Folded to Fit : New Adventures of the Viking Age Woman Estrid

This paper revisits the doll Estrid, a reconstruction of a Viking Age woman that was excavated by archaeologists in the mid-1990s in Täby, Vallentuna parish, Sweden. The woman was shortly after the excavation attributed to be Estrid, a woman’s name mentioned on rune stones in proximity of the excavated burial. After this ‘identification’, the Estrid phenomenon has taken different shapes and paths, both literally and figuratively, with various effects and affects, in archaeological, museum and political arenas. Pivotal in these have been the reconstructions of the Viking Age woman Estrid at different ages. This contribution discusses Estrid and the unfolding narratives in the present in which she/it participates. It reveals the ways in which a reconstruction’s hybrid character, having both factual and fictional components, contributes to the Estrid phenomenon being easily folded to fit a number of contemporary, educational and political purposes

On Field Theory Thermalization from Gravitational Collapse

Motivated by its field theory interpretation, we study gravitational collapse of a minimally coupled massless scalar field in Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant. After demonstrating the accuracy of the numerical algorithm for the questions we are interested in, we investigate various aspects of the apparent horizon formation. In particular, we study the time and radius of the apparent horizon formed as functions of the initial Gaussian profile for the scalar field. We comment on several aspects of the dual field theory picture.Comment: 31 pages, 17 figures; V2 Some figures corrected, minor revision. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1106.233

Diffracting Digital Images in the Making

This paper presents a diffractive dialogue between prehistoric imagery, digital or computational imaging, and art practices. Our dialogue begins by responding to Thomas Nail’s recent argument that digital images force us to recognize the ontological mobility and instability of all images, whether contemporary or ancient (Nail 2019). In tandem with this, Back Danielsson and Jones (2020, 4) develop the notion of ‘Images in the making’. By discussing images as being ‘in-the-making’ they underline an understanding of images as conditions of possibility, and as processes of assembly, outlining the way in which images draw together and bringing into relation the cognitive and material components of the world. Although, the original notion of ‘images in the making’ drew on digital images to make its argument, it did not explore the special character of digital images in any detail. This paper develops the notion of images in the making in the context of the digital domain. It will focus on two digital imaging techniques developed within archaeology and cultural heritage– Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and Structure from Motion photogrammetry (SfM)- exploring how these techniques play out in heritage and art world contexts and practices. The paper will highlight digital images as unstable compositions, explore how digital images in the making enable us to reconsider the shifting temporal character of the image, and discuss the way in which the digital image forces us to disrupt the representational assumptions bound up in the relationship between the virtual and the actual; we argue that digital images are ‘phygital’ and are better understood as existing somewhere in the blurred ground between the physical and the digital (Dawson and Reilly 2019). We argue that the diffractive moment in these encounters between archaeology and art practice disclose the potential of digital imaging to recursively question the complex ontological composition of images and the ability of images to act and affect

Viking Mortuary Citations

Introducing the European Journal of Archaeology’s special issue ‘Mortuary Citations: Death and Memory in the Viking World’, this article outlines the justification and theoretical framework underpinning a new set of studies on Viking-age mortuary and commemorative practice as strategies of mortuary citation. The contributions to the collection are reviewed in relation to strengths and weaknesses in existing research and broader themes in mortuary archaeological research into memory work in past societies

Citations in Stone: The Material World of Hogbacks

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Journal of Archaeology on 06/07/2016, available online: doi 10.1080/14619571.2016.1186910This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Journal of Archaeology on 06/07/2016, available online: doi 10.1080/14619571.2016.1186910This article explores a meshwork of citations to other material cultures and architectures created by the form and ornament of house-shaped early medieval recumbent stone monuments popularly known in Britain as ‘hogbacks’. In addition to citing the form and ornament of contemporary buildings, shrines, and tombs, this article suggests recumbent mortuary monuments referenced a far broader range of contemporary portable artefacts and architectures. The approach takes attention away from identifying any single source of origin for hogbacks. Instead, considering multi-scalar and multi-media references within the form and ornament of different carved stones provides the basis for revisiting their inherent variability and their commemorative efficacy by creating the sense of an inhabited mortuary space in which the dead are in dialogue with the living. By alluding to an entangled material world spanning Norse and Insular, ecclesiastical and secular spheres, hogbacks were versatile technologies of mortuary remembrance in the Viking Age

The social Qualia of Kuml. An exploration of the iconicity of rune-stones with Kuml inscriptions from the Scandinavian Late Viking Age

This article discusses qualitative experiences (qualia) of Scandinavian Late Viking Age rune-stones from a semiotically theorized perspective. Rune-stones with kuml inscriptions receive particular attention. Despite the fact that kuml referred to different material entities, such as rune-stone, other standing stones, and/or grave, it is suggested that they resembled one another on iconic grounds. The quality associated with the multiple qualia was a sensation of safety that resulted in shared experiences that had positive social values. The article demonstrates that the semiotics of Peirce can be of great value to archaeologists who want to delve deeper into the social analysis of things

Engendering Performance in the Late Iron Age

This paper deals with humanoid figures on gold foils from the Late Iron Age in Scandinavia. Interpreted as figures wearing masks, an effort is made to show the complexity, importance and significance of masking practices. The single Bornholm figures from the 6th century are interpreted as shamans performing rituals. Further, it is proposed that a restriction of masked appearances and performances to certain people (shamans) and places in the long run created stricter and more rigid gender roles in everyday life. The later gold-foil couples are seen as signs of divine communication, cosmological movement and seasonality, making up a mythology that legitimised political domination —the sacred lineage of rulers pivoting around an apical, ancestral cross-sex pair.</jats:p