Bodies and Identities in the Scandinavian Late Iron Age

2007

This thesis explores bodily representations in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (400–1050 AD). Non-human bodies, such as gold foil figures, and human bodies are analysed. The work starts with an examination and deconstruction of the sex/gender categories to the effect that they are considered to be of minor value for the purposes of the the-sis. Three analytical concepts – masks, miniature, and metaphor – are deployed in order to interpret how and why the chosen bodies worked within their prehistoric con-texts. The manipulations the figures sometimes have undergone are referred to as masking practices, discussed in Part One. It is shown that masks work and are powerful by being paradoxical; that they are vehicles for communication; and that they are, in effect, transitional objects bridging gaps that arise in continuity as a result of events such as symbolic or actual deaths. In Part Two miniaturization is discussed. Miniaturization contributes to making worlds intelligible, negotiable and communicative. Bodies in miniatures in comparison to other miniature objects are particularly potent. Taking gold foil figures under special scrutiny, it is claimed that gold, its allusions as well as its inherent properties conveyed numinosi-ty. Consequently gold foil figures, regardless of the context, must be understood as extremely forceful agents. Part Three examines metaphorical thinking and how human and animal body parts were used in pro-creational acts, resulting in the birth of persons. However, these need not have been human, but could have been the outcomes of turning a deceased into an ancestor, iron into a steel sword, or clay into a ceramic urn, hence expanding and transforming the members of the family/household. Thus, bone in certain contexts acted as a transitional object or as a generative substance. It is concluded that the bodies of research are connected to transitions, and that the theme of transformation was one fundamental characteristic of the societies of study.

Kumulative Habilitationsschrift zur Erlangung der Venia Docendi im Fach Urgeschichte und Historische Archäologie, Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Universität Wien. Vorgelegt von Mag. Dr. phil. Katharina Rebay-Salisbury in Wien, im April 2017.

Doctoral Thesis, 2019

Multiple burials— generally defined as the presence of more than one individual within a grave— are a common feature of the Viking Age mortuary landscape throughout Scandinavia and the lands of the Western Diaspora. Even though a number of spectacular examples have captured the imagination of professionals and the public alike, multiple burials have not been the subject of dedicated and systematic archaeological investigation. Despite this, they are widely considered in relation to two interpretive themes emphasising either the 'Ordinary' family nature of the burials, or their role in demarcating social deviants and ‘Others’. In light of the growing recognition that concepts of identity are not static, one–dimensional or universal, I argue that a framework of personhood may better illuminate the nature of the multiple burial rite and its role in producing Viking Age persons. To do so, Viking Age burials located across the lands of the Western Diaspora and the urban trading centres of Kaupang and Hedeby were drawn together to produce an original corpus of multiple burials. The multiple burial corpus was approached using a perspective grounded in relationality and the ontological turn, which focused on the relationships between various components of the burials, and how persons were produced through these interactions. The analysis centred on three types of beings— humans, animals and things— to explore the ways in which they related and mutually constituted the personhood of the other. The results demonstrate that, firstly, temporality was a key component in the physical construction of Viking Age multiple burials and the ontological construction of Viking Age persons, and secondly, that the shared bodily experiences of humans, animals and things suggest that persons were potentially conceptualised as ‘not of one shape’ in Viking Age minds. While this study firmly situates the multiple burial rite within the wider suite of normative burial practices observed across the Viking World, it also builds upon a developing discourse in the Scandinavian tradition, which is increasingly revealing the fluidity of 'being' across human, animal and thing bodies in Iron Age myths and material culture. The research poses the question: is it time for us to reconceptualise the multiple burial rite to acknowledge the potential personhood of 'other bodies'?

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.

European Journal of Archaeology

The authors set a relatively small and little-known corpus of human remains recovered from Iron Age wetland contexts in Norway in a wider theoretical framework of sacrifice and personhood. The material studied, fragmentary skeletal remains in wetland contexts, juxtaposed with the better-known bog body tradition of northern Europe, offers a base from which to query constructions and perceptions of personhood. Situating the discussion in a contextual framework and relational underpinnings of ways of being, the authors examine whether or not the assumption that personhood rests in a human body can be implicitly inferred when confronted with ancient human remains, and what this may imply for interpretations of human bodies in votive settings.

Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae, 2018

The article discusses the utilization of death and burial for the construction of social identity and socio-political legitimacy and the resultant impacts for the particular society. Apart from the aspect of the technical removal of a dead body, a burial is mainly a public ritual within the local community which fulfills several religious and cultic but also social and political functions. As with other public feasts like weddings, the highly dynamic burial ceremony allows a negotiation or manipulation of the social reality. This can be afforded through the provision of outstanding grave goods as token of might and power, through the outer form of the grave or its localization in relation to other burials or important landmarks or through the position of the dead body itself. Based on a new conceptualization of the term ‘resource’ as every material or immaterial media that can be used by human actors to alter social reality, death and burial can be interpreted as resources for the relatives to reconstruct, legitimize or secure their social position or political claim. These aspects are analyzed by the Collaborative Research Center ‘SFB 1070 ResourceCultures B06 – Humans and Resources in the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages. Anthropological und Bioarchaeological Analyses of the Use of Food Resources and the Detection of Migrations’.

In recent years, a number of scholars have challenged the assumption of a bodily integrity after death (Brück

In this article, the editors summarize how the different starting points for studying the self in the articles of this book, lead to different conclusions with regard to the nature of the self and the distribution of agency: cultural / social / practice theorists give priority to the context, the discourse, the practice when defining the self, while cognitive theorists give agency to various human agents behind cultural expressions. Based on this synthesis of the articles' approaches and results, the article, and the book as a whole, conclude that every given expression or conceptualization of the self is certainly conditioned by its specific historical and socio-cultural context. However, the emergence of the self in itself appears as a constant cognitive process of traveling and unfolding, wayfinding and choice-making, that happens continuously in all historical and social contexts and in all individuals, known and unknown.

UBAS Nordic vol. 3 (University of Bergen), 2006

Primitive Tider, 2018

In this text, it is argued that we need to take the issue of alterity seriously to avoid categorizing the post-burial practices into contemporary western dichotomizing concepts. Inspired from recent research within the “ontological turn” it is suggested that we need to rethink familiar concepts such as burial, grave, individual, death and mortal remains and explore other dimensions of the old burials as they may have appeared to the recently Christianized Late Iron Age communities.