For the Blind Eye Only? Scandinavian Gold Foils and the Power of Small Things

Hedeager, Lotte

doi:10.1080/00293652.2015.1104516

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…This smuggles in a lot of contemporary baggage. Rather, size and fragility were clearly part of the capacities and qualities of gold foil figures (Hedeager 2015). While the use of foil may be connected to diminishing flows of gold to the North after the fall of the Roman empire, and the need to make the substance last as long as possible, there were other choices available to their Late Iron Age makers.…”

Section: (Iii) Engaging As Worldingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body-Worldings of Later Scandinavian Prehistory: Making Oddkin with Two Body-Objects

Eriksen

2022

csa

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In the last two decades, the body has emerged as a rich field of theorization and scholarly exploration in archaeology. This paper is an excursion into a consideration of two bodyobjects of prehistoric Denmark: an anthropomorphic bronze figurine from the Fårdal assemblage dating to the late Bronze Age, and a figural gold foil with an anthropomorphic stamp from Sorte Muld, created perhaps as much as 1 500 years later, in the Merovingian period (550–750 CE). The two images are made in very different materials, in distinctly different forms, and belong to different historical situations. Nevertheless, the two artefacts render what are likely women’s bodies with clear differences, but also some uncanny similarities.This article explores these artefacts from a more-than-representational perspective. Moving beyond a taxonomic approach, it focuses on aspects of these images beyond what or who they ‘represent’. What can such an approach tell us about the capacities of bodies, as well as the capacities of the artefacts themselves? This entails, following the work of Donna Haraway, worlding them in two vastly different social, material and political worlds; drawing out their making from two very different technological processes; engaging with the similarities and differences of their biographies; and, crucially, thereby contemplating their kinship.

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Section: (Iii) Engaging As Worldingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body-Worldings of Later Scandinavian Prehistory: Making Oddkin with Two Body-Objects

Eriksen

2022

csa

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“…Their meaning is unknown; but their context suggests that they were associated with centres fulfilling political, economic, and cultic functions controlled by the elite (Watt, 2004;Ratke & Simek, 2006). Despite their minute size, the gold foils show a remarkable level of detail in the depiction of bodies, clothes, and key accessories associated with highly ritualized roles or ritual transformations (Back-Danielsson, 2002;Hedeager, 2015). Several gold foils show women wearing a disc-on-bow brooch placed horizontally, with the head plate pointing toward the woman's right, just under the woman's chin (Figure 6a).…”

Section: Women As Custodians Of the Past: Collective Memories And 'Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Echoes of the Past: Women, Memories and Disc-on-Bow Brooches in Vendel- and Viking-period Scandinavia

Glørstad

Røstad

2020

Eur. j. archaeol

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This article examines the development, handling, and depositions of disc-on-bow brooches from the sixth to tenth centuries ad in the Vendel and Viking periods in Norway and mainland Sweden. A revised typological framework is presented, and the context of these brooches explored. The authors discuss their preservation, re-use, fragmentation, and ritual meaning within ongoing social negotiations and internal conflicts from the late Vendel period into the Viking Age. References to the past in Viking-Age society and the significance of women for maintaining narratives of the past are considered, as are levels of access, control, and definition of narratives of the past in times of social redefinition.

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Comments on Maria Panum Baastrup’s: invitation systems and identification in Late Iron Age southern Scandinavia? The gold foil figures from a new perspective

Lyngstrøm

2016

Danish Journal of Archaeology

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For the Blind Eye Only? Scandinavian Gold Foils and the Power of Small Things

Cited by 6 publications

References 32 publications

Body-Worldings of Later Scandinavian Prehistory: Making Oddkin with Two Body-Objects

Body-Worldings of Later Scandinavian Prehistory: Making Oddkin with Two Body-Objects

Echoes of the Past: Women, Memories and Disc-on-Bow Brooches in Vendel- and Viking-period Scandinavia

Comments on Maria Panum Baastrup’s: invitation systems and identification in Late Iron Age southern Scandinavia? The gold foil figures from a new perspective

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