Norwegian Archaeological Review最新文献

{"title":"Residence, Ritual and Rulership: A State-of-the-Art for Royal Places in Early Medieval Ireland","authors":"P. Gleeson","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2021.1941233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2021.1941233","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the nature of royal residences in early medieval Ireland. Through the excavated evidence, it examines key themes of long-term dynamics, architectures and networks of power. It presents a synthesis of excavated evidence for often overlooked residential elements to provincial capitals, and subsequently, interrogates the development of several key royal sites regarded as archetypal residences. It argues that there are important distinctions between the earlier and later phases of many such sites that relate to their role in diverse strategies of rulership. In particular, ritual, ceremony and violence are key early characteristics, whereas a residential element often only appears relatively late. While these changes may be related to wider realpolitik, it is suggested that they also embody the crystallization of residential foci within new strategies of rulership during the seventh to ninth centuries AD.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47784465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Medieval Rulership and Assembly: Thoughts on ‘Practice, Power and Place’ and ‘Residence, Ritual and Rulership’","authors":"A. Sanmark","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2021.1955408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2021.1955408","url":null,"abstract":"The two articles under discussion contain new and important considerations of the enacting of rulership in the Early Middle Ages. Both papers, although firmly based on detailed archaeological discussions of specific sites in southern Britain and Ireland respectively, make use of comparisons with other geographical areas, such as Scandinavia. Patrick Gleeson’s request that such comparative work should include both ‘Germanic and Celtic’ areas may seem obvious, but it is the case that Ireland as well as Scotland are frequently left out of discussions focusing on north-west Europe. A similar case was indeed made recently by authors in the volume Scotland in Early Medieval Europe (Blackwell 2019). By examining evidence from wider geographical areas, we have the potential to create overarching and conceptual discussions that in turn generate new pathways of thinking. In this piece, I intend to build on this approach and offer commentary from a Scandinavian point of view on the links between rulership, royal estates, and assembly sites, which are some of the main themes emerging from the two papers. Gabor Thomas and Chris Scull draw parallels between the great hall complexes of southern Britain and the central place complexes of Scandinavia, both of which are seen to have been multipurpose, with assembly as one of the functions (cf. Brink 1996, p. 238). Gleeson, on the other hand, examines the links between Irish royal residences and outdoor assemblies and inauguration sites. In order to take the discussion further, it is important to consider what types of assembly are envisaged in the two articles. In this context there are two main types that need to be distinguished as they differed in terms of ritual, performance, and space; the public assembly (i.e. the Scandinavian thing, Old Norse þing) and the royal assembly (‘the council’, Old Norse ráð, Anglo-Saxon witan). In modern terms, the public assembly has been compared to parliaments and courts while the councils have been likened to ‘pre-meetings’ before the full parliamentary debates (Norr and Sanmark 2008, pp. 379–381). The thing, also referred to as the ‘open assembly’, was elite led and participation was above all limited to landowners, although the overriding principle was that everyone was welcome, perhaps even encouraged, to attend. Thing meetings were held at outdoor assembly sites, many of which have been identified across Scandinavia (Norr and Sanmark 2008, pp. 379–381, Semple et al. 2020, chs. 4, 5 and 8). A major reason why meetings were held outdoors was the ‘concept of public knowledge’, seen as the ‘foundation of early Scandinavian law’ (Stein-Wilkeshuis 1998, pp. 313–314). The existence of this concept","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48695731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Itinerancy, Ritualisation and Excavating Understanding","authors":"G. Noble","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2021.1955409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2021.1955409","url":null,"abstract":"The nature of the societies and social, ideological and political frameworks that filled the voids left by the demise of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD – both within and beyond the Empire’s boundaries – is one of the most pressing debates about lateand post-Roman Europe. One fundamental topic within that debate is the nature and character of ruler’s residences and the Gleeson, and the Thomas and Scull’s articles on early medieval royal residences in Ireland and southern Britain respectively, are welcome approaches to understanding the material manifestations of early medieval rulership. Comparative approach is the key, for there has been a tendency to assume a uni-linear socio-evolutionary model of political development, rather than considering the multiple pathways by which early European communities were transformed during this crucial period. In these two articles the authors set about using archaeology to challenge and build models for how kingship operated within particular siteand landscapebased case studies. Each paper brings about important new perspectives. Thomas and Scull’s study of great hall culture in southern Britain has at its heart detailed observations from welldocumented Anglo-Saxon power centres at Lyminge and Rendlesham. In particular the fine-grained analysis from well excavated and documented material sequences is particularly welcome as is the focus on skilled practitioners and the communities of practice that led to the quite astonishing feats of architectural expression at great hall complexes. Here, there can be little doubt about neither the importance of material expressions of rulership as a specific strategy of consolidating power bases, nor the importance of archaeology for understanding the socio-political and socio-economic basis of power. Similarly, Gleeson’s observations on the 9th–10thcentury phase of Knowth as a ‘very tangible expression of the practicalities of a system of royal taxation and governance based on render and tribute’ is a convincing example of how archaeology can help pin down the material underpinnings of how kingship operated in its specifics, and the very base levels of storage and surplus accumulation that allowed kings to rule. Reading through these two articles, two areas for further thought sprung to mind: the nature (and the presence) of itinerancy and the divides (or lack of) between residence and ritual.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49181098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rethinking Historical Time, New Approaches to Presentism","authors":"Marko M. Marila","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2021.1928743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2021.1928743","url":null,"abstract":"Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier have put together a truly inspiring collection of writings that, for a history dilettante like me, provided a lot of food for thought. Firstly, it is necessary to note that history, and perhaps more importantly historical research, is understood in the book as extremely multivalent. This lends the collection a transdisciplinary tone that is most evident in how welcoming the book was to an archaeologist. More importantly, I read the book as a philosopher of archaeology who was repeatedly reminded of the importance of the different combinations of archaeology, history, and philosophy to historical understanding. History today, as we are told, is not interested in any defining conceptualization of time, but in how to think time and history as consisting of multiple temporalities. Not only are there many pasts, presents, and futures, but also many ways to research them. This simple realization forms the backdrop and aim of the book: ‘to enter into a transdisciplinary dialogue with the contemporary conceptualisations of time’ (editors’ introduction, p. 3). This formulation is, however, somewhat misleading because the book takes issue with one particular contemporary and, dare I say, Eurocentric conceptualization of time: presentism. Presentism, in Chris Lorenz’s (Ch. 1) reading of François Hartog, one of the originators of the term, can mean two things. It is either 1) a term for our present, contemporary period, a block in time, or 2) a particular heuristic tool in the analysis of the relationship between the past, present, and future where the present nevertheless dominates. Whereas the former view is simply a reaffirmation of the modern conceptualization of history as causal, directional, and unilinear, and as such part of the problem rather than the solution, the second meaning is much more interesting and, as I see it, also the motivation behind many, if not all, of the chapters. The problem of presentism (and I say problem because, as also noted by Aleida Assmann in her conclusion to the book, there is an evident irritation with the anti-historicism of presentism running through the chapters) is operationalized in three movements. Part 1 is deeply rooted in the philosophy of history and as such charts some of the philosophical foundations of presentism. On the one hand, the roots of presentism stretch back to the time between the world wars, the Holocaust, and post-colonialism. These events form the impetus to the distrust in the future which, entwined with the disappointment with a history that we cannot leave behind, leads to presentism (Ch. 4, p. 73). While the causes for presentism can be understood via an analysis of postmodernism, it is also evident that the roots of presentism as an analytical concept extend to the Enlightenment. Special reference is made to Kant. If in biblical chronologies history was adapted to chronology, in Kant’s analysis, after the Enlightenment, chronology has had to adapt to history","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00293652.2021.1928743","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41639992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era","authors":"L. Khatchadourian","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2021.1891566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2021.1891566","url":null,"abstract":"Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal’s book is either a manifesto in the guise of a textbook, or a textbook in the guise of a manifesto. Like any good textbook, the book approximates a comprehensive compilation...","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00293652.2021.1891566","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48545665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Practice, Power and Place: Southern British Perspectives on the Agency of Early Medieval Rulers’ Residences","authors":"G. Thomas, C. Scull","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2021.1910337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2021.1910337","url":null,"abstract":"This paper advances understanding of rulership over the fifth to the ninth centuries AD, drawing upon a category of elite settlement from southern Britain known as the great hall complex. Guided by a practice-based conceptual framework, we connect these sites with the embodied regimens, rituals, habits, and activities through which rulership was constituted in the early medieval world. Harnessing recent expanded datasets, we generate insights in three key areas. First, by documenting the significant and sustained antecedent occupation attested at great hall sites, we reveal how rulers exploited the complex multiple pasts of these places to advance symbolic and worldly agendas. Second, we reframe understanding of hall construction as a strategy of elite legitimation by focusing attention on the agency of the skilled practitioners who created these innovative architectural statements and, in doing so, recognize these hitherto neglected specialists as ‘crafters’ of rulership. Third, we use proxies from recently investigated great hall complexes to reconstruct the networks of dependency and interaction which enmeshed these centres. A concluding comparative discussion of southern Britain and Scandinavia contributes shared perspectives on rulers’ residences as a prime arena for the orchestration and creative renewal of early medieval sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47724862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Indigenous Archaeology in a Settler-Colonist State: A View from the North American Southwest","authors":"Ruth M. Van Dyke","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2020.1778779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2020.1778779","url":null,"abstract":"Collaborative, open, participatory, community-based, public, and Indigenous archaeologies are frequently discussed collectively as a paradigm shift for the discipline. As these approaches mature, w...","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00293652.2020.1778779","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58823709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Quarry: Stories from Fragments","authors":"R. Ferraby","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2020.1830847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2020.1830847","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00293652.2020.1830847","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49109126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Creating a Sense of Belonging: Religion and Migration in the Context of the 3rd Millennium BC Corded Ware Complex in the Eastern and Northern Baltic Sea Region","authors":"Marja Ahola","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2020.1852305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2020.1852305","url":null,"abstract":"Although not often discussed in an archaeological context, religion plays an important role in human migrations by working as an anchor of collective identity and distinction among the migrants. By establishing permanent religious structures – such as burials – the newcomers can also use religion as a tool to indicate an enduring presence in their new homeland. Remarkably, such practices can also be seen among the groups connected with the Corded Ware complex that migrated and settled in the eastern and northern Baltic Sea region roughly 5000 years ago. According to the material remains of the mortuary practices associated with this complex, these people did not travel alone; they carried with them a novel religion. Defined in this paper as a ‘steppe-originated religion’, this belief system continued mortuary practices known from the Pontic Steppe, while also incorporating material and ritual elements from different regions over the course of time. Despite this syncretism, the core ideas of the religion nevertheless persisted. As these ideas seem to relate to the mixing of past and present generations, as well as the merging of homeland and new land, this religion could have provided much-needed aid and comfort for a people on the move.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00293652.2020.1852305","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46432095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Who’s Afraid of the S-word? Deviants’ Burials and Human Sacrifice","authors":"Matthew J. Walsh, Marianne Moen, S. O'Neill, Svein H. Gullbekk, R. Willerslev","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2020.1850853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2020.1850853","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last couple of decades, archaeologists interested in studies of ritualized violence have continued to debate the possibility, extent, and possible evidence for human sacrifice in much of the archaeological record. There is no doubt ample evidence for such activities from many parts of the world and from many time periods. However, for the archaeology of Northern European prehistory, this debate remains surprisingly unresolved. In many ways the field remains divided along deeply-held lines: some see widespread evidence for human sacrifice across the record, whilst others see spatial and temporal pockets where macabre sets of evidence rear their head and beg more questions than they answer; still others argue that solid evidence is scant or nonexistent. As part of this debate, the term ‘deviant’ burial has become a catchword for some scholars, used to designate graves and burials which do not fit a normative explanatory framework given their cultural and temporal contexts. Some such burials may provide evidence for sacrifice while others reflect various likely causes of death, such as illness, warfare, or even natural disasters and accidents. The term ‘deviant’ in this context is not only normative but confusingly ambivalent. It is used to describe those graves (or other archaeological assemblages/features) which are otherwise ‘atypical’ whether in their exhibition of evidence for ritualized violence or evidence (whether suggestive or clear) for the apparent mistreatment of the dead. But ‘deviant’ is also used, rightly, in descriptions of non-normative burial contexts outside of necessarily violent or errant ends. Confusion is compounded by the use of the term in also referring to ‘deviant’ individuals themselves, whose deaths and maltreatment upon deposition may be interpreted as judicial killings, e.g. as punishment for miscreant behaviours or activities. A distinction should clearly be made. But, we submit here that distinguishing between some deviants’ executions and sacrificial killings may not actually be necessary. This is because the act of execution itself may have","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00293652.2020.1850853","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47473335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}