Own and Be Owned: Archaeological Approaches to the Concept of Possession

242 Pages·2015·20.932 MB·English

by  Alison Klevnäs, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson (eds.)

Own

and be owned
Archaeological approaches
to the concept of possession
1
Edited by A. Klevnäs & C. Hedenstierna-Jonson

Own and be owned

Own and be owned
Archaeological approaches
to the concept of possession
P AG – Postdoctoral Archaeological Group
Alison Klevnäs & Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson (Eds)
Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 62, 2015
Own and be owned
Archaeological approaches to the concept of possession

© 2015 by PAG – Postdoctoral Archaeological Group, and the authors
Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies
Stockholm University
SE-106 91 Stockholm
www.archaeology.su.se
Editors: Alison Klevnäs & Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson
English revision: Kristin Bornholdt Collins
Cover and typography: Anna Röst, Karneol form & kommunikation
Printed by Publit, Stockholm, Sweden 2015
ISSN 0349-4128
ISBN 978-91-637-8212-1
Contents
Preface vii
Alison Klevnäs & Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson
Introduction: the nature of belongings 1
Alison Klevnäs
Things of quality: possessions and animated objects
in the Scandinavian Viking Age 23
Nanouschka Myrberg Burström
The skin I live in. The materiality of body imagery 49
Fredrik Fahlander
To own and be owned: the warriors of Birka’s garrison 73
Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson
The propriety of decorative luxury possessions.
Reflections on the occurrence of kalathiskos dancers
and pyrrhic dancers in Roman visual culture 93
Julia Habetzeder
Hijacked by the Bronze Age discourse?
A discussion of rock art and ownership 109
Per Nilsson
Capturing images: knowledge, ownership
and the materiality of cave art 133
Magnus Ljunge
Give and take: grave goods and grave robbery
in the early middle ages 157
Alison Klevnäs
Possession through deposition: the 'ownership' of coins
in contemporary British coin-trees 189
Ceri Houlbrook
Possession, property or ownership? 215
Chris Gosden
About the authors 222

Preface
This publication is the result of a workshop held in late 2012 by
the Postdoctoral Archaeology Group (PAG) in the Department of
Archaeology and Classical Studies at Stockholm University. It was
the fifth in an ongoing series of more or less annual events bringing
together researchers from inside and outside the department. The
tradi tion is to discuss topics which make new connections between
different research traditions within the discipline. To this end papers
typically do not present finished research projects or programs for
future work, but instead are essays exploring ideas and possibilities
for applying viewpoints or theoretical concepts to new material.
Previous workshops have focused on current approaches in mortuary
archaeology and gender research, on matters of scale and process,
and on the archaeology of the senses, all of which also resulted in
edited volumes in the series Stockholm Studies in Archaeology.
This time it was decided to go further and make an attempt on a
theme which is not already established and defined as an area of en-
quiry in archaeology, but which was felt to resonate and recur in dif-
ferent ways through the diverse topics researched by the contributing
group. The outcome was a stimulating, even exhilarating discussion
day, exploring the numerous and pervasive ways in which concepts
of ownership are used in archaeological interpretations, sometimes
explicitly and to express well-defined relations of possession, but
often implicitly or in more or less metaphorical senses. There then
followed a more difficult and lengthy process of framing the often
vii
innovative approaches as written articles grounded in the discourses
of their own periods, but drawing out and connecting lines of obser-
vation and argument on this new theme. The papers in this resultant
volume, from a wide variety of angles and using diverse material,
reveal ownership as a slippery, often obscuring concept, widespread
but poorly defined in archaeological discourse from prehistory to
contemporary studies. They aim to show how much more exists to
be explored beneath an easy reliance on the language of ownership
to explain so many differing kinds of connections between materials,
humans, values, geographic areas, traditions, artefacts, individuals,
groups, and archaeological periods – to name but a few of the owners
and owned discussed in the following pages.
We wish to thank the discussant, Chris Gosden, for his insight-
ful and enthusiastic participation in the workshop day and for his
commentary in this volume. Likewise we thank all the speakers and
authors, including Gordana Ciric, who was unable to contribute to
this publication, and Ceri Houlbrook, who was not present at the
workshop but agreed at a late stage to contribute a paper. Anna Röst
and Kristin Bornholdt Collins provided valuable and much apprecia-
ted support with design and layout and language editing respectively.
Last but not least, our gratitude to the Berit Wallenberg Foundation
and the Stockholm University Department of Archaeology and
Classical Studies for their generous funding of the production and
printing of this work.
Alison Klevnäs and Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson,
Stockholm, 2015
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