Human Interment and Making Memory in Viking Age Iceland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over 300 Viking Age (AD 871–1000) human interments are known from Iceland, many with accompanying dogs and horses. Though these interments are similar to those of elites in Scandinavia, inhumation burial in Iceland apparently served a different purpose — to demarcate boundaries in a landscape devoid of hoards, mounds, and other markers of ancestral habitation. Without an existing sacred geography or the possibility of large-scale cremation or ship burial, early colonists adapted Scandinavian funerary rituals to the socio-political and environmental landscapes of Iceland, inscribing land claims and creating memory in spaces devoid of a mythic past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24787