This article discusses the construction details of the mounds erected over large Viking ship burials in Norway and shows that they form an integral part of mortuary practice. Moreover, elements of the construction that are potentially unique to this type of monument are repeated, suggesting a knowledge of the properties of materials and their inter-relationships within the mounds. Here, referencing between and within the mounds is considered alongside the connections these soils, sediments, and other earth-sourced materials contained in relation to the cultural landscape. The selection of such materials and the location of the burials in the landscape were fundamental to the creation of a performative scene for the burial rites, and for establishing a desired, interlinked, social memory.

The well-known Zvejnieki cemetery, with 330 burials, is one of the largest hunter-gatherer cemeteries in northern Europe, overshadowing the more than 115 other Stone Age burials from over ten sites in Latvia. This article is a first overview of these other burials, summarizing their research history, characteristics, and assemblages. The authors discuss the problematic chronology of Latvian Stone Age burials and place them in a wider regional context. Most of the burials are hunter-gatherer burials, and a few are Corded Ware graves. This overview broadens our understanding of Latvian Stone Age burials and brings to light the diversity of hunter-fisher-gatherer mortuary practices in the eastern Baltic region.

The ephemeral nature of religious practices and rituals makes them challenging to trace in the archaeological record of Late Neolithic hunter-gatherer communities in central and eastern Europe. A ritual feature with Bell Beaker elements discovered in north-eastern Poland, a region occupied by hunter-gatherer groups of the Neman cultural circle, is thus exceptional. Its syncretic character indicates its role as a harbinger of wider cultural change that led to the emergence in this region of the western group of the Bronze Age Trzciniec cultural circle.

This article examines the development, handling, and depositions of disc-on-bow brooches from the sixth to tenth centuries ad in the Vendel and Viking periods in Norway and mainland Sweden. A revised typological framework is presented, and the context of these brooches explored. The authors discuss their preservation, re-use, fragmentation, and ritual meaning within ongoing social negotiations and internal conflicts from the late Vendel period into the Viking Age. References to the past in Viking-Age society and the significance of women for maintaining narratives of the past are considered, as are levels of access, control, and definition of narratives of the past in times of social redefinition.

The end of the villa landscape in the north-western Roman provinces is characterized by significant transformation. One facet is the use of the villa complex and its surrounding area for funerary purposes. Traditionally, these burials have been divided into large-scale reuse of sites in the Migration period and small-scale transitional burials. The study of the latter has previously often been misguided or neglected. In this article, the author examines these transitional burials, addresses their historical background, and presents a new approach for assessing the scale, temporal distribution, and characteristics of a group of sites with funerary evidence in Belgica, Britannia, and the Germanic provinces.

Isotope ratios of tooth enamel from ten Early Neolithic individuals buried in a long cairn at Whitwell in central England were measured to determine where they sourced their childhood diet. Five individuals have low Sr concentrations (11–66 ppm) and high 87Sr/86Sr ratios (0.7164–0.7212). Three individuals have relatively low 87Sr/86Sr ratios (0.712–0.711) and Sr concentrations ranging between 54 and 109 ppm. Two individuals have strontium isotope values that bridge the gap between the isotope compositions of these two groups. The high 87Sr/86Sr values are rare in human enamel and exclude sources within the biosphere of central England. Oxygen isotope values are comparable to those found within human archaeological populations buried in temperate regions of Europe. The strontium isotope results should be interpreted in the context of other evidence for migration from northern France to Britain during the Early Neolithic.

In much of Europe, the advent of low-input cereal farming regimes between c.ad 800 and 1200 enabled landowners—lords—to amass wealth by greatly expanding the amount of land under cultivation and exploiting the labour of others. Scientific analysis of plant remains and animal bones from archaeological contexts is generating the first direct evidence for the development of such low-input regimes. This article outlines the methods used by the FeedSax project to resolve key questions regarding the ‘cerealization’ of the medieval countryside and presents preliminary results using the town of Stafford as a worked example. These indicate an increase in the scale of cultivation in the Mid-Saxon period, while the Late Saxon period saw a shift to a low-input cultivation regime and probably an expansion onto heavier soils. Crop rotation appears to have been practised from at least the mid-tenth century.

Among the most prominent prehistoric features in the boreal forests of northern Sweden are trapping pits or pitfalls used for hunting elk and/or reindeer. Even if often ascribed to the Viking Age and its trade in furs and other animal products, the chronology of these features has long been a matter of debate. In this article, a database of 370 dated radiocarbon samples from excavated pitfalls has been compiled and analysed using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) modelling to create the most elaborate chronology of Swedish trapping pit systems so far. The analysis shows that the most intensive period of construction of trapping pits was in the centuries before the Viking period. This challenges previous interpretations of Viking Age resource exploitation but is in line with several other recently published studies concerned with resource exploitation, non-agrarian production, and trade connecting northern Scandinavia with inter-regional trade networks.

In the last few decades, the discovery of large ditched enclosures in Iberia has revealed the diversity and complexity of deposition and manipulation of human bone remains. Alongside traditional ritual burials (mainly megalithic tombs and hypogea), fragmented and scattered human bones mixed with other kinds of material culture began to appear in many features. This is the case for Ditch 5 at Marroquíes, which offers an excellent opportunity to explore this ritual behaviour. Based on a multi-proxy approach, three main conclusions can be drawn: 1) the skeletal elements present show deliberate selection of particular categories of bones; 2) depositional episodes included the remains of people who died at different points in time and were subject to different taphonomic processes, and 3) mobility patterns indicate that all individuals, with one possible exception, were local. The movement and manipulations of body parts may reflect the active role of people after death as social and symbolic elements that retain agency and capacity for action.

Between the sixth and eighth centuries ad, the practice of furnished burial was widely abandoned in favour of a much more standardized, unfurnished rite. This article examines that transition by considering the personhood and agency of the corpse, the different ways bonds of possession can form between people and objects, and what happens to those bonds at death. By analysing changing grave good use across western Europe, combined with an in-depth analysis of the Alamannic cemetery of Pleidelsheim, and historical evidence for perceptions of the corpse, the author argues that the change in grave good use marks a fundamental change in the perception of corpses.

The point of departure for this article is the excavation of two burial mounds and a trackway system in Bamble, Telemark, Norway. One of the mounds overlay ard marks, which led to speculation as to whether the site was ritually ploughed or whether it contained the remains of an old field system. Analysis of the archaeometric data indicated that the first mound was related to a field system, while the second was constructed 500–600 years later. The first mound was probably built to demonstrate the presence of a kin and its social norms, while these norms were renegotiated when the second mound was raised in the Viking Age. This article emphasizes that the ritual and profane aspects were closely related: mound building can be a ritualized practice intended to legitimize ownership and status by the reuse of domestic sites in the landscape. Further examples from Scandinavia indicate that this is a common, but somewhat overlooked, practice.

The Late Glacial, that is the period from the first pronounced warming after the Last Glacial Maximum to the beginning of the Holocene (c. 16,000–11,700 cal bp), is traditionally viewed as a time when northern Europe was being recolonized and Late Palaeolithic cultures diversified. These cultures are characterized by particular artefact types, or the co-occurrence or specific relative frequencies of these. In north-eastern Europe, numerous cultures have been proposed on the basis of supposedly different tanged points. This practice of naming new cultural units based on these perceived differences has been repeatedly critiqued, but robust alternatives have rarely been offered. Here, we review the taxonomic landscape of Late Palaeolithic large tanged point cultures in eastern Europe as currently envisaged, which leads us to be cautious about the epistemological validity of many of the constituent groups. This, in turn, motivates us to investigate the key artefact class, the large tanged point, using geometric morphometric methods. Using these methods, we show that distinct groups are difficult to recognize, with major implications for our understanding of patterns and processes of culture change in this period in north-eastern Europe and perhaps elsewhere.

This article focuses on the maritime cultural landscape of the former Zuiderzee (ad 1170–1932) in the central part of the Netherlands. Since the large-scale reclamations from the sea (1932–1968), many remains have been discovered, revealing a submerged and eroded late medieval maritime culture, represented by lost islands, drowned settlements, cultivated lands, shipwrecks, and consequently socio-economic networks. Especially the north-eastern part of the region, known today as the Noordoostpolder, is testimony to the dynamic battles of the Dutch against the water. By examining physical and immaterial datasets from the region, it is possible to give a modern-day idea of this late medieval maritime cultural landscape. Spatial distribution and densities of late medieval archaeological remains are analysed and compared to historical data and remote sensing results. This interdisciplinary approach has led to the discovery of the remains of the drowned settlement of Fenehuysen.

This article presents a summary of new evidence for the Mesolithic in the Dinaric Alps of Montenegro. The region is one of the best areas in south-eastern Europe to study Early Holocene foragers and the nature of the transition to Neolithic lifeways at the end of the seventh and the beginning of the sixth millennium cal bc thanks to the existence of biodiverse landscapes and numerous karstic features. We argue that harpoons found at two different sites in this regional context represent a curated technology that has its roots in a local Mesolithic cultural tradition. The continued use of this standardized hunting tool kit in the Neolithic provides an important indication about the character of the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. We also use this regional case study to address wider questions concerning the visibility and modes of Mesolithic occupation in south-eastern Europe as a whole.

In this article, I explore how digital data collection in the context of the Berkeley-Abiquiú Collaborative Archaeology (BACA) project works, some of the affordances of this new-ish technology, and how they articulate with analogue art practices to achieve the goals of engaged research. Thinking with affordances helps me reflect critically on what digital data recording offers our research goals. In this case, the most important aspect of using digital data recording is how it changes our relationship to time. New orientations of research time created by such technology is an opportunity to engage creatively with how archaeology can represent complexity, produce embodied experience, and share senses of place through both digital and analogue practices. As archaeologists trying to think trans-humanistically, we need to reflect critically on digital technologies to produce engaged research. This is always a shifting target. New uses reveal new possibilities, and vice versa. But newness is not what makes an impact, a difference, or changes the way we do research together; what makes a difference is the result, effects, and affects of these affordances.

This article discusses the chronology and nature of the earliest Viking activity, based on a group of early burials from Norway containing Insular metalwork. By focusing on the geographical distribution of this material and applying the concept of locational and social knowledge, the importance of establishing cognitive landscapes to facilitate the Viking expansion is highlighted. It is argued that the first recorded Viking attacks were only possible after a phase in which Norse seafarers had acquired the necessarily level of a priori environmental knowledge needed to move in new seascapes and coastal environments. This interaction model opens the possibility that some of the early Insular finds from Norway may represent pre-Lindisfarne exploration voyages, carried out by seafarers along the sailing route of Nordvegr.

In this article I address the relationship between European archaeologists and the European Union and argue that the dominant attitude of non-involvement that archaeologists have embraced over the past decades cannot be justified given recent political developments. The European project finds itself in a state of deep crisis, under siege from populist and far-right leaders within and around Europe. We cannot afford to watch from the sidelines when the future of hundreds of millions of people is at stake. As archaeologists we can make a positive contribution by harnessing the political dimension of our work, which we need to stop seeing in a negative light. We should deploy the past to help tackle the challenges of our society. European archaeologists should particularly focus on developing grand narratives of a shared past in Europe, to act as a foundation for a European identity.

During excavations of the Iron Age ringfort of Sandby borg (ad 400–550), the remains of twenty-six unburied bodies were encountered inside and outside the buildings. The skeletons and the archaeological record indicate that after the individuals had died the ringfort was deserted. An osteological investigation and trauma analysis were conducted according to standard anthropological protocols. The osteological analysis identified only men, but individuals of all ages were represented. Eight individuals (31 per cent) showed evidence of perimortem trauma that was sharp, blunt, and penetrating, consistent with interpersonal violence. The location of the bodies and the trauma pattern appear to indicate a massacre rather than a battle. The ‘efficient trauma’ distribution (i.e. minimal but effective violence), the fact that the bodies were not manipulated, combined with the archaeological context, suggest that the perpetrators were numerous and that the assault was carried out effectively. The contemporary sociopolitical situation was seemingly turbulent and the suggested motive behind the massacre was to gain power and control.

Discussions of pre-Viking trade and production have for many decades focused on products made of precious metals, glass and, to some degree, iron. This is hardly surprising considering the difficulties in finding and provenancing products made of organic matter. In this article we examine gaming pieces made from bone and antler, which are not unusual in Scandinavian burials in the Vendel and Viking period (c. ad 550–1050). A special emphasis is placed on whalebone pieces that appear to dominate after around ad 550, signalling a large-scale production and exploitation of North Atlantic whale products. In combination with other goods such as bear furs, birds of prey, and an increased iron and tar production, whalebone products are part of an intensified large-scale outland exploitation and indicate strong, pre-urban trading routes across Scandinavia and Europe some 200 years before the Viking period and well before the age of the emporia.