Food for Thor: The Deposition of Human and Animal Remains in a Swedish Wetland

Abstract

This paper publishes an assemblage of human- and animal remains from Torresta, a wetland site in Uppland, mid-Sweden, dating to the Bronze- and Early Iron Ages. The location of this material suggests that the phenomena of depositing bodies in watery places occurred much further north than has formerly been accounted for. It is argued that the understanding of such depositions may gain by a move from an anthropocentric focus to include relationships between humans, animals and landscape. In particular, the study makes an effort to explore whether the remains of human and animal bodies were parts of networks of care or neglect and how they could have worked in a more-than-human landscape. The paper suggests that these depositions could have operated as religious materiality and unfolds cross-temporal links with the landscape, as the depositions are located at a rock-art site by a fording point, which may have been of multi-species importance. In this place a variety of materialities from the past have formatted and attracted later depositional action. The paper works with a feminist post-human, relational notion of landscape that experiments with the boundaries between nature and culture and between different times in a place where depositions and bodily movement of humans and animals interlace with geological forces such as land-rise and corresponding water-retreat. Thereby the paper experiments with an altered approach to landscape, accounting for landscape as changing sets of relations, which is more than landscape as captured in the eye of a human beholder or captured in meaning-making processes.