Emotion and colonialism: building affective ties in contested landscapes

Recent debates regarding Scottish independence and the centenary of the Irish 1916 Rising British rule illustrate that Britain and Ireland’s long relationship with colonialism continues to loom large in the insular collective conscience. This article focuses on one particular historically-attested medieval colonial episode which involved colonists from Scandinavia and, later, from among the Scandinavian diaspora from the ninth to the early eleventh . The geographic focus moves between Ireland and western Scotland, with the emphasis on a series of furnished burials on either side of the North Channel in Argyll and northeast. These furnished burials – dated to c.AD850–980 on the basis of radiocarbon and artefactual dating – take a number of forms, ranging from purpose-built mounds covering interred remains laid out in boats or stone-lined chambers and surrounded by markers of ascribed social status, to cremations and inhumations inserted into either pre-existing Christian and Bronze Age cemeteries or late prehistoric burial mounds and cairns.The article explores the way in which furnished burials can be used to (re)negotiate, propagate and legitimate asymmetric status-based relationships in a colonial setting where status is not expressed via conspicuous monumentality of settlement forms. Building on this, the article ends with a discussion of the use of burial as an emotive and identitive anchor in a new landscape. Both issues involve contested interpretations of the same physical spaces, connected to the (re)negotiation of individual and communal identities, social institutions and status asymmetry.