Board Games in Boat Burials: Play in the Performance of Migration and Viking Age Mortuary Practice

Abstract

This contribution explores an aspect of boat burials in the second half of the first millennium AD across Northern Europe, specifically boat burials that included equipment for board games (surviving variously as boards and playing pieces, playing pieces only, or dice and playing pieces). Entangled aspects of identity, gender, cosmogony, performance, and commemoration are considered within a framework of cultural citation and connection between death and play. The crux of this article's citational thrust is the notion of quoting life in the rituals surrounding death. This was done both in the service of the deceased and in the service of those wanting to remember the deceased, the argument distills around the biographical trajectories or the different social and individual uses to which people put ostensibly simple things such as gaming pieces.

Whalebone Gaming Pieces: Aspects of Marine Mammal Exploitation in Vendel and Viking Age Scandinavia

“…These objects are regularly found on excavations and described in reports, but in-depth analyses are few and questions about the raw material for the large group made of unspecified bone and antler have always been secondary to chronology, typology, and social contexts (e.g. Selling, 1940; Lindquist, 1978; Mclees, 1990; Kjer Michaelsen, 1992; Sandberg, 1994; Stauch, 1994; Duczko, 1996; Haahr Kristiansen, 1997; Dahl, 2003; Whittaker, 2006; Kristensen, 2007; Solberg, 2007; Rundkvist & Williams, 2008; Ljungkvist, 2008a; Lund Koksvik, 2010, 2013; Skomsvoll, 2012; Caldwell & Hall, 2014; Hall, 2016).…”

Making Sense of Abstract Board Games: Toward a Cross-Ludic Theory

“…In antiquity, three-dimensional examples of boards are mostly found in elite tombs that have helped to identify the associated gaming materials (e.g., Tait, 1982) while most other three-dimensional game boards still remain undecorated and without any cultural clues other than the context in which they were found (see, e.g., Hall, 2016; Hillbom, 2011; Swiny, 1980). These board games are attested in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia as well as in Roman, Mayan, Ottoman, and other ancient and Medieval contexts (see Crist, Dunn-Vaturi, & de Voogt, 2016; Schädler, 2007; Voorhies, 2017).…”

Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581

“…As individual objects, they are not uncommon in Viking Age burials, but rare as full sets with iron-bound boards (for a discussion of the Birka examples, see Selling 1940). They particularly occur in relation to military leaders; for example, being present in most of the larger boat graves (Whittaker 2006; Hall 2016), where they are employed symbolically, such as boards laid out with pieces in play (e.g. in Valsgärde boat burial 7, Arwidsson 1977: pl.…”