrival and diversification of this linguistic group remain contentious 1—3 . By adding 712 new ancient human genomes we find an archaeologically elusive population entering Sweden...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03328-2.

The maritime expansion of Scandinavian populations during the Viking Age (about ad 750–1050) was a far-flung transformation in world history1,2. Here we sequenced the genomes of 442 humans from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland (to a median depth of about 1×) to understand the global influence of this expansion. We find the Viking pe...

Viking smallpox diversity Humans have a notable capacity to withstand the ravages of infectious diseases. Smallpox killed millions of people but drove Jenner's invention of vaccination, which eventually led to the annihilation of this virus, declared in 1980. To investigate the history of smallpox, Mühlemann et al. obtained high-throughput shotgun...

The Viking maritime expansion from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) marks one of the swiftest and most far-flung cultural transformations in global history. During this time (c. 750 to 1050 CE), the Vikings reached most of western Eurasia, Greenland, and North America, and left a cultural legacy that persists till today. To understand the...

Objectives: The diet and subsistence in Iron-Age ?land is debated as earlier studies and different archaeological sources seemingly provide conflicting interpretations. The objectives of this study are therefore to: (i) add new insights on diet and (ii) investigate the chronological variation in detail. It is common in studies of diet to investiga...

The objective of this study was to develop, test and evaluate a specifically defined interdisciplinary approach—the human-centred approach—as applied to a case study, Iron Age Öland. Four themes were selected to highlight different aspects of particular interest in Öland: taphonomy, diet, migration, and social organization. The uncremated human ske...

This study explores a bi-isotopic approach to migration, adding δ18O values to samples with 87Sr/86Sr values for 109 individuals from the Iron Age (500 BCE–1050 CE) on the island of Öland, Sweden. Determining a local baseline for 87Sr/86Sr was complicated due to the wide range of variation in faunal samples so we divided the human values into three...

Migration is a complex subject to approach in archeology and the new materials and methods available, such as isotope analysis and DNA, make it possible, and necessary, to ask new questions. The objective of this paper is to highlight the possibilities with using a new approach to migration on a population level by applying Bayesian mixing analysis...

The objective of this paper was to integrate excavation and post-processing of archaeological and osteological contexts and material to enhance the interpretation of these with specific focus on the taphonomical aspects. A method was designed, Virtual Taphonomy, based on the use and integration of image-based 3D modeling techniques into a 3D GIS pl...