3.1 Archaeology of Early Medieval Europe: Grave Goods, Identities and Personhood.

Dr. Emma Brownlee, Girton College, Cambridge.

Publications:

Emma Brownlee. (2020) 'The Dead and their Possessions: The Declining Agency of the Cadaver in Early Medieval Europe', European Journal of Archaeology 23 (3) 2020, 406–427.

Brownlee, E. Connectivity and Funerary Change in Early Medieval Europe. Antiquity: a quarterly review of archaeology https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.51984.

Between the sixth and eighth centuries AD, the practice of furnished burial was widely abandoned in

favour of a much more standardized, unfurnished rite. This article examines that transition by considering

the personhood and agency of the corpse, the different ways bonds of possession can form between

people and objects, and what happens to those bonds at death. By analysing changing grave good use

across western Europe, combined with an in-depth analysis of the Alamannic cemetery of Pleidelsheim,

and historical evidence for perceptions of the corpse, the author argues that the change in grave good use

marks a fundamental change in the perception of corpses.

Keywords: early medieval, personhood, cadaver, funerary practices, grave goods, possession.

Dr. Michèle Hayeur Smith, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

Kevin P. Smith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

Prof. Karin M. Frei, National Museum of Denmark.

Publications:

MICHÈLE HAYEUR SMITH, KEVIN P SMITH & KARIN M FREI (2019). ‘Tangled up in Blue’: The Death, Dress and Identity of an Early Viking-Age Female Settler from Ketilsstaðir, Iceland, Medieval Archaeology, 63:1, 95-127,

IN 1938, a woman’s burial was uncovered by road builders at Ketilsstaðir in north-eastern Iceland.

Recently, her physical remains and associated funerary goods were re-examined by an international, interdisciplinary

team and formed the basis for an exhibition at the National Museum of Iceland in 2015.

This paper focuses on the items of dress that accompanied the woman in order to gain insights into the

ways her cultural identity was expressed at the time of her death. Here we explore the roles played by

material culture in signaling her identity, and the technologies and trade networks through which she was

connected, visually, to Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the Viking world at large.

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