Viking-Age archaeology has often treated ancient objects, monumental graves and reused artifacts as evidence of elite power. A new 2026 study by University of Oslo archaeologist Julie Lund argues that this explanation is too narrow.
In her book Time and Temporality in the Viking Age: An Archaeology of Reuse, Remembering, and Relations to the Past in the Past in Scandinavia, 750–1050 CE, Lund examines how Viking-Age communities reused much older objects, copied ancient burial forms and deliberately connected themselves with earlier landscapes.
The book was published by Sidestone Press in 2026 and runs to 134 pages. Its case studies include ship settings, Viking hoards and burial mounds surrounded by kerbstones.
Lund does not deny that power mattered.
Her argument is that old objects could also create memory, identity, belonging and continuity between generations. A Roman gemstone kept for centuries or a Viking grave designed to resemble a much older burial may have carried meanings that cannot be reduced to wealth or political manipulation.
That changes how archaeologists read some of Scandinavia’s most striking Viking remains.
The New Study Challenges A Familiar Viking Explanation
Lund’s 2026 book on Viking memory and reuse focuses on how people between approximately AD 750 and 1050 related to earlier periods.
Archaeologists have long recognized that Viking communities reused old monuments and possessed objects that were already ancient by the time they entered Viking contexts.
The disagreement concerns why.
A traditional interpretation often connects such behavior with elites claiming legitimacy. A ruler might associate himself with famous ancestors, occupy an old burial landscape or display ancient objects to strengthen political authority.
Lund argues that this model can become too automatic.
Different social groups reused the past in different ways. Some practices may have strengthened political claims, while others could create emotional connections, shared histories or a sense that a community belonged within a landscape extending far beyond one lifetime.
Her work therefore asks a harder question.
Instead of simply identifying who possessed power, archaeologists should ask why particular old things still mattered to the people using them.
The Hoen Hoard Preserved Objects With Much Older Histories
One of Lund’s most important examples comes from the Hoen Hoard in Buskerud, Norway.
A tenant farmer found the treasure at Nedre Hoen farm in 1834 while digging drainage ditches.
The Historical Museum in Oslo describes it as Norway’s largest Viking-Age gold hoard. The assemblage contains gold rings, jewelry, beads, coins and imported objects representing connections stretching from western Europe to the Islamic world.
The museum dates the treasure broadly to AD 875–900.
Among the objects was a Roman intaglio, an engraved gemstone already centuries old when it became part of the Viking hoard.
Lund uses pieces like this to challenge a purely economic interpretation.
The stone was not simply raw material.
Someone preserved an object whose history stretched back toward the Roman world, carried it through later European cultural networks and eventually incorporated it into a Viking-Age assemblage.
Its age may have contributed to its value.
A Frankish Sword Fitting Became Viking Jewelry
Another Hoen object shows even more clearly how old things could acquire new lives.
A three-lobed brooch in the treasure originated as a Frankish fitting, probably attached to a sword scabbard.
Scandinavian craftspeople transformed such imported fittings into jewelry.
The process did more than move an object geographically.
Its function changed.
Something connected with Carolingian military equipment could become an ornament worn in Scandinavia.
Lund sees this kind of transformation as evidence that objects possessed biographies.
Their meanings accumulated through movement, reuse and alteration.
A fitting could connect several different historical moments at once: Carolingian craftsmanship, long-distance movement and Scandinavian reuse.
If archaeologists view it only as evidence of elite wealth, those other relationships disappear.
Some Objects May Have Been Preserved For Centuries
The timescales involved can be extraordinary.
In recent University of Oslo reporting on Lund’s work, she points to groups of objects that appear to have circulated or been preserved for hundreds of years.
That possibility raises difficult questions.
An heirloom passing through several generations makes intuitive sense.
An artifact surviving for four or five centuries requires a much longer chain of remembering, rediscovery or deliberate reuse.
Not every ancient object necessarily passed directly from parent to child for centuries.
People could recover old objects from graves, encounter them in ancient deposits or reproduce forms that had disappeared from normal use.
Lund’s work treats all of these possibilities as ways in which Viking communities actively interacted with older material worlds.
The important point is that the past remained physically available.
It could be touched, altered and placed into new social settings.
Hunn Shows How A Viking Grave Could Be Made To Look Older
Objects were not the only way Viking communities reused history.
Burial architecture could do the same.
At Hunn in Østfold, archaeologists have documented more than 145 visible burial mounds spanning a period from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Viking Age.
Lund has studied the relationship between a spectacular Roman-period grave called Stubhøj and a later burial known as Store Vikingegrav.
Her peer-reviewed study of the Hunn graves argues that the Viking grave deliberately echoed features visible in the much older Roman-period mound.
Both graves used conspicuous kerbstones around their edges.
The Viking burial also occupied a similar position on the same ridge.
These parallels suggest that people constructing the later grave knew the older monument and intentionally referenced it.
Copying An Old Grave Was More Than Architectural Style
The similarities at Hunn extended beyond the exterior.
Stubhøj contained a sword, spear, shield, decorated spurs, drinking horns, a gold ring and other prestigious objects.
The Viking-Age Store Vikingegrav also contained weapons, spurs and drinking equipment.
Lund argues that the combined similarities were too specific to dismiss easily.
The later burial may have created a deliberate connection with a remembered past.
That does not necessarily mean one Viking leader claimed direct descent from the person buried centuries earlier.
Community memory could work more broadly.
People returning to the same cemetery generation after generation encountered physical monuments whose age was obvious.
Constructing a new burial to resemble an ancient one could place the deceased inside a long local story.
The grave became a statement about time as well as status.
Viking Communities May Have Created A Sense Of Deep Time
This is where Lund’s argument moves beyond conventional explanations of elite competition.
Old monuments could create what she describes as connections across time.
A burial mound built with ancient-looking features did not simply say, “this person was powerful.”
It could also say, “this person belongs here.”
That distinction matters for understanding Viking communities as more than chiefs surrounded by followers.
The cemetery at Hunn remained meaningful for roughly two millennia.
Different generations encountered graves from periods whose original occupants and rituals had long disappeared.
Even without knowing precise names, people could recognize those monuments as old.
Reusing their styles may have helped communities construct continuity in landscapes that carried visible evidence of earlier lives.
Ship Settings Could Reuse Even Older Monumental Ideas
Lund’s book also examines ship settings, monuments in which stones outline the form of a ship.
These structures are strongly associated with Late Iron Age and Viking-Age Scandinavia, but they also draw on older traditions of monumental burial and maritime symbolism.
Her interest lies partly in how new monuments could cite older forms.
A stone ship did not need to reproduce one particular ancient grave.
It could activate a broader sense of inherited landscape and maritime tradition.
That idea changes the way monuments such as ship settings are interpreted.
Scale and visibility still mattered.
So did political display.
Yet a monument could simultaneously reinforce community memory, connect people with ancestors and make the landscape feel historically continuous.
Archaeological meaning does not need to have only one layer.
The Study Pushes Back Against A Chieftain-Centred Viking Age
Lund has also criticized the tendency to search repeatedly for “the chieftain and his men.”
Written sources encourage that approach because kings, warriors and elite households appear prominently in later narratives.
Spectacular graves reinforce it.
Weapons, gold and monumental mounds naturally attract attention.
The risk is that archaeological interpretation starts to force every unusual practice into the same explanation.
Large grave equals powerful leader.
Imported object equals prestige.
Ancient object equals political legitimacy.
Lund argues that these associations may sometimes be correct without being complete.
Material culture could also support relationships among families, communities and places.
That broader view aligns with Old Norse News coverage of modern Viking myths and archaeological interpretation, where familiar Viking images can become oversimplified when one explanation dominates the evidence.
Memory Could Work Differently Across Social Groups
One of the study’s strongest implications is that there may never have been one Viking way of using the past.
Different groups had access to different objects and traditions.
Elite households could possess imported Roman or Frankish material.
Rural communities might interact more directly with old burial grounds, ancient stones or inherited landscapes.
Women could preserve and transform jewelry.
Families could return to cemeteries that had been used for centuries.
The same practice might carry different meanings depending on context.
An ancient gem in a wealthy hoard and an old-style kerbstone around a burial both connect with the past, but they do so through different materials and social settings.
This variety makes a single power-based explanation increasingly difficult to sustain.
The Study Does Not Remove Power From Viking Archaeology
Lund’s argument should not be read as saying that status or politics no longer matter.
The Hoen Hoard was an extraordinary concentration of wealth.
Monumental burials required labor.
Large ship settings could dominate landscapes.
Those features clearly intersected with hierarchy.
The new interpretation adds rather than subtracts.
Political authority, personal memory, ancestry, emotion and community belonging could operate simultaneously.
A powerful family might use an ancient object because it enhanced prestige and because it carried a meaningful history.
Those motives are not mutually exclusive.
That is why Lund’s emphasis on material biographies matters.
Objects did not enter Viking graves as blank commodities.
Some arrived with centuries behind them.
Why Old Objects Could Build Community
The strongest contribution of Time and Temporality in the Viking Age is its insistence that Vikings had their own past.
They did not live inside a historical vacuum beginning around AD 793.
They inherited landscapes filled with prehistoric graves, ancient settlements, Roman-period objects and monuments already hundreds or thousands of years old.
People interacted with that material constantly.
Some ancient objects entered hoards.
Others became jewelry.
Certain burial traditions were copied or revived.
Old cemeteries remained active places.
Lund argues that such practices could help people understand who they were in relation to those who came before them.
That may involve power.
It could also involve belonging.
This distinction makes Viking society look more socially complex.
The past was not simply a political weapon controlled by chiefs.
It could be a shared material resource through which communities built identity, memory and relationships across generations.
The objects survived because people kept finding reasons not to forget them.
