Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 64

ADOLF FRIÐRIKSSON AND ORRI VÉSTEINSSON
with, and caused by, the change in religion
of their users. It is entirely possible that
the trend towards fewer cemeteries had
started already in the pagan period and
that many of the very small cemeteries
observed were abandoned not because of
a change in religion but because of other
developments. These developments, we
suggest, related to the interconnected
issues of a gradually increasing sense of
security and belonging in a new country
and of a gradual forging of community
ties, involving both interdependencies and
hierarchical relations. We suspect that the
pattems we have observed in the burial
data have as much to do with these sorts of
issues as with the change of religion
although the conversion no doubt sped up,
or, if the reduction in cemetery numbers
had not begun, facilitated a change for
which there was already fertile ground.
Secondly the essential difference
between the pagan and Christian burial
paradigms is that the former reflects
liminality and the other centrality. Both
can be seen as aspects of the same
conceptualisation of landscape. In the
pagan burial paradigm burials are located
on borders of various types, property
boundaries as well as more subjective
limits both within farms as well as beyond
inhabited areas (as evidenced by highland
burials such as Öxnadalsheiði and
Hólaskógur - Eldjám 2000, 83-85,
140-41), in addition to routes. Potential
burial locations can accordingly be
described as a grid, where the significance
of each actual cemetery is not its
association with the farm (as we
habitually assume) but rather its location
on the grid. The poor fit between rich
burials and high status farms (Eldjám
2000, 303-304) may indicate that the
association of an individual buried in a
pagan grave to the farm which the
cemetery is nearest to may not necessarily
be that of habitation. Once an ideological
change dictated that cemeteries should not
be located on borders but rather that they
needed to be directly associated with what
were perceived as centres of settlement it
is revealed that many of the small farms
which had had their own pagan cemeteries
were in fact considered to be satellites.
The import of the ideological change is of
course key here. We suspect it involves a
shift away from exclusion and
marginalisation of the dead from the
world of the living to their inclusion,
almost an appropriation, into the world of
the living.
These are admittedly tentative ideas
that will need more elaboration and
factual support to take flight. We present
them here as challenge to ourselves to
improve on and for others to refute.
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