'Woman in Blue' sheds light on Iceland’s first settlers

Iceland’s “woman in blue,” the partial skeleton of a young woman found in 1938 in a grave with Viking-era objects, was a child of some of the island’s earliest settlers, researchers reported April 14 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Tooth development and wear suggest she was between 17 and 25 years old when she died.

A female’s jaw dating to the early 900s, with some flesh still attached, floats  in a jar filled with light paraffin oil. The jaw belonged to one of Iceland’s earliest  colonizers, known as the “woman in blue” for her indigo-dyed apron
[Credit: Ivar Brynjólfsson/The National Museum of Iceland]

It’s not known if the woman was a Viking or if she came from another northern European population, said bioarchaeologist Tina Jakob of Durham University in England. A chemical analysis of one of her teeth indicates that, between ages 5 and 10, she started eating a lot of fish and other seafood for the first time after having previously consumed mainly plants and land animals, a team led by Jakob and Joe Walser III of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik found.

Read the rest of this article...