Commemorating Dwelling: The Death and Burial of Houses in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Hem Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Burial Mounds ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Social Markers ◽  
Deceased Individual

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.

scholarly journals What Makes a Mound? Earth-Sourced Materials in Late Iron Age Burial Mounds

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rebecca J.S. Cannell
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Archaeological Interpretation ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Burial Mounds ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Southern Norway

The interpretation of Late Iron Age burial mounds often focuses exclusively on the discovered contents, the social identity or role of the interred and the economic and political implications that can be extracted. This article considers the mound itself as a basis for archaeological interpretation, and attempts to place substantial late Iron Age burial mounds within the landscape they are made of. Within these burial mounds internal references to time, place and the transformations and imbued associations within the earth-sourced materials are purposeful and significant. This is illustrated via comparable examples from southern Norway, and to add contrast, cases from the Viking Age Isle of Man will be explored. This article will outline why the selected mounds should be seen as closely related to each other in the references they contain, and how the materials used can be seen as a purposeful link to the land itself.

scholarly journals Bones of the Earth: Imitation as Meaning in Viking Age Burial Ritual

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Tore Artelius ◽  
Mats Lindqvist
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Natural Stone ◽  
Burial Ground ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Burial Grounds ◽  
Ritual Context

From excavation results of a pre-Roman Iron Age and Viking Age burialgroundin Västergötland, an example is presented ofhow religious meaning became projected into Viking Age burial ritual through imitation of an already then ancient custom. The burial-ground was abandoned for a period of at least 600 hundred years in between the two periods. In the Pre-Roman Iron Age and Viking Age graves the custom of depositing flakes of firecracked natural stone was documented. From a Viking Age perspective the tradition was imitated and derived from the urnfield burial-grounds ofther late pre-Roman Iron Age. The authors link the Viking Age ritual behaviour  to the sagas, where stones are presented as symbolical representations of the human body and as cosmological parts of the skeleton that kept the earth together. In the interpretation it is argued that the very concrete use of older graves was essential in the Viking Age burial custom. In this specific example, the deposition of stones in the Viking Age ritual context is interpreted as a projection and representation of the past and the bodies of the dead.

scholarly journals Burial Mounds, Ard Marks, and Memory: A Case Study from the Early Iron Age at Bamble, Telemark, Norway

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-226
Author(s):  
Christian Løchsen Rødsrud
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
System Analysis ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Old Field ◽  
Field System ◽  
Burial Mounds ◽  
Point Of Departure

The point of departure for this article is the excavation of two burial mounds and a trackway system in Bamble, Telemark, Norway. One of the mounds overlay ard marks, which led to speculation as to whether the site was ritually ploughed or whether it contained the remains of an old field system. Analysis of the archaeometric data indicated that the first mound was related to a field system, while the second was constructed 500–600 years later. The first mound was probably built to demonstrate the presence of a kin and its social norms, while these norms were renegotiated when the second mound was raised in the Viking Age. This article emphasizes that the ritual and profane aspects were closely related: mound building can be a ritualized practice intended to legitimize ownership and status by the reuse of domestic sites in the landscape. Further examples from Scandinavia indicate that this is a common, but somewhat overlooked, practice.

Dead Sea Levels during the Bronze and Iron Ages

Radiocarbon ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Joy Kagan ◽  
Dafna Langgut ◽  
Elisabetta Boaretto ◽  
Frank Herald Neumann ◽  
Mordechai Stein
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Lake Level ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
The Past ◽  
Organic Debris ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead

The history of lake-level changes at the Dead Sea during the Holocene was determined mainly by radiocarbon dating of terrestrial organic debris. This article reviews the various studies that have been devoted over the past 2 decades to defining the Dead Sea levels during the Bronze and Iron Ages (≃5.5 to 2.5 ka cal BP) and adds new data and interpretation. In particular, we focus on research efforts devoted to refining the chronology of the sedimentary sequence in the Ze'elim Gully, a key site of paleoclimate investigation in the European Research Council project titled Reconstructing Ancient Israel. The Bronze and Iron Ages are characterized by significant changes in human culture, reflected in archaeological records in which sharp settlement oscillations over relatively short periods of time are evident. During the Early Bronze, Intermediate Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Late Bronze Ages, the Dead Sea saw significant level fluctuations, reaching in the Middle Bronze an elevation of ≃370 m below mean sea level (bmsl), and declining in the Late Bronze to below 414 m bmsl. At the end of the Late Bronze Age and upon the transition to the Iron Age, the lake recovered slightly and rose to ≃408 m bmsl. This recovery reflected the resumption of freshwater activity in the Judean Hills, which was likely accompanied by more favorable hydrological-environmental conditions that seem to have facilitated the wave of Iron Age settlement in the region.

scholarly journals Hillforts, rocks and warriors

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 154-165
Author(s):  
Javier Rodriguez-Corral
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
The Bronze Age

During the Late Iron Age, monumental stone statues of warriors were established in the northwest of Iberia, ‘arming’ landscapes that ultimately encouraged specific types of semiotic ideologies in the region. This paper deals with how these statues on rocks not only worked in the production of liminality in the landscape – creating transitional zones on it –, but also how they functioned as liminal gateways to the past, absorbing ideas from the Bronze Age visual culture up to the Late Iron Age one, in order to create emotional responses to a new socio-political context.

scholarly journals The Odal and its Manifestation in the Landscape

1994 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-238
Author(s):  
Torun Zachrisson
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Wide Sense ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Individual

The concept odal can be regarded in a narrow sense, i.e. as the inherited landed property of a family. But here it is argued that odal should be viewed in a wide sense - as a mentality that is of great importance to the understanding of Late Iron Age society in Sweden. The article focuses on the material expressions which belonging to a family and possessing a farm could take in the individual farmstead in the Mälar Valley. The Viking Age is interpreted as a time period in which there was a need to make the odal visible. The acts of burying dead relatives on top of the graves of early ancestors, erecting runestones, and possibly also erecting mounds are regarded as ways of guarding, marking, and confirming the possession of the odal in the odal man's own eyes and in his neighbours' and consequently also the odal man's position in society.

Cemeteries and Funerary Practice

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jake Weekes
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Spatial Separation ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Mortuary Ritual ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Process Method

This chapter applies and attempts to contribute to the funerary process method of investigating late Iron Age and Roman period mortuary ritual in Britain. In this approach, evidence derived from archaeological contexts including tombstones and monuments, possible cemetery surfaces, cemetery boundaries, burials, pyre sites, and other features is reconsidered diachronically in relation to funerary schema. We therefore try to consider objects and actions in their correct funerary contexts, from the selectivity of death itself, through laying-out procedures, modification of the remains and other objects, degrees of spatial separation of the living and the dead, and types of deposition and commemorative acts. The development of tradition and diversity in funerary practice in Roman Britain is considered throughout, and the chapter concludes with a brief reconsideration of the multi-vocality of funerary symbolism.

scholarly journals Making Space for Past Futures: Rural Landscape Temporalities in Roman Britain

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-342
Author(s):  
Andrew Gardner ◽  
Lacey Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Future ◽  
Material Record

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focused on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge preconceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materializing of time, the future has a very significant part to play.

Artefact studies in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain: a blast from the past?

Antiquity ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 86 (331) ◽  
pp. 258-260
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Ponting
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age

scholarly journals Iron Age Mnemonics: A Biographical Approach to Dwelling in Later Prehistoric Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Lindsey Büster
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Successive Generations

Domestic architecture played a central role in the identity of later prehistoric communities, particularly in creating lasting bonds between the living and the dead. Acting as a conduit of memory and legacy for successive generations of inhabitants, roundhouses straddled the divide between house and memorial. The exceptionally well preserved Late Iron Age settlement at Broxmouth in southeast Scotland demonstrates the potential of biographical approaches in understanding the central role that roundhouses played in fashioning the identity of successive households, and the role of objects in constructing genealogical narratives.

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