THE NATURAL CHOICE - RECONSIDERING THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO NATURAL PRODUCTS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-02-07

In the interpretation of the traces of funerary practices, the primary concern was traditionally not placed upon the sustained engagement with the entire materiality visible to us, but rather upon the selection of the material categories that are suitable for establishing the stylistic chronologies, construction of narratives, and exhibiting in museums. A good example of this selective removal from the narrative about Viking Age burials are the so called natural products (Swe. naturalier) often found deposited among the cremains in Viking Age burial urns: pebbles, hazelnuts, fossils, cultivated and wild seeds and other plant remains, avian eggshells, minerals, etc. The focus on grave goods of high quality and on stylistically specific artefacts can be inverted to ask how is it that various forms of matter from the same context have different appeals and become treated differently during excavation, analysis, interpretation, storage, and exhibitions. Is this issue of hierarchizing material based upon the scientific potential of things and the production of knowledge about Viking Age funerary practices or is it established and normalized during the history of the archaeological discipline and in the way the modern science classifies reality? The aim of this article is to bring into sharper relief the importance of natural products in Viking Age cremation rituals. Rather than emanating from the traditional rhetoric within the field of Viking Age studies, where these objects were seen as mundane and of low priority, this paper takes its cues from the wider debate on materiality within the social sciences and in philosophical phenomenology, respectively, and thus pushes funerary archaeology into fuller engagement with material remains of post-cremation practices.


Author(s): Jelicic, Anna (Stockholms University)