Kerbing Relations through Time: Reuse, Connectivity and Folded Time in the Viking Age

Abstract

The paper explores a group of graves in which the past was used actively in Viking Age eastern Norway. Studying the use of the past in the past was introduced in British landscape archaeology of the 1990s, but a reassessment and a renewed relevance of the theme may now be observed due to the rise of materiality studies and the affective turn within archaeology. Through an investigation of the apparently insignificant kerbstones on a number of Viking Age burial mounds in Eastern Norway, and their links to specific Roman period mounds and graves, the paper explores how time and the past were perceived in the Viking Age. This further opens potential for examining connections between the use of the past and identities and self-perceptions in a Viking Age society. The analysis also includes a movement away from understanding reuse merely as a means of power. The overall ambition is to demonstrate the relevance of studies of the past in the past in archaeology today.