How Did Vikings Travel on Land? We Tested a Reconstructed Wagon

How did Vikings travel over land?
While Viking ships dominate popular imagination, land transport was just as important for everyday life, trade, farming, and communication across Scandinavia.

In this video, we use a reconstructed Viking Age wooden wagon as our starting point to explore how people and goods moved through the landscape over 1,000 years ago. By combining experimental archaeology with archaeological evidence, we examine what Viking Age wagons can tell us about mobility, infrastructure, and daily life.

Together we'll explore:
How Viking Age wagons were built and used
Ancient roads and surviving wheel ruts
Archaeological evidence for land transport
How goods, people, and livestock traveled across Scandinavia
The relationship between roads, settlements, and trade networks
What experimental archaeology can reveal about the Viking world

Rather than focusing solely on the famous longships, this documentary highlights the often-overlooked network of roads, tracks, bridges, and wagons that connected farms, markets, and towns throughout the Viking Age.