The Transcontextual Process—Materials, Objects, and Their Changing Meanings Across Contexts

This paper proposes the idea of ‘the transcontextual process’ as a theoretical tool to help interpret materials that have travelled long distances to new contexts. Archaeological literature is often guilty of looking at past movements with a bird’s-eye view and applying assumptions of knowledge, rather than considering the experiences of people who lived in the past. The transcontextual process uses context and assemblage theory to think about what materials and objects of long-distance origin meant to the people using them. A case study of glass tesserae from eighth-century Denmark is used to show how the transcontextual process might be used as a tool for interpretation. It follows the journey of glass tesserae from their use in wall mosaics in the late antique world to the Viking age emporia of Ribe, where they are transformed into glass beads, that are in turn circulated across southern Scandinavia.