Ritual Hoarding in Migration-Period Scandinavia: A Review of Recent Interpretations

Abstract

Non-funerary deposits of an apparently ritual character are a persistent, often very prominent aspect of all periods of Scandinavian prehistory from the Neolithic to the later Iron Age (post 600 AD). The hoards of the nearer end of this series have recently been brought within theoretical and analytical studies from a variety of modern perspectives differing in ideology and specialism. This paper offers a critical review of those studies in the light of a detailed case-study from the nearer end. Harmonies can be found between the shaping force of economic and social factors posited by Richard Bradley's model and the evidence of this case, although, perhaps inevitably, the effects of these may appear more complex and even quite different from what a description of the general model can encompass. More cautionary conclusions reached which have important implications within the construction of general theory are that greater care ought to be exercised in identifying the establishment of polities and socio-economic crises from this and other contemporary categories of material, and that the specific content of ideology, particularly religious concepts, which affects the fact and the form of ritual hoards, while probably incapable of being built into a general model like Bradley's on the same implicative basis as specific types of economic and social structures, merits a more prominent place in studies of the topic.

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