Viking Age women with cone-shaped skulls likely learned head-binding practice from far-flung region

The elongated, cone-shaped skulls of Viking Age women buried on the Baltic island of Gotland may be evidence of trading contacts with the Black Sea region, a new study finds.

The women's skulls were most likely modified deliberately from birth by wrapping their heads with bandages. This practice is attributed to the nomadic Huns, who invaded Europe from Asia in the fourth and fifth centuries, and it was followed in parts of southeastern Europe until the 10th century.

But the modifications have been found only on the skulls of three Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066) women buried on the now-Swedish island of Gotland and nowhere else in Scandinavia, which indicates it was a foreign practice, said study lead author Matthias Toplak, an archaeologist at the Viking Museum Haithabu in Germany.

While it's unclear if the skull modifications were disguised by a distinctive hairstyle, "I assume that the foreign (or rather alien) appearance of these females was visible," Toplak told Live Science in an email. "It might have been a token of a certain elite or some other social group."

Related: 12,000 years ago, a boy had his skull squashed into a cone shape. It's the oldest evidence of such head-shaping.

It's likely the modified skulls were restricted to a few women from one family across a few generations, perhaps to highlight their connection with a distant region where the modifications were more common, he said; at least one of the women may have originated in that region.

"I suggest that the skull deformations on Gotland were regarded as evidence of far-reaching trading contacts, and thus as tokens of iNFLuence and success in trading," he said.