Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2009, Page 36

Þóra Pétursdóttir
bury themselves, we can not think of
them as clay in the hands of the living.
The ambiguous and demanding presence
of the deceased during a Viking Age
burial ceremony may have bestowed him
or her with an ability to communicate and
manipulate the living. The dead body
may have silently insisted that the things
that were part of the person’s identity in
life - with and through whom it formed
networks - should be deposited along-
side it. That the animals, a dog and horse,
which it loved, bred, played and worked
with, be put to death and follow it in the
grave. Through her ethnographic research
Marilyn Strathem (1981, 219) has actu-
ally recognized that funerals often
“remember” the dead through the per-
son’s reconfíguration. That is, by bring-
ing together the parts he or she demon-
strated in life and thereby unite or re-
member an otherwise “distributed per-
son”. Thus, the contents of an excavated
grave cannot simply be conceived as “...
osteological data, artefacts or symbolic
resources, but as holding material agency
influencing the selective remembering
and forgetting of the deceased’s person-
hood [italics added]” (Williams 2004,
263).
Obviously, all the constituents of a
grave were brought to the place of depo-
sition by the living - they did not fall
from the sky. But, not the body, the
things, the animals, or other items were
brought there as inert passive materials.
And moreover, not one came into being
at this moment, but brought with it a life
history, “...a series of networks of sig-
nificance, involving places, the personal
histories of people, substances, skills and
symbolic references” (Thomas 1996,
159). Presuming that it was the deceased’s
relatives that handled the burial, it is
Figure 3: A woman and horse resting in an
undivided grave at Ytra-Garðshorn in
Eyjajjarðarsýsla (Eldjárn 1966, 37).
likely that they also knew the different
constituents. Objects like the elaborate
sword from the grave at Kaldárhöfði
(Eldjám 2000, 324 (see Fig. 4)), the unu-
sual spear from Tindar (ibid, 343), the
oval and trefoil brooches from Ketilsstaðir
(ibid, 360, 364), the tongue shaped
brooches from Komsá (ibid, 370) and the
lignite arm ring from Alaugarey (ibid,
390) are of such character or rarity that
their identity, even their name, and their
reputation may have been known by
many. The fact that the corpus comprises
very few such elaborate things can only
strengthen such an argument. It is there-
fore not difficult to see how the selection
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