Were the Vikings even more brutal than we realized?

From the ninth century to the 11th century, marauding Viking warriors laid waste to a broad swath of Europe, and in the process often took slaves for physical labor and sex. Now researchers from the University of Oslo in Norway say they’ve found new evidence suggesting that when their Viking masters died, slaves were beheaded and buried along with them.

Elise Naumann, an archaeologist at the university, and her colleagues reached this conclusion after analyzing the skeletal remains of 10 Viking-era bodies originally discovered decades ago in Flakstad, Norway. The researchers paid particular attention to graves that contained the remains of two or more bodies — but only one head.

“We were curious about the Flakstad double burials,” Naumann told The Huffington Post in an email. “They are poorly documented, and the definition of double burial was doubted at the time. It was thus strange that only one skull was retrieved from each double burial, but postcranial bones from two or three individuals.”