The Hjortspring boat is a vessel designed as a large canoe, from the Scandinavia

Scandinavia

Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

n Pre-Roman Iron Age

Pre-Roman Iron Age

The Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe designates the earliest part of the Iron Age in Scandinavia, northern Germany, and the Netherlands north of the Rhine River. These regions feature many extensive archaeological excavation sites, which have yielded a wealth of artifacts...

, that was excavated in 1921–1922 in Hjortspring Mose at Als in Sønderjylland. It was a clinker

Clinker (boat building)

Clinker building is a method of constructing hulls of boats and ships by fixing wooden planks and, in the early nineteenth century, iron plates to each other so that the planks overlap along their edges. The overlapping joint is called a land. In any but a very small boat, the individual planks...

-built wooden boat 21 m long (outer length), 13 m long inside and 2 m wide with space for a crew of 22–23 men who propelled the boat with paddle

Paddle

A paddle is a tool used for pushing against liquids, either as a form of propulsion in a boat or as an implement for mixing.-Materials and designs:...

s: it was built around 300-400 BC.

The boat is the oldest find of a wooden plank ship in Scandinavia and its closest parallels are the thousands of petroglyph

Petroglyph

Petroglyphs are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images...

 images of Nordic Bronze Age

Nordic Bronze Age

The Nordic Bronze Age is the name given by Oscar Montelius to a period and a Bronze Age culture in Scandinavian pre-history, c. 1700-500 BC, with sites that reached as far east as Estonia. Succeeding the Late Neolithic culture, its ethnic and linguistic affinities are unknown in the absence of...

ships. When found, it contained a great quantity of weapons and armour, including 131 shields of the Celtic type, 33 beautifully crafted shieldbosses, 138 spearheads of iron, 10 iron swords, and the remains of a mailcoat. Thus, its sinking has been interpreted as a deliberate war sacrifice.

The strange design of the stern and bow has not yet been explained. The parts sticking out connected with a vertical stick do not seem to have had any function for the canoe's basic stability. The rugged end pieces in the stern and bow were enough to attach the planks to form the shape of a canoe.