Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research

The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning, NIKU) is a cultural heritage research institute based in Oslo, Norway. The institute has nearly 80 employees and regional offices in Bergen, Trondheim, Tønsberg and Tromsø. It consists of six research departments: Archaeological Excavations Digital Documentation Conservation Buildings Heritage and Society High North The chair is Torger Ødegaard and the deputy chair is Mette Bye The current director general is Kristin Bakken. NIKU was created in 1994 as a split from the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage. From 1994 to 2003, the institute shared a board of directors with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research under the moniker NINA•NIKU. In 2019, archaeologists from NIKU, using large-scale high-resolution georadar technology, determined that a 17-meter-long Viking ship was buried beside Edøy Church on the island of Edøya. Traces of a small settlement were also found. NIKU estimates the ship's age as over 1,000 years: from the Merovingian or Viking period. The group plans to conduct additional searches in the area. A similar buried ship was found previously by a NIKU group in 2018, in Gjellestad. The Gjellestad (ˈjɛ̂lːəˌstɑːd) ship burial, also spelt Jellestad, is the remains of a Viking age longship found at the farm of Gjellestad in Halden municipality in Norway in 2018 by the archeologists Lars Gustavsen and Erich Nau. An ancient well-preserved Viking cemetery for more than 1000 years was discovered using ground-penetrating radar. Archaeologists also revealed at least seven other previously unknown burial mounds and the remnants of five longhouses with the help of the radar survey. The discovery of extensive Bronze Age remains at Gjellestad has led archaeologists to speculate that it had been a sacred site for centuries before the Viking era. A 2019 examination by the University of Oslo has dated it to AD 733, at the earliest. Originally interred beneath a burial mound, in the present day the ship lies 50 centimetres below the topsoil due to years of plowing.