Neil Price: The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (original) (raw)
Related papers
2 RMN Newsletter is a medium of contact and communication for members of the Retrospective Methods Network (RMN). The RMN is an open network which can include anyone who wishes to share in its focus. It is united by an interest in the problems, approaches, strategies and limitations related to considering some aspect of culture in one period through evidence from another, later period. Such comparisons range from investigating historical relationships to the utility of analogical parallels, and from comparisons across centuries to developing working models for the more immediate traditions behind limited sources. RMN Newsletter sets out to provide a venue and emergent discourse space in which individual scholars can discuss and engage in vital crossdisciplinary dialogue, present reports and announcements of their own current activities, and where information about events, projects and institutions is made available.
European Journal of Archaeology, 2016
The flexibility of material culture encourages material phenomena to take a dynamic part in social life. An example of this is material citation, which can provide society with links to both the past and connections to contemporary features. In this article, we look at the diverging ways of relating to and reinventing the past in the Viking Age, exploring citations to ancient monuments in the landscape of Gammel Lejre on Zealand, Denmark. Complementing the placement of landscape monuments, attention is also brought to examples of mortuary citations related to bodily practices in Viking-age mortuary dramas, such as those visible at the mound of Skopintull on the island of Adelsö in Lake Mälaren, Sweden. Through these case studies, we explore the variability in citational strategies found across tenth-century Scandinavia.
Journal of Social Archaeology
At a possible transition towards a 'flat', post-human or new-materialist environment, many have suggested that archaeological theory and theorizing is changing course; turning to metaphysics; leaning towards the sciences; or, even is declared dead. Resonating with these concerns, and drawing on our fieldwork on a northern driftwood beach, this article suggests the need to rethink fundamental notions of what theory is – its morphological being – and how it behaves and takes form. Like drift matter on an Arctic shore, theories are adrift. They are not natives of any particular territory, but nomads in a mixed world. While they are themselves of certain weight and figure, it matters what things they bump into, become entangled with, and moved by. Based on this, we argue that theories come unfinished and fragile. Much like things stranding on a beach they don't simply 'add up' but can become detached, fragmented, turned and transfigured. Rather than seeing this drift as rendering them redundant and out of place, it is this nomadism and 'weakness' that sustains them and keeps them alive.
In the past, Viking Age (800-1066 AD) burial customs have been characterised as highly diverse in structure, content and treatment of the dead, often exhibiting standardised, gendered suites of grave goods, leading invariably to interpretations based on the assessment of wealth and status. Many of these characteristics are also evident in Bronze Age (2500-800 BC) burial practices, despite occurring approximately four millennia earlier in vastly different political, economic and social contexts. However, the manner in which these phenomena have been interpreted differ greatly, highlighting that interpretation is significantly influenced by the historico-cultural baggage we bring to it. A number of Bronze Age and Viking Age case studies are considered here to demonstrate that similar archaeological records often generate considerably dissimilar interpretations, stressing the need for a critical re-examination of the material and the historical biases that have shaped their study. It is argued that many concepts considered by Bronze Age archaeologists can contribute to our understanding of Viking Age identities by reframing our approach to mortuary practices in the Viking period.