The Past and Present Social Role of Viking Age Mounds

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Jellhaug, Norway, is Scandinavia’s second largest prehistoric mound. Dating from the (pre)Viking period, it has a long history of human interaction and interpretation. Built in phases with distinct, selected, and transformed earthly materials, the mound compares with contemporary mounds in that both the material selection from the familiar environment, the building experience, and the result, cemented communities. However, in the present, the Viking period is highly politicized, burdened with stereotypes, and perceived as the catalyst to modern state formation. Therefore, despite evidence to the contrary, the underlying assumption that they shared our singular view of the world persists, with the result that we project modern values onto sites such as Jellhaug. In the nineteenth century, due to Jellhaug’s lack of conformity on the outside, the mound was dismissed, before tales of possible Viking ships were attached to it to form individual, local, and regional senses of identity. The final act was to make Jellhaug conform on the outside, by using a bulldozer, reshaping it into the idealized “Viking mound.” This biography offers a reflection of how earth-made heritage is viewed, valued, and interacted with by different actors over time and space, from communal memory to modern ideals and political identities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36206.0