Becoming Bog Bodies : Sacrifice and Politics of Exclusion, as Evidenced in the Deposition of Skeletal Remains in Wetlands Near Uppåkra

This paper is inspired by new materialist gender theory and the way it reconfigures the analysis of bodies and the environment. Here the relationships entangled in wetlands and bogs through depositions are in focus. More specifically, it deals with the placing of bodily remains and artefacts in wet contexts around the political and religious centre of Uppåkra in Scania, South Sweden. The aim of this paper is to map some of the processes that led to those people ‘becoming bog bodies’ and investigates their role in a situated political ecology. By examining who these people were and became during the life course and in death, it will open up a discussion on precariousness, vulnerability and masculinity, where victims of sacrifice were perhaps not only selected, but also possibly made. The paper brings a neglected dataset of skeletal remains from bogs to the attention of research and present new radiocarbon dates as well as osteological analysis of these remains. It engages with concepts such as slow violence and necropolitics derived from discussions within the environmental humanities.Tidens vatte

Water politics. Wet deposition of human and animal remains in Uppland, Sweden

This paper presents evidence for deposition of human and animal remains in watery locations in Uppland province. Likewise, deposition of artefacts in watery locations also seems to continue into the historical period. This changes the previous understanding of such depositions with regards to their geographical distribution, their contents and how long the practices continued. It is argued that the changing water landscape and the deposition of bodily remains of certain human and animal others co-worked agentically to change a variety of relations over time, which had political effects. These assemblages operated to draw attention to and from settlement clusters and central places, and were important in negotiations of boundaries. Furthermore, some depositional sites used in earlier periods seem to have attracted renewed attention at the end of the Viking Period. Hence, these depositions may have been important in the transition from Paganism to Christianity, and also helped merge communities and faiths.Tidens Vatte

Personhood of Water : Depositions of Bodies and Things in Water Contexts as a Way of Observing Agential Relationships

This paper stems from a curiosity about relationships between water, depositions, life, death and sacrifice. It probes into how traditional binaries such as nature/culture, human/ animal, alive/dead and language/reality were addressed in Irish medieval place lore, using critical posthumanist theory to explore ways in which agential powers were not merely ascribed to the environment, but also observed and acknowledged by people in the past. It also considers how the agentialities of both artefacts and waters could have affected and made their way into human storytelling. In so doing, the paper presents a contribution from archaeology to the emerging field of environmental humanities, offering research that could entice us to sharpen our environmental sensibilities and respond to environmental change. Depositions of things and bodies in wet contexts are often understood as sacrifices made to deities located in the otherworld. However, there is plentiful evidence in archaeology and in medieval place-lore to suggest that waters were observed as being alive, as immanent beings, as more-than-human persons who could have received these depositions as gifts. This study explores how depositions would have added to and reconfigured such water-personhood in locally and regionally situated ways, and how they may also have worked as apparatuses for paying close attention to the water environment

Re-wilding the Environmental Humanities : A Deep Time Comment

The reasoning around the Anthropocene starts with a sobering clarification – human agency has not only created high culture, such as buildings, tools or art, by its actions. What are left are also heritages of  species and gender inequalities, scarred landscapes, waste, toxicities, species extinctions, mono-cultures, layers at the beds of oceans, climate and environmental change. This is a mixed heritage (often unlabelled) that is the result of material interferences that change the textures of times, that territorialize futures to come, that shape the spaces and cartographies within which future (multispecies) generations can manoeuvre. I ask again, with Haraway (2016:100), what measures need to be taken to make the Anthropocene as thin as possible? What are the means with which the humanities, however loosely formed, can contribute with towards that end? Here I share the visions of Riede, but find the paper somewhat limiting. Does the present predicament not demand of us a more undisciplined academic encounter – and a rewilding of the humanities – to form these transversal modes of querying past, present, futures? Does it not need a lot of creativity to find a range of engagements, knowledges and inspirations to work elsewise? What interests me is how to expand on scientifically informed multi-species storytelling, with a base in archaeological materials that deals with how to tie human-animal knots and temporal relations in other ways. There are other ways to relate to and be related to by the environment (see Fredengren, this volume). For such it is very premature to set boundaries for what archaeology may bring to the Environmental Humanities table, as both subjects are on the move.  Likewise, I ask how heritage is captured as time elements, in presentisms, in merges of materialities and meaning, in troubled bodies, in how to deal with anthropocentrism in heritage making, how to capture heritages as process ontologies as human-animal relations (Fredengren 2015, 2018). I also ask what modes and models of stewardship (who cares for whom, according to what ethic and on what mandate) come with the heritage business? I am curious about people’s relationships with the more-than-human, with things, place and spaces, and with care and curatorship in a wider sense. However, I do not envisage the meeting between environmental humanities and archaeology to be limited to these matters, but to be developed through various creative and affirmative encounters.  And then I ask … for what causes do we do this? Is it to establish subject boundaries and to carve up academic terrain, or for forming new types of unexpected collaborations? And perhaps, at the end of the day … as many of us would say, don’t we do it … for the love of the world

Att möta våtmarkernas natur : En spekulativ arkeologi om offer, mosslik och klimatfrågor

Ett närliggande café säljer fantastiska lila, röda, blå och gula bakelser med devisen ”Veganism is not a sacrifice”. För mig pekar termen offer istället direkt mot det som jag arbetar med – arkeologi och forskning om deponeringar av döda kroppar i våtmarksmiljöer, främst under järnåldern. Utforskandet lyfter fram olika materiellt och vetenskapligt förankrade berättelser om andra sätt att leva, gränser mellan liv och död, våld mot en lång rad mänskliga och mer-än-mänskliga varelser. Det handlar också om att tydliggöra effekterna av ojämlikheter, klimatförändringar och tickande tidsbomber – att tala för de döda och för de som kommer att dö. Mot bakgrund av klimatkrisen insisterar Donna J. Haraway på vikten av att öva sig på att låta tanken och fantasin gå på besök hos en lång rad oväntade andra, att vara nyfiken, att välkomna det oförutsedda, påbörja viktiga samtal och möta och ta ansvar för det som vi på olika sätt möter i våra liv. Det handlar om att ta ansvar även i situationer där vi normalt inte har ett utpekat ansvar. Här har Haraway inspirerats av Hanna Arendt och Virginia Woolf, och visar att vi behöver träna föreställningsförmågan för att kunna ge respons och bry oss. Detta oavsett om de vi träffar under dessa övningar är sådana som liknar oss själva, eller är några vars existenser och besök överraskar oss helt och kanske vidgar det vi ser som släktingar bortom det som faller innanför den normala ramen av mänskliga. Haraway låter förstå att de som talar för de döda har ett särskilt ansvar som handlar om att föra de döda in i nutiden, för att därigenom bjuda in till bättre sätt att leva och dö i alla sorters framtider och för att vi ska kunna lära oss något av dem. Det öppnar också för vad som kan göras inom arkeologi. Här tar jag mig an Haraways uppmaning för att göra ett slags miljöhumanistiska, forskningsbaserade, spekulativa arkeologier och därigenom undersöka andra sätt att mötas över mer-än-mänskliga generationsgränser, med utgångspunkt i natur- och kulturarv. Det handlar om att ta sig an olika, ibland oönskade, kvarlåtenskaper av kolonial, postkolonial, antropocentrisk eller ekonomisk art, och dit kan miljöförstöringen räknas. För, som det verkar, har vi inte slutat att offra i våtmarker och genom våtmarker, även om det kanske tros att så är fallet

Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time Enchantment : Bog Bodies, Crannogs and Otherworldly' sites. The materializing powers of disjunctures in time

The topic of deep time' has recently gained attention in the field of environmental humanities. In contrast, heritage studies have a narrower focus on the role of the past in the present. This paper probes into how encounters with deep time, archaeology and heritage could play a role in environmental ethics and issues of intergenerational justice and care. People's meetings with intermingled temporalities, and collisions of past and present, are highlighted through the peculiar and disruptive affect of exceptional preservation in crannogs, bog bodies, wetlands and lakes. It is argued that such archaeology has the potential to produce enchantment' effects, understood as energising moments of startling presence, which can be powerfully deployed to move people from ethical thinking and reflection towards ethical action. However, in order to acknowledge the particular power of deep-time archaeological effects, and to realise the potentialities of heritage, it needs to be approached differently

Posthumanism, the Transcorporeal and Biomolecular Archaeology

This paper will discuss the tensions between the humanities and sciences within archaeology and examine how these tensions exist, both in how identity and personhood are understood, and in different views of epistemology and ontology. From a basis in critical posthumanism it is argued that unnecessary boundaries have been set up between the body and the environment. The concept of the transcorporeal allows for rethinking the connection between bodies and landscape, enabling us to discuss the environment inside. This approach can provide an alternative framing for the use of the sciences in archaeology, particularly for osteology and DNA and isotope analysis. Biomolecular mapping of body networks allows for a better understanding of the configuration of specific historic bodies as well as for discussing ethics. Furthermore, there may be a case for describing analysed bodies as figurations, rather than as identities.Tidens Vatte

Nature:Cultures : Heritage, Sustainability and Feminist Posthumanism

This paper makes use of feminist posthumanism to outline how a range of heritage policies, practices and strategies, partly through their base in social constructivism have a clear anthropocentric focus. Not only do they risk downplaying materiality, but also a number of human and non-human others, driving a wedge between nature and culture. This may in turn be an obstacle for the use of heritage in sustainable development as it deals with range of naturalized others as if they have no agency and leaves the stage open for appropriation and exploitation. This paper probes into what heritage could be in the wake of current climate and environmental challenges if approached differently. It explores how a selection of feminist posthumanisms challenge the distinction between nature:culture in a way that could shift the approach to sustainability in heritage making from a negative to an affirmative framing

Checking in with deep time : intragenerational care in the registers of feminist posthumanities, the case of Gärstadsverken

Starting from the assumptions of feminist perspectives from various forms of re-invented humanities, this chapter approaches the major research question of how better to re-tie the material and immaterial knots between past, present and future generations for heritage research. This is a research question guiding us in our project on deep-time interventions and intragenerational care that we explore here through the multi-temporal site of the Gärstad waste-to-energy plant. This plant resides just outside the town of Linköping in south-east Sweden, a site we often pass by on our way home or to the university. The over-arching intent of our research is to contribute to the sociocultural and material transformations needed for us all to become more gracious ancestors for multispecies generations to come.The Posthumanities HubFORMAS project "Checking in with Deep Time" pi Fredengren, with Åsber