 Good morning, everyone. I will start by just shortly introducing myself. My name is Anna Jelicic, and I'm a PhD student in general archaeology at the Department of Archaeology in Stockholm. My primary research interest lies in the Viking Age burial archaeology, in particular, the study of the post-chromation practices of manipulation and circulation of cremains and also composition of burial learns. What I'm presenting today is an overview of a paper with the title Natural Choice, in which I'm dealing with the usage of so-called natural products within post-chromation practices. Among these natural things are also minerals, one of which you can see behind me. This paper is a final product of the workshop Materiality and the Human, given within the doctoral school in the humanities at Stockholm University. The main idea behind the workshop was to gather PhD students from different fields within humanities and through a series of writing retreats, seminars, and presentations, produce and present and publishable paper. My intention was to re-examine and present one quite poorly defined category of objects, the natural products. And you can see this position of my paper, which I will loosely follow in my presentation. Well, what exactly do I mean when I say natural products? In Swedish literature, they are called naturalier. And the boundaries of this concept of natural products is poorly defined. This one over-reaching category is used to encompass a broad variety of these humble objects, such as minerals, cultivated plants, meadow plants, diverse plant parts, like berries, nuts, pine needles, also eggshells, seashells, pebble stones, oval stones for cells, and so on. I'm analyzing the ones which are deliberately deposited among remains. Not the ones which describe a secondary deposition. They have traditionally been considered uninterested, not always collected, and with development of different sub-archaeological fields. They are usually used for dating and in discussion of food processing, resource use, climate, health, diet, and similar questions. What I perceive as problematic is that this adjective natural clearly carries some rhetorical weight for archaeological discipline, how we engage with things. Natural products are taught to be static, low priority, and hard to use as elements around which one can tell an interesting narrative of why can gauge cremation. The overall agenda of my article is to challenge this description and to put forward a rather active place and significance in post-cremation rituals. Here you can see examples of one example of how little space they traditionally get. This is just a few sentences about hazelnuts and fruits in Vietar Liston's Birken number two publication. As a point of departure for the furthest discussion on natural products, I chose Arning and Mount number three, which I will refer to Arning and Mount from now on. Arning area some 20 kilometers north of Stockholm was heavily exploited in the early 80s. And one of these archeologically investigated and completely removed ancient monuments was the Arning and Mount, which is on this picture. Centrally under the covering stone layer, impressive undisturbed cremation layer was discovered holding as much as 90 liters of cremated bones. The commendation of the cremation layer is unfortunately really poorly done due to bad weather and some time pressure. Osteological material was analyzed in the 80s as a part of the monumental Mount project. You can see it is listed here among these high status late Iron Age grade, which were analyzed at the time. As you can see, Arning and Grave contain remains of five humans and a wide variety of other mammal, fish, and bird species. The richness of cremated bones, both in quantity and in variation of species represented together with the great goods of exceptional quality, were taken as an indicator of the high status of the deceased. A compelling narrative of the chieftain burial and possible human sacrifice, this older man, young woman scenario was created and published with the emphasis on the high status indicator, such as garnet jewelry, gilded objects, gold-foliated beads, diversity in the mountain, animals, species, and so on. You can see some of these objects behind me. This narrative of cremation, which was molded around the high status objects and sacrifice, completely dominates the narrative of Arninge and lives vividly even today in the popular imagination, which is witnessed by this newspaper from 2016, in which Arninge is described as a place where people were sacrificed to gods. However, quite a different story emerges if we shift our focus from the high status objects placed on the pyre to the material remains of the post-cremation practices. In this narrative, the natural products are the essential element. After the pyre was extinguished, three burial urns were composed and deposited in cremation layer. The composition of these urns is far from being a representative sample of the richest of material found within the cremation layer itself. They are poor in artifacts and low in bone quantity. Furthermore, all three burial urns contain the natural products in the form of rich plant remains, both cultivated and wild species. And also, the unburned eggshell or eggs were placed among the cremains into the of these urns. The choice of plant in urn was of different character for each urn. While contact of one of them was dominated by wild species, especially barley, the upper one, the other one was dominated by cultivated seeds, which were different sorts of domesticated plants, also with the insertion of black torn fruit and hazelnuts. The samples from these urns were taken only in order to answer some environmental questions and not to debate cremation practices. Thus, natural products are not mentioned in the main report in any significant way. Arning a grave illustrates, I think, two crucial issues for cremation studies, a lack of detail in excavation and lack of interest in natural objects which are perceived as less significant in interpretation and publication of final report. In my opinion, the natural origin of natural products downplays their cultural significance due to this false perspective on the inexistence of human impact in their modification. However, I argue that these objects are not actually unmodified. One of the examples I use to illustrate modification are these two minerals I'm holding in my hand, which are found deposited among cremation into mouset used a burial ground. Interestingly, well, I did analysis. And the analysis shows that these minerals are called tremolite, which is not naturally occurring in Kirste area. Interestingly, their crystal structure cannot survive the movement of the ice sheet, which means that they cannot be just picked from the surface. They had to be mined or quarried. And the nearest possible candidate is the mine in Nade Mora, some 30 kilometers away. But they also could have been transported from some destination further away. Now, if we consider all the examples of natural products I already mentioned, like metal plants, cereals, hazelnuts, minerals, ax shells, it is easy to imagine these projects as static, as objects which are just picked up and deposited. But I think something happened to them from the place of their origin to the point of them being a part of burial-earned composition. Cutting, roasting, smoking, arranging, harvesting, trashing, cleaning, washing, storing, transporting, warring, a list of these verbs, what was done to these objects can be long. By the means of these verbs, natural products interaction, wit and relation to a human is apparent. They bear a witness of continuous anthropogenic modification. In my article, I'm describing a variety of examples which demonstrate a large range of possible options for the composition and deposition of the Viking Age burial-earns. Like these two examples behind me, the one which is quite traditional, burial-earned, deposited under the lockstone with this combination of natural products, artifacts, and bone material, and also the other example which shows two burial-earns deposited on the top of each other, each one under separate lockstones, again with this different composition of what is actually inearned. This illustrates how different composition and placement could be perceived as acceptable and efficient, and that placement of natural products among cremains was a common sense natural choice in such compositions. To present solution in line with symmetrical approach to material culture of cremation, I'm regarding burial-earns as composite products with a context-specific design and manufacture procedure. All the individual components are thus relevant for the composite products characteristic. Thus the natural products play an active part and a vital part in construction of a burial-earn which by the observer and or creator in the past was probably perceived as proper, acceptable, and efficient for the purpose it was intended to have within post-cremation rituals and in dealing with that in general. Conclusion. To conclude, natural products have historically been described as natural, unmodified, mundane, static, and thus not considered as significant as artifacts in interpretation of funerary practices and as element of the narrative of the Viking Age cremation. However, the core concern of my paper is not to dwell upon the history of archeological discipline. I have argued that natural products bear a witness of continuous anthropogenic modification and that their deposition among cremains was a common natural choice in composition of burial-earns, thus making them a significant cultural content. By highlighting the existence of significant asymmetry present in the approach to the material remains of cremation practices, I'm pointing toward the need for the integration of the full range of detectable evidence of post-cremation practices in interpretation process and narrative creation. In my opinion, this integration is needed in order to enhance and balance the somewhat biased narrative of Viking Age cremation, which is based on artificial, durable, and high status objects. Just shortly, this conclusion leads us to my PhD project, which is entirely dedicated to searching for new means of dealing with our stance to an engagement with material traces of post-cremation practices. In particular, I'm searching for more encompassing ways of approaching the pluralism and potency of natural objects. The project's ambition is to explore the usage of natural products in composition of burial-earns to the series of thematic chapters like selection, deposition, variation, representation, and at the end to hopefully change narrative of Viking Age cremation. That's it. Thank you for your attention.