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Memory through monuments: Movement and temporality in Skamby’s boat graves
Williams, Howard
Williams, Howard
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2014
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book chapter
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Abstract
Boat inhumation graves were one among many
ways by which waterborne craft were deployed
in the mortuary arena in late first millennium AD
Scandinavia: they might be represented on stone,
burned, decommissioned or set adrift. Moreover,
smaller craft and parts of craft might have been
readily employed in inhumation and cremation
practices far more than is revealed in the archaeological record. Further still, boats can be symbolised through boat-shaped stone-settings and their depiction on picture-stones (see Andrén
1993; Williams et al. 2010). Consequently there are strong grounds for seeing boat-inhumation as part of a diverse versatility in mortuary expression drawing upon water transportation as metaphor and medium. Yet within this diversity, I here contend that the high archaeological visibility of wealthy boat-inhumations was not an accident of archaeological preservation. Instead, I argue that boatinhumation was a strategic choice to exhibit and constitute a distinctive identity for the dead using a specific use of a maritime vessel in early medieval mortuary practice. Hence, as technologies of remembrance, boat-inhumations are the
surviving archaeological traces of a distinctive
chains of ritual acts by which the dead were
selectively remembered and forgotten by survivors and interred unburned within a maritime
craft (Williams 2001, 2006). Moreover, boatinhumation was a practice that rendered the
grave persistent in the landscape as an ongoing
place for memory work, prone to subsequent
manipulations, whether sanctioned interventions
by the survivors or plundering inspired by a range of motivations (e.g. Bill & Daly 2012).
Citation
Williams, H. (2014). Memory through monuments: Movement and temporality in Skamby’s boat graves. In H. Alexandersson, A. Andreeff, & A. Bünz (Eds.), Med hjärta och hjärna. En vänbok till professor Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh (pp. 397-414). Göteborg, Sweden: Institutionen för historiska studier, Göteborgs Universitet.
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Institutionen för historiska studier, Göteborgs Universitet
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Book chapter
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en
Description
This is the published version of the book chapter in Med hjärta och hjärna. En vänbok till professor Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh© 2014
Series/Report no.
GOTARC Series A, Gothenburg archaeological studies
5
5
ISSN
1403-8293
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ISBN
9789185245577