Tracing Charisma - "An Anglo-Saxon workbox" from an early Viking Age burial.pdf (original) (raw)
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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.
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World Archaeology, 2020
This article explores practices of processing, displaying, and depositing human and animal crania in built environments and wetlands in the long Iron Age of Scandinavia. The paper first reports on a dataset of a range of practices targeting heads over the first millennium CE, with a particular focus on deposition of crania in built environments. I subsequently present a two-fold analysis of these data: an exploration of how reworking bodies into cranial objects transformed personhood in complex ways, and a discussion of how the particular practices afforded to the head connects with practices of placemaking and atmospheric intervention. I consider reworked, displayed and deposited heads as ‘body-objects’ – a different kind of being than ‘person’, ’animal’ or ‘thing’ that breaks open some existing assumptions of the constitution of bodies and persons in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia.
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European Journal of Archaeology, 2016
Current debates on the ontology of objects and matter have reinvigorated archaeological theoretical discourse and opened a multitude of perspectives on understanding the past, perspectives which have only just begun to be explored in scholarship on Late Iron Age Scandinavia. This article is a critical discussion of the sporadic tradition of covering longhouses and halls with burial mounds in the Iron and Viking ages. After having stood as social markers in the landscape for decades or even centuries, some dwellings were transformed into mortuary monuments — material and mnemonic spaces of the dead. Yet, was it the house or a deceased individual that was being interred and memorialized? Through an exploration of buildings that have been overlain by burial mounds, and by drawing on theoretical debates about social biographies and the material turn, this article illuminates mortuary citations between houses and bodies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Ultimately, I question the assumed anthropocentricity of the practice of burying houses. Rather, I suggest that the house was interwoven with the essence of the household and that the transformation of the building was a mortuary citation not necessarily of an individual, but of the entire, entangled social meshwork of the house.
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](The man from Voll : An example of a well-preserved Norwegian male grave
In this short article, I provided a summary of the rich and well-preserved content of the 10th century inhumation mound from Voll, Overhalla municipality, Nord-Trøndelag county, Norway. The work is supplemented with an abundant catalogue and short reports about the making of spear sheath replicas (Are Pedersen) and a cross-shaped dress pin recreation Roman Král). The article summarizes organic objects in Viking Age graves and suggests how these objects could have been used in the everyday life.
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The context in which a hoard was deposited is perhaps the most important clue we have towards understanding its relevance to the people who deposited it. The deposition site would have been chosen deliberately and carefully, based on factors that were important to the owner of the hoard. The purpose of this paper is to examine hoarding during the Viking Age in old, pre-Viking grave monuments. This is an interesting – albeit rather marginal – phenomenon. Attempts to understand the variables involved in site selection have been limited in scope and the interpretations are categorically either functional or ritual; recently, however, this dialectic division has started to break down. This paper endeavours to show that the time aspect associated with older grave monuments was a significant factor in the choice to hoard in them.
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This paper aims to examine the use and social signifi cance of pottery and other vessels found in burials from the Early Iron Age (500 BC–575 AD) in eastern Norway. Early in the period, the vessels are largely used as cremation urns, but from the beginning of the Roman Period (1 AD) complete sets of vessels for food and drink were also buried in the graves with the deceased. The scene is reminiscent of a table setting, almost as you would see in ritualised feasting. The transition from urns to sets of tableware also relates to a change of pottery shapes, temper and ornamentation, and coincides with the occurrence of Roman glass and bronze vessels. In the cremation urn, the deceased is consumed by fi re, which is a passive death. However, through what appears to be a table setting, ties are created to a life that has been lived. The deceased is no longer consumed, but is himself participating in a banquet. From a high level of standardization in large cemeteries with urns, the graves are increasingly individualized by the use of mounds and a wider variety of grave goods, for instance vessels for food and drink, as a way of standing out.
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Transitional Landscapes? The 3rd Millennium BC in Europe. Universitätsforschungen zur Prähistorischen Archäologie, 2016
The 3rd millennium BC in South Scandinavia was characterised by a sizable cultural heterogeneity covering differences in the use of material culture, burial practices and subsistence economic strategies. In the first half of the 3rd millennium BC, four archaeologically- defined cultural groups coexisted for at least a couple of hundred years: the late Funnel Beaker culture (TRB), the forager-oriented Pitted Ware culture and the Single Grave and Battle Axe cultures, the last two belonging to the overall Corded Ware complex. As the Funnel Beaker culture ceased, East Denmark entered an insignificant and culturally blurred period usually ascribed to the so-called ‘East Danish Single Grave culture’. However, this paper argues for a renewed and balanced understanding of the cultural conditions in East Denmark and questions the presence of the Single Grave culture in the area. Instead, it is argued that new material elements were obtained and fitted into existing Funnel Beaker traditions forming a heterogeneous cultural expression.
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Memories of migration? The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ burial costume of the fifth century AD
Antiquity, 2019
It is often claimed that the mortuary traditions that appeared in lowland Britain in the fifth century AD are an expression of new forms of ethnic identity, based on the putative memorialisation of a ‘Germanic’ heritage. This article considers the empirical basis for this assertion and evaluates it in the light of previously proposed ethnic constructivist approaches. No sound basis for such claims is identified, and the article calls for the development of new interpretative approaches for the study of early medieval mortuary archaeology in Britain. The full article can be accessed at Cambridge Core first view at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/memories-of-migration-the-anglosaxon-burial-costume-of-the-fifth-century-ad/232BF114F0AB5F90A8493C1212AE3616
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