Hauglegging i Sør-Fron – hva var de redd for? Gravfunn, løsfunn og flomskred i yngre jernalder

The density of large burial mounds in Sør-Fron shows that interring bodies in earth and stone was an act of great importance to the populace at some point in prehistory. In this paper I analyse grave finds and stray finds to establish when this need was at its most urgent. My results imply that the majority of the mounds date to the Late Iron Age, and show that the mounds had the agency to structure ritual action in the area at this time. Natural disasters, especially in the form of landslides, constituted a constant threat to the farming communities of the area in the Late Iron Age. Drawing on the work of Tarlow (1995), Skre (1996), Gardela (2016) and Eriksen (2019), I argue that constructing mounds was a way of coping with these threats through a manifestation of land ownership and a strategy of “ritual fertilization”.