A long-term project to map and catalog all precontact Native American burial mounds in Iowa provides information about the number, location, form, survivorship, and rate of loss of mounds. This analysis reveals previously undocumented mound manifestations, including a large cluster of 200 linear mounds along the central Des Moines River valley. Historical records reveal that at least 7,762 mounds were identified at 1,551 sites in Iowa between 1840 and the present. About 47% of the mounds from these sites can be possibly seen in lidar, with 33% of the total clearly seen in lidar. Data show that mound loss over time is linear. Extrapolation of data suggests that at least 15,000–17,000 mounds stood in Iowa in the nineteenth century, but the actual number was likely higher.

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.

Viking Age burial mounds are usually interpreted with reference to their exterior dimensions, the funerary treatment of the deceased and the artefacts placed within them. The process of constructing these mounds, however, may also have played an important role in funerary traditions. Investigations at the Gokstad mound in Norway demonstrate that the building of this mound—in terms of its phases and material expressions—formed an integral part of the overall burial rite. The complex construction sequence contained references to both the physical and mythical landscapes, revealing the potential of the study of burial mound construction at other sites in Viking Age Scandinavia and beyond.

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.

Tombs and cairns present a dating challenge when the human remains are unstratified, incomplete and dispersed. By considering the distribution of time intervals between deaths as a possible a priori condition of multiple burials of select groups, a Bayesian model is suggested that may constrain the uncertainty date range of the group. The method may also address the wide uncertainties seen in radiocarbon calibration on a calibration curve plateau. The mathematical justification for the choice of Log Normal intervals, between death events, is first presented, followed by worked examples that compare the treatment of groups of 22 dates using Phase then Sequence with interval gaps. Finally, scenarios of potential Select Groups are examined, to demonstrate the efficacy of this alternative heuristic model to current model treatments.

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.

This paper details a new approach to the study of the Scythian burial mounds—the ‘planigraphy’ (or spatial analysis) of the mound and its burials, which follows two lines of enquiry that have so far been largely overlooked. Firstly, the statistics concerning the depth of all types of graves, such as primary and secondary burials, servants’ and horse graves, have been closely examined and compared because this parameter is an important mark of the social status and hierarchy of the deceased and their burials in Scythian funeral ceremonies. Secondly, grave locations within the mounds have been analysed with regard to their arrangement in relation to the ideal latitudinal and meridian axis of the Scythian mound. This analysis has led to the discovery of new facts concerning the planigraphy of the Scythian burial mound, which contribute to a more detailed understanding of the spatial representation of kinship and family hierarchy in Scythian society. The new evidence also sheds light on their system of geographical orientation in terms of cardinal points.

The author describes a process of systematic integration of aerial and satellite imagery, which has provided a huge increase in the number of known burial mounds in the area where the Danube meets the Black Sea. Careful evaluation of newly acquired and archival imagery from satellites and lower level platforms shows where data is comparable and how visibility varies with imagery type. Excavations to date suggest the majority of the mounds are of Greco-Roman date and associated with the large towns and their road networks. Clusters of barrows exist, hinting at associated settlement aggregation, but a large proportion are single tumuli, raising interesting questions about their social role in this period. Above all, the large numbers revealed by the survey must invite new thoughts on whether, or in what way, the mounds reflect social ranking.

What happened at the sites of prehistoric burial mounds after they were erected? In the southern highlands of Brazil and Argentina the pre-Hispanic mounds of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries AD are surrounded by large circular enclosures with avenues leading to their centre. The authors discovered that the banks of the surrounding enclosure were built up over several generations of time, accompanied by a succession of ovens. Ethnohistoric observations of more recent peoples in the same region suggested an explanation: the cremation of a chief was followed by periodic feasts at his mound, where meat was steamed and maize beer prepared at the edge of the gathering.

The Minusinsk Basin is located where China, Mongolia, Siberia and Kazakhstan meet. Enclosed, but broad, and rich in copper and other minerals, the valley offers missing links between the prehistory of China and that of the greater Russian steppes. In the late Bronze Age the material from Minusinsk was important for the origins of bronze metallurgy in China, and in the Iron Age the area was a focus for the development of that equestrian mobility which was to become the elite way of life for much of the Eurasian steppe for more than a millennium.

We are privileged to publish the following two papers deriving from research at the Institute for the History of Material Culture at Saint Petersburg, which give us the story so far on the archaeology of this remarkable place. In The emergence of the Karasuk culture Sophie Legrand discusses the people who occupied the Minusinsk Basin in the Bronze Age, and in The emergence of the Tagar culture, Nikolai Bokovenko introduces us to their successors, the horsemen and barrow-builders of the first millennium BCE.

A new study of the group of kurgans (burial mounds) which stands near Orenburg at the south end of the Ural mountains has revealed a sequence that began in the early Bronze Age and continued intermittently until the era of the Golden Horde in the Middle Ages. The application of modern techniques of cultural and environmental investigation has thrown new light on the different circumstances and contexts in which mound burial was practised, and confirmed the association between investment in burial and nomadism.