Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Side 53

LANDSCAPES OF BURIAL: CONTRASTING THE PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN
PARADIGMS OF BURIAL IN VIKING AGE AND MEDIEVAL ICELAND
as the funerary features themselves.
Broadly the study of burial location
tends to emphasize the association of
burials with settlements on the one hand
and the type of landscape setting
considered suitable for locating burials on
the other. One is the precondition for
demographic reconstructions based on
burial data while the other may underpin
hypotheses about power, ideology and
belief systems. The two aspects cannot be
studied in isolation however: an
understanding of the types of landscape
settings considered suitable for burials is
essential if a comprehensive view of their
distribution and association with
settlements is to be constructed while the
landscape settings cannot be identified or
understood without reference to
settlement pattems. It is necessary
therefore to proceed in such a manner that
neither aspect gets sidelined even if the
nature of the available evidence and / or
the research interests may favour one over
the other. This is particularly important
when approaching the subject from a
macro-analytical point of view as we will
be doing in this paper. The problem we
propose to address is that of the numerical
development of cemeteries in Iceland
ffom the beginning of settlement in the
late 9th century to the high-middle ages.
An explicit theory about the number and
distribution of cemeteries in a given
period and in a given landscape is not only
useful to provide context and meaning to
hypotheses derived from available burial
data but it can also form the basis of
higher-level analyses of changes in social
stmcture and religious belief. In particular
we are interested in understanding better
the changes in burial practice associated
with the conversion to Christianity which
took place in the late lOth and early llth
century. The traditional grouping of
burials into Christian and pagan or
pre-Christian has created an unhelpfi.il
dichotomy, where each group tends to be
discussed without reference to the other.
For one thing the dichotomous view
leaves out a very large number of burials,
those that cannot with confidence be
ascribed to either categoiy. In our research
project, Death and burial in Iceland for
1150years, we aim to address this deficit
by investigating this hitherto neglected
in-between group of burials alongside the
others. This also reflects our view that
while there defmitely were quite different
pagan and Christian paradigms of burial
practice, both in terms of grave furnishing
and location, - which can be fruitfully
contrasted and analysed - these mask
fundamental issues and developments
which can be more profitably examined
through an analysis of the totality of
available burial data. Burial is not just a
reflection of religion but also pattems of
behaviour, social stmcture and ideology
un- or tangentally related to religion. It has
a practical aspect (getting rid of corpses
before they begin to rot), involves issues
of land-ownership and land-use (who
owns the land where the cemetery is and
what is it used for), status and social
relations (who gets to be interred in the
cemetery; is the same cemetery used by all
from the same community or not) and
may reflect attitudes to belonging as well
as symbolic expressions of identity and
domination. It is these issues our project
aims to throw light on through a
comprehensive study of the Icelandic
burial evidence. That however does not
mean that the pagan and Christian
categories can be neglected. Practically all
existing knowledge about Icelandic burial
evidence is bound up with these
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