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

Abstract

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.

Don’t all mothers love their children? Deposited infants as animate objects in the Scandinavian Iron Age

“…Intriguingly, infant deposition could occur at the foundation of a building, during its life, and as a concluding ritual at abandonment. Other known concluding rituals for buildings in Iron Age Scandinavia include artefact deposition, animal deposition, and burning and burying the house (Carlie 2004;Eriksen 2016).…”

“…This interpretation falls in line with rare traditions of burying houses in first-millennium Scandinavia. I have previously interpreted a sporadic custom of covering Iron-Age longhouses with burial mounds as a mortuary monument not for an individual, but for the house itself (Eriksen 2016). Taken together, rare traditions of burying the house, and of placing infants in constructional elements and hearths, may point to the house potentially being perceived as an agential presence worthy of devotion or even burial.…”

Askim-tunets kronologi. En tillämpad bayesiansk analys

“…Från och med yngre romersk järn-ålder måste man med andra ord vara öppen för att överklassen knyter an till traditionella uppfattningar om människan och huset. Att tankar om kopplingen mellan människa, grav och hus förs vidare, kan man finna belägg för i Marianne Hem Eriksens diskussion av hus och grav i järnålder och vikingatid (Eriksen 2016).…”

Citations in Stone: The Material World of Hogbacks

“…Halls may have accrued famed life-histories connected with their own construction, use, abandonment, and citation through new acts of building and burial (Thäte, 2007;Eriksen, 2013;. As places where memories were produced through the biographies of their inhabitants, halls may have become famed structures with personalities of their own: 'living', 'dying', and 'dead' non-human agents (see Eriksen, 2016). Thus, selected buildings in the late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian context may have been renowned, remembered, and actively commemorated long after their own demise.…”