During their prime, the Vikings mastered the seas and went on to make wide-spanning voyages by boat. But how exactly did they know where they were going? A recent study, focused on a set of medieval stone disks found in Ukraine, supports the belief that Viking sailors used solar compasses to navigate and may have passed on this knowledge to other populations in Europe.
The appraisal of the eight stone disks was featured in a December 2024 paper published in Sprawozdania Archeologiczne, a Polish archeological journal. The study’s authors contend that some of the disks display key features that would have used the sun to operate as a compass, sharing similarities with other Viking artifacts originating from Greenland and Poland.
Identifying the Medieval Disks
The disks, found in several medieval-era archaeological sites in Ukraine, were originally crafted from pyrophyllite, a soft and easy-to-process mineral used for many industrial purposes during the period.
