Current debates on the ontology of objects and matter have reinvigorated archaeological theoretical discourse and opened a multitude of perspectives on understanding the past, perspectives which have only just begun to be explored in scholarship on Late Iron Age Scandinavia. This article is a critical discussion of the sporadic tradition of covering longhouses and halls with burial mounds in the Iron and Viking ages. After having stood as social markers in the landscape for decades or even centuries, some dwellings were transformed into mortuary monuments — material and mnemonic spaces of the dead. Yet, was it the house or a deceased individual that was being interred and memorialized? Through an exploration of buildings that have been overlain by burial mounds, and by drawing on theoretical debates about social biographies and the material turn, this article illuminates mortuary citations between houses and bodies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Ultimately, I question the assumed anthropocentricity of the practice of burying houses. Rather, I suggest that the house was interwoven with the essence of the household and that the transformation of the building was a mortuary citation not necessarily of an individual, but of the entire, entangled social meshwork of the house.

In 2010, the largest find of exquisite gilded silver brooches ever made in Scandinavia came to light during a metal detector survey in a small fort on Öland in the Baltic Sea. It consisted of five hoards buried in five different houses within the fort. The brooches were of the Dreiknopfbügelfbeln/radiate-headed and relief types. Three of the hoards also contained large quantities of beads and pendants, some quite exclusive and rare. In addition, the upper part of another relief brooch probably belonged to a sixth hoard ploughed up in the late nineteenth century. In 2011, Kalmar County Museum excavations at the site of these hoard finds also revealed the traces of a massacre. Though a connection between the deposition of the hoards and the massacre is plausible, several elements suggest that the deposits are ritual in character and unrelated to the attack on the fort. The regular placing of the hoards in the right corner inside the entrance of the houses suggests ritual acts, and the composition of the hoards demonstrates that the deposits are symbolic. We conclude that the hoards and the brooches are props belonging to the interior of the forts and to activities conducted inside them; they may have been worn by some women during rituals. Why these hoards were left in the Sandby fort is, however, no doubt related to its destruction.

As an academic discipline, archaeology is deeply rooted in the cultural, social, and political practices of Western Europe of the nineteenth century. The emergence of local scholarly communities in other parts of the continent tends to be described as a process that saw the even spread of ideas and concepts in their original form. This further implies a uniform, unilinear sequence of paradigms (culture-historical, processual, postprocessual), each with their own internal logic. However, more often than not, these transfers of disciplinary knowledge from one academic community to the other have introduced distortions of the original concepts, designed to meet the demands of the different cultural and intellectual traditions and research agendas. In this article, we explore the foundation of academic archaeology in Serbia and of the pivotal figure in this process – Miloje M. Vasić, educated at German universities and considered to be the first academically trained archaeologist in the country. His adaptations of the German tradition of Classical scholarship applied to the study of the Balkan past have marked the theory and practice of archaeology in the country up to the present. This example indicates that we should seek to explore the ways in which the concepts we apply in our study of the past are articulated in particular local settings if we are to achieve a better understanding among various academic and professional communities of archaeologists across Europe.

Sami are indigenous people of Northern Fennoscandia. Some Sami offering sites have been used for over a thousand years. During this time, the offering traditions have changed and various people have started using the places based on different motivations. Present day archaeological finds give evidence of both continuing traditions and new meanings attached to these sites, as well as to sites that were probably not originally used for rituals in the Sami ethnic religion. In some cases, the authenticity of the place seems to lie in the stories and current beliefs more than in a historical continuity or any specifically sacred aspects of the topography or nature it is situated in. Today's new users include, for example, local (Sami) people, tourists, and neo-pagans. This paper discusses what informs these users, what identifies certain locations as offering sites, and what current users believe their relationship to these places should be. What roles do scholarly traditions, heritage tourism, and internal culture have in (re)defining Sami offering sites and similarly what roles do ‘appropriate’ rituals have in ascribing meaning to particular places? How do we mediate wishes for multivocality with our professional opinions when it comes to defining sacredness?

Reproduction of archaeological material was a significant and serious enterprise for antiquarians and museums in the long nineteenth century. Replicas embed many stories and embody considerable past human energy. Behind their creation, circulation, use, and after-life lies a series of specific social networks and relationships that determined why, when, and in what circumstances they were valued, or not. Summarising the context of their production, circulation, and changing fortunes, this article introduces the ways in which replicas are important, and considers the specific benefits and aspects of a biographical approach to their study. Beyond the evidential, the study of existing replicas provides a historical and contemporary laboratory in which to explore the concepts of value and authenticity, and their application in cultural heritage and collections management, offering us a richer insight into the history of ourselves as archaeologists and curators.

This article explores a meshwork of citations to other material cultures and architectures created by the form and ornament of house-shaped early medieval recumbent stone monuments popularly known in Britain as ‘hogbacks’. In addition to citing the form and ornament of contemporary buildings, shrines, and tombs, this article suggests recumbent mortuary monuments referenced a far broader range of contemporary portable artefacts and architectures. The approach takes attention away from identifying any single source of origin for hogbacks. Instead, considering multi-scalar and multi-media references within the form and ornament of different carved stones provides the basis for revisiting their inherent variability and their commemorative efficacy by creating the sense of an inhabited mortuary space in which the dead are in dialogue with the living. By alluding to an entangled material world spanning Norse and Insular, ecclesiastical and secular spheres, hogbacks were versatile technologies of mortuary remembrance in the Viking Age.

In the nineteenth century, the continuous discharge of sewage from millions of Londoners into the River Thames caused a notorious, unbearable stench during the summer, which reached a climax in 1858 and became known as The Great Stink. In this article it is argued that such a ‘Great Stink’ also occurred in the booming and heavily populated pre-industrial town of Leiden, because cesspits were being replaced by sewers draining directly into canals. Flawed as cesspits may have been, the new, hygienic sewer infrastructure meant the advent of unsanitary conditions normally only associated with the era of the Industrial Revolution. How and why the cesspit was killed off is explained by comparing Leiden with the seventeenth-century boom town of Haarlem, where cesspits remarkably survived the ‘Golden Age’ of the seventeenth century. Using the stakeholder model it becomes clear that the shift in hygienic infrastructure was not the outcome of a single stakeholder calling the shots but was the result of interactions between tenants, housing developers, local government, and textile entrepreneurs (in the case of Leiden), or brewers (in Haarlem).

This article examines the location and context of archaeological investigations in England between 1938 and 1945. The analysis of sources, including national inventories and contemporary journals, dispels any notion that archaeological practice was suspended during World War II, despite the absence of some leading practitioners, and reveals that a surprising amount of salvage and research fieldwork took place. Fieldwork was primarily in the south of the country; it reflects pre-war investigative trends, contemporary knowledge, opinion of the archaeological resource, and the increased threat of war-related construction work, but also the impact of immediate post-war concerns such as housing and infrastructure. Although primarily undertaken by established excavators employed by the Ministry of Works, a substantial amount of rescue work was carried out by small groups, local societies, and individuals often outside State funding, which reflects an independent culture of fieldwork that continues to the present day.

This themed journal issue provides many examples of ways forward in the study of death and memory in the Viking world. While all contributions demonstrate that there are exciting new ways to study remains from funerary contexts that focus on different forms of citation involving material culture and monuments, this article will very briefly discuss dimensions that have not been addressed here. Specifically, it showcases how the mortuary citations approach can also use post-humanist theory for further development and exploration of mortuary practices in the Viking world. Although short, this article discusses rune stones, particularly rune stones with kuml inscriptions, which I have examined elsewhere. The term kuml appears on contemporary rune stones; it refers to different material entities such as rune stones, mounds/cairns, and other standing stones. The being and becoming of kuml is briefly discussed through the concepts of intra-action and agential cuts championed by Karen Barad.

Postmedieval protestant missionaries working in exotic locations used objects both as a marker of their own ‘civilisation’ in contrast to that of the local populations and as a means of engaging these communities with Christianity. European things were displayed and conspicuously used to encourage a consumer mindset and interest in capitalism, thought to be crucial steps on the path to full conversion. Excavations at a Presbyterian mission house on Tanna Island, Vanuatu, recovered a remarkable assemblage of nineteenth-century British-made transfer-printed ceramics for such a remote location. These objects reflect multiple, complex meanings including performance of a ‘civilised’ British identity, romanticized ideals of pastoral landscapes, and conceptions of death and rebirth in the afterlife. These meanings were complicated by the context of cross-cultural interactions that were necessary to the missionary project.