Missing Bodies and Cat Skeletons: New Perspectives on Ritual in Viking Age Iceland

Summary

The research that has dominated Icelandic burial practices has until very recently been quite narrow. Burials were excavated to extract the skeleton and artifacts within the grave cut itself, leading to a central theory that Icelandic burials are poor in ritual and culture. Recent excavation and theories, however, have led to open area excavations of pagan cemeteries, which reveal much more complicated ritual. Snorri Sturlusson, the author of the famous Icelandic Sagas and Eddas, might give us some clues as to what these newly discovered rituals might have been. How much did Snorri know about his ancestors and what does that mean for Viking Age Icelandic identity?

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Resilience, Sustainability and Collapse in the North Atlantic

Keywords

Spatial Coverage