Ruptured Space and Time in Lahepera Burial Site in Eastern Estonia

Abstract

This article discusses archaeological landscapes as narratives. Artefacts tell stories, but they are also parts of larger stories told by the landscapes of their time. Landscapes are considered to comprise not only the physical setting to people’s activities, but also the social space of the inhabitants. As the social world itself always consists of stories, it is possible to read landscapes as narratives of an area in a certain period. However, these narratives are subjective, because the landscape has been ruptured by time: the physical and social landscape has changed a great deal over the centuries, and due to the temporal distance, it is not always easy for an archaeologist to tell the story of a past period. Narratives can be collective or individual, and so can landscapes. Usually, archaeological landscapes represent the laws and traditions of a past society, so they are collective landscapes. Iron Age burial landscapes are at present spatially and temporally ruptured landscapes that narrate the collective stories of their time. The notions of collectivity and individuality are also used in the discussion of the case study, for understanding these concepts in society is an interesting problem, especially in the case of the Late Iron Age in Estonia. The transition from collective to individual burial is a spatial rupture, both in the sense of the physical landscape and the social space of society. In this article, the rupture will be studied first and foremost from the perspective of the landscape of the burial site, and this will be combined with different archaeological data from other areas and hypotheses on the Late Iron Age social system previously published. In conclusion, the spatially and temporally ruptured burial landscape of Lahepera will tell its story.