Theme:
6. Contested Pasts & Presents
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Zooming in/out/past the Viking Age: Integrating Local, Regional and Global Funerary Practices in the Baltic–North Sea–Atlantic Axis, AD750–1050
Content:
For many parts of the Afro-Eurasian landmass, the period c.AD750–1050 was characterized by a contraction of conceptual space and increased chains of social interaction and interdependence. This session will trace practices of transculturation in the well-documented funerary spaces of one part of that landmass: the Baltic–North Sea–Atlantic axis. Change and stasis in funerary practices will be a point of entry for exploring local, regional and pan-regional material manifestations of the processes of transculturation brought about through the resulting movement of people, objects, and ideas in an area not generally studied as a zone of networked identities.
The agents of change in this zone have traditionally been referred to as ‘vikings’, but migrants, raiders, and traders were just some of the many people on the move. Scholars, nomads, diplomats, craftspeople, settlers, missionaries, refugees, the enslaved, and the betrothed were all part of this maelstrom of movement, with a range of short- and long-term outcomes in terms of transculturation. Both human and non-human agents are at play here, as the serialized production of trade goods and influxes of raw materials created new chains of interdependence and avenues for transculturation. Funerary practices in context allow us to study these processes in progress.
Papers seeking to integrate localized shifts in material manifestations of funerary practices with the wider social processes at work are particularly welcome, including those which seek to decentralize agency in this period. Also welcome are treatments of the problematic binary of colonizer–colonized, and the way that transculturation better captures the material record resulting from these complex interactions over time. So too papers concerned with questioning the exceptionality of the period. Finally, participants will be encouraged to critique—or justify—loaded concepts like hybridity, mestizaje, acculturation, and syncretism, in the ongoing deconstruction of the existence of bounded ‘cultures’.
Keywords:
funerary practices, material culture, transculturation, viking age
Session associated with MERC:
yes
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Russell Ó Ríagáin (Ireland) 1
Co-organisers:
Frida Espolin Norstein (Sweden) 2
Adrián Maldonado (United Kingdom) 3
Affiliations:
1. School of Archaeology, University College Dublin
2. Stockholm University
3. National Museums Scotland
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