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

Abstract

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.

Mounds Against the State? An Anarchist Approach to Mound Construction, Environmental Stress, and Centralization of Power in Viking and Merovingian Age Scandinavia

“…Bjørn Ringstad (1987: 16-19) estimates that a person equipped with Iron Age tools could build between 0.4 and 2 m 3 of mound per day, which suggests that heaping up 2500 m 3 required somewhere between 1250 and 6250 working days. To this, we should add the time it took to transport the materials-which studies of other mounds suggest could sometimes come from considerable distances-and that materials were often not simply heaped but carefully arranged (Myhre, 2015: 179;Cannell, 2021). While the estimate is obviously rather speculative and should only be taken as a vague indication, it illustrates that mound construction took much more time than the Late Moche feasts that Swenson describes.…”

Kerbing Relations through Time: Reuse, Connectivity and Folded Time in the Viking Age

“…Most of the penannular brooches from male graves dating to the tenth century ad have been identified as belonging to a social group closely related to the early establishment of kingship (Glørstad 2010, 90, 114–61, 254–86; 2012). Even the soil from the Store Vikingegrav mound may be examined in order to gain insights into the use of the past at the construction of the grave (for a discussion on the use of soils in the construction of mounds in the Viking Age, see Cannell 2021; Cannell et al 2020). The soils from the mound contained concentrations of charcoal, ceramics, burnt bones and pottery.…”