The Viking Age (c. AD 790-1050) represents the very notion of uprootedness and social transformation. Yet there are signs of inherent nostalgia in Scandinavian Viking Age communities; hundreds of rune stones scatter the landscape with tales of genealogies and memories, and older burial mounds are reused for new graves. Burials show that the communities also had a careful eye for assembling items of different ages, with the reuse of antique beads or ornaments. The Viking Age was not all about moving forth – it was also about handling the past as society changed.

From the 8^th Century, the regular use of older jewellery focused on a specific form of brooch: the disc-on-bow brooch, which appears in often richly furnished female burials. They stand out owing to a very distinctive aesthetic – gilding with intricate patterns of red garnet gemstones from Sri Lanka and India. During their time of use, they expand into almost unwearable sizes and are increasingly covered with garnets and complex, symbolic animal art.

The brooches also appear on enigmatic miniature images, imprinted on tiny gold leaves, often recovered in aristocratic dwellings. The images show a mythical couple, facing each other in a formal pose. Despite their minute proportions, the couple is depicted in astonishing detail, and the images accentuate specific postures and objects associated with authority, gender and ideology. Among them, is the disc-on-bow brooch, representing a tangible symbol related to a particular elite and their ideology. The considerable increase in the brooches’ size and adornment during the 8^th Century suggests that the brooches’ inherent associations and  ritual use became increasingly important, at the same time as societies and economies gradually redirected towards new horizons.

This article argues that the brooches offers a unique insight into how stories of the past were embodied, legitimised, but ultimately also contested, in this transformative period of Scandinavian history. As the Viking Age dawned at the turn of the 8^th Century, social hierarchies and networks changed and provided new opportunities. New forms of exotic female jewellery were introduced, repurposed from looted or traded items from Ireland and Britain. The production of colossal disc-on-bow brooches with luxurious stones seem to come to a sudden halt. Still, parts of them were kept in circulation, sometimes found as worn and repaired antiquities in female graves up to 100 years later. There, they represented a last homage to past generations, and to dwindling ideals of old elites.

The article – Echoes of the Past: Women, Memories and Disc-on-Bow Brooches in Vendel- and Viking-period Scandinavia – is published in the European Journal of Archaeology and currently free to access.

Zanette Glørstad is Associate Professor at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway. Her research interests focus on the construction of social identities, cultural interaction and mortuary archaeology in Early Middle Ages/Viking Age Scandinavia.

Ingunn M. Røstad is Associate Professor at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway. She specializes in Scandinavian Iron Age/Early Medieval materiality, object analysis and collection management. Her main research interests are archaeological find complexes and jewellery from ad ca. 400–800.