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?

The perception of and interaction with ancient relics in past societies has been intensively debated in the archaeology of north-western Europe. This paper aims to make a contribution to this debate by reconstructing the long-term history of late prehistoric barrows and urnfields in Flanders (Belgium). The period between the Late Bronze Age and High Middle Ages (c. 1100 cal bc–ad 1300) is centred on. Contrary to Germany, Scandinavia and especially Britain, data from the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) have so far barely played a role in wider international and theoretical discussions on the role of the past in the past. Previous studies on reuse practices in the Low Countries mainly focused on the Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region of the southern Netherlands and north-eastern Belgium, which partly overlaps Flanders. These studies are combined and summarised. Their main outcomes are tested by means of a detailed inventory of reused late prehistoric cemeteries in Flanders. This study differs methodologically from most others in that it both offers an evidence-based overview of regional diachronic trends (documented at 62 barrow cemeteries and 13 urnfields) and discusses the developments at six sites yielding high resolution data. The observed reuse practices and site biographies appear to be remarkably dynamic and more diverse than previously suggested.