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

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. </p

Between the real and ideal : Ordering, controlling and utilising space in power negotiations - hall buildings in Scandinavia, 250 - 1050 CE

ABSTRACT: The Scandinavian hall building was a constructional and social innovation which emerged sometime in the Early Iron Age; most scholars agree that it occurred in the second half of the Roman Period. The thesis examines the ordering, control and utilisation of space expressed through the Scandinavian hall buildings c. 250 – 1050 CE. The power relations of the Scandinavian Iron Age society are in the thesis interpreted as expressed through the hall buildings and their placement in a both genuine and cognitive landscape. The buildings’ construction, the finds related to the buildings, and the mythological ideas of the buildings are related to power struggle and power negotiations in the Iron Age societies. A recurrent theme throughout the thesis is the reciprocity between the built environment and the agents therein, as well as a focus on the biography of the hall buildings. Other important aspects discussed is the strong connection between the hall and the dead, the use of space as a differentiating factor between social groups, and the hall as an arena for rituals, transformation and liminality, differentiation and negotiation. Keywords: Hall, cultic buildings, Iron Age, mythology, power, spatial ordering, communication, landscape, biography, practice theory

Of bodies and buildings: Rituals in the halls of the Vikings

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Of bodies and buildings: Rituals in the halls of the Vikings

No description supplie

Reflections on Posthuman Ethics. Grievability and the More-than-human Worlds of Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia

Posthuman feminism grows out of interdisciplinary discourse exploring relational metaphysics. It is set apart from other approaches in the broader ontological turn by its central ethical claim: by actively forming kinship or alliances among human and non-humans, we can overcome major challenges of today's world and create a better future. Archaeologists and anthropologists are well situated to investigate this claim, as we already work with worlds unstructured by western dichotomies. This paper explores one such past world—Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia—to ask how alternative more-than-human relationships may work in practice. Specifically, we examine the relations among swords, animals, houses and humans in the first millennium ce, assessing ethical commitments within Butler's framework of grievability. We argue that the picture that emerges is fundamentally relational and unfamiliar, with complex articulations of bodies and personhood criss-crossing human–object divides; however, the ethical commitments of this world leave us deeply uncomfortable. Thus, although we welcome posthuman feminism's call to ontological openness, we caution against too easy an association between more-than-human kinship and ethical projects