Ep. 337 | Mags's PhD: Decoding the Oseberg Ship Tapestries w/ Margrethe Havgar

What does it take to complete a doctoral dissertation in archaeology—and what secrets lie within the Oseberg ship's fragile textiles? Daniel Farrand sits down with co-host and in-house archaeologist Margrethe (Mags) Havgar to deconstruct her PhD research: Tracing Threads of Thought: A visual exploratory reanalysis of the creatures of the Oseberg tapestries and their rhythms.

Mags details her four-year journey analyzing Scandinavia’s largest Viking Age textile find, debunking persistent myths along the way. She explains how early archaeologists labeled the Oseberg ship a fragile "pleasure craft" due to gendered bias and reconstruction errors, why the tapestries functioned like narrow 6-to-9-inch narrative comic strips, and how bird and serpent figures were deliberately arranged to guide the human eye.

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