Two members of the Felix staff have been engaged in an exciting sampling session at the Museum of Archeaology Schloss Gottorf in beautiful Schleswig in the north of Schleswig-Holstein. The archeological sites in this area date back to the Viking Age, when the sea trading venue of the near Haithabu constituted a narrow passage between the Baltic Sea estuary Schlei and the North Sea lowlands. During the Early Middle Ages these sites were strategic in the trading networks between Scandinavia and Continental Europe. Claudio (Felix PI) and Marco (Felix PhD) sampled more than one hundred archeological cat bones rescued from the three Viking sites of Elisenhof, Haithabu and Schleswig dated to 9th – 12th century. They adopted a minimum invasive sampling strategy on the inner surface of the horizontal ramus of the mandibles.
