away from the river, or further downstream). This has been seen as further demonstrating the Scandinavian character of elites in "Old Rusʹ". There is uncertainty as to how small the Scandinavian migration to Rus was, but some recent archaeological work has argued for a substantial number of 'free peasants' settling in the upper Volga region. The quantity of archaeological evidence for the regions where the Rus people were active grew steadily through the 20th century, and beyond, and the end of the Cold War made the full range of material increasingly accessible to researchers. Key excavations have included those at Staraja Ladoga, Novgorod, Rurikovo Gorodischche, Gnëzdovo, Shestovitsa, numerous settlements between the Upper Volga and the Oka. Twenty-first century research, therefore, is giving the synthesis of archaeological evidence an increasingly prominent place in understanding the Rus. The distribution of coinage, including the early 9th-century Peterhof Hoard, has provided important ways to trace the flow and quantity of trade in areas where Rus were active, and even, through graffiti on the coins, the languages spoken by traders. There is also a great number of Varangian runestones, on which voyages to the east (Austr) are mentioned. In the mythical lays of the Poetic Edda, after her true love Sigurd is killed, Brunhild (Brynhildr in Old Norse) has eight slave girls and five serving maids killed and then stabs herself with her sword so that she can be with him in Valhalla, as told in The Short Lay of Sigurd, similarly to the sacrifices of slave girls that Ibn Fadlan described in his eyewitness accounts of the Rus. Swedish ship burials sometimes contain both males and females. According to the website of Arkeologerna (The Archaeologists), part of the National Historical Museums in Sweden, archaeologists have also found in an area outside of Uppsala a boat burial that contained the remains of a man, a horse and a dog, along with personal items including a sword, spear, shield, and an ornate comb. Swedish archeologists believe that during the Viking age Scandinavian human sacrifice was still common and that there were more grave offerings for the deceased in the afterlife than in earlier traditions that sacrificed human beings to the gods exclusively. The inclusion of weapons, horses and slave girls in graves also seems to have been practiced by the Rus. Historiography Prior to the 18th century, it was the consensus of Russian historians that the