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 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.

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.