This paper critically examines how power is understood and used in archaeological interpretation of prehistoric societies. We argue that studies on power within archaeology have been haltered in their interpretive potential, frequently limited to individualizing coercive power with androcentric connotations. We explore new avenues of power through a retrospective view. Drawing on ideas first conceptualized by Hannah Arendt, while also incorporating theoretical ideas from collective action, anarchistic theory and the affective turn, we argue that power as a phenomenon and explanation within archaeology can be refined and nuanced when approached through a lens of collective agency and the affective potential of material culture. This connects, furthermore, to how we today see and act on changing power dynamics.

The paper explores a group of graves in which the past was used actively in Viking Age eastern Norway. Studying the use of the past in the past was introduced in British landscape archaeology of the 1990s, but a reassessment and a renewed relevance of the theme may now be observed due to the rise of materiality studies and the affective turn within archaeology. Through an investigation of the apparently insignificant kerbstones on a number of Viking Age burial mounds in Eastern Norway, and their links to specific Roman period mounds and graves, the paper explores how time and the past were perceived in the Viking Age. This further opens potential for examining connections between the use of the past and identities and self-perceptions in a Viking Age society. The analysis also includes a movement away from understanding reuse merely as a means of power. The overall ambition is to demonstrate the relevance of studies of the past in the past in archaeology today.

This article examines a small group of artefacts of the Viking Age that may have been perceived as animated objects. These specific weapons and pieces of jewellery appear in narratives in the Old Norse sources as named, as having a will of their own, as possessing personhood. In archaeological contexts the same types of artefact are handled categorically differently than the rest of the material culture. Further, the possible links between these perspectives and the role of animated objects in early medieval Christianity of the Carolingian Empire are examined through studies of the reopening of Reihengräber and the phenomenon of furta sacra. By linking studies of the social biographies of objects with studies of animism, the article aims to identify aspects of Viking Age ontology and its similarities to Carolingian Christianity.

The flexibility of material culture encourages material phenomena to take a dynamic part in social life. An example of this is material citation, which can provide society with links to both the past and connections to contemporary features. In this article, we look at the diverging ways of relating to and reinventing the past in the Viking Age, exploring citations to ancient monuments in the landscape of Gammel Lejre on Zealand, Denmark. Complementing the placement of landscape monuments, attention is also brought to examples of mortuary citations related to bodily practices in Viking-age mortuary dramas, such as those visible at the mound of Skopintull on the island of Adelsö in Lake Mälaren, Sweden. Through these case studies, we explore the variability in citational strategies found across tenth-century Scandinavia.

A pair of animal heads of the Faardal type is central in our reinterpretation of the Late Bronze Age Vestby hoard from eastern Norway. After a period of use and circulation, the heads were mounted on bodies belonging to a different animal species. We argue that the making of the animal figurines and the other high-quality objects of the hoard can only be properly understood against the backdrop of Scandinavian Bronze Age cosmology. This line of thought extends to the presence of a tin bead necklace, which we interpret as a lunar calendar. By combining a ‘body perspective’ – including understandings of body techniques, operational sequences and the ‘sociality’ of objects – with a ‘symbolist perspective’ – including symbol systems, cosmology and intentionality – we put the head back onto the body, so to speak. We also scrutinize the premises for earlier interpretations of the objects' ‘life stories’ and reinterpret their trajectories. This influences the understanding of the act of hoarding, and finally leads to a discussion of how hoarding was also somehow related to the ‘birth’ of the artefacts.