Perforated stone plaques, known as bracers, are found across late prehistoric Europe and many of them have been recovered in Bell Beaker funerary contexts, usually associated with adult individuals. Experimental, technological, and use-wear studies have determined that the bracers were both utilitarian and symbolic objects. Very few are found in children's graves, but examples are known in the Iberian Peninsula, two of which are presented here. The analyses conducted on the two bracers, including archaeological contextualization, raw material identification, and technological and use-wear studies, allow the authors to reconstruct their respective biographies. Although these pieces were associated with young children, they had long lives before their final deposition in the graves. Use-wear marks on one of the bracers suggest that it was used in archery, despite its small size.

The flexibility of material culture encourages material phenomena to take a dynamic part in social life. An example of this is material citation, which can provide society with links to both the past and connections to contemporary features. In this article, we look at the diverging ways of relating to and reinventing the past in the Viking Age, exploring citations to ancient monuments in the landscape of Gammel Lejre on Zealand, Denmark. Complementing the placement of landscape monuments, attention is also brought to examples of mortuary citations related to bodily practices in Viking-age mortuary dramas, such as those visible at the mound of Skopintull on the island of Adelsö in Lake Mälaren, Sweden. Through these case studies, we explore the variability in citational strategies found across tenth-century Scandinavia.