Bronze Age ‘Barrows’ and Funerary Rites and Rituals of Cremation

1997 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 129-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline I. McKinley
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Related Feature ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Funerary Rites ◽  
The Relationship

This paper discusses the evidence for pyre sites, debris, and technology associated with the disposal of cremated human remains in Bronze Age ‘barrows’. The use of the terms such as ‘cremation’, ‘cremation burial’, and ‘cremation-related feature’ are examined. The types of evidence for the remains of cremation-related activities which survive on archaeological sites are described with examples and compared with the results of modern experimental data. It is concluded that a wealth of information may be recovered in relation to the funerary rites and rituals of cremation and that Bronze Age barrows hold a potentially unique position in being able to provide evidence of various aspects of the funerary activity under one ‘mound’. While the archaeological components within different types of cremation-related features are often the same, it is the relationship between the various components within the deposit which have the potential to assist in our understanding of aspects of procedure, rites, and rituals attendant on the disposal of the dead by means of cremation.

Death, exchange and reproduction in the British Bronze Age

2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brück
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Interpersonal Ties ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the character and role of exchange in Bronze Age Britain. It critiques anachronistic models of competitive individualism, arguing instead that the circulation of both artefacts and the remains of the dead constructed the self in terms of enduring interpersonal ties. It is suggested that the conceptual divide between people and things that typifies post-Enlightenment rationalism has resulted in an understanding of Bronze Age exchange that implicitly characterizes objects as commodities. This article re-evaluates the relationship between people and things in Bronze Age Britain. It explores the role of objects as active social agents; the exchange of artefacts and of human remains facilitated the production of the self and the reproduction of society through cyclical processes of fragmentation, dispersal and reincorporation. As such, Bronze Age concepts of personhood were relational, not individual.

To Gaze Upon the Dead: The Exhibition of Human Remains as Cultural Practice and Political Process in Scandinavia and the USA

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liv Nilsson Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Small Hand ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Dead

The clattering sound of a child’s shoes across the cold stone floors; the echo is magnificent. I am nine or ten years old and I make my way through the prehistoric exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen. The dimly lit display cases are filled with arrowheads, heavy beads of perforated amber, funnel beakers, and bronze artefacts. I reach my goal, the alluring Bronze Age oak cists where the buried men and women from the heaths of Jutland are looking back at me. I touch the glass. My eyes wander over their reddened hair and their clothes, stained in deep shades of peat brown. My eyes seek theirs in the hollow orbits of their skulls. I close mine and imagine a life thousands of years ago. My small hand moves across the glass, leaving an almost invisible trace. Small fingerprints; a dreaming child’s gesture. I would stay there forever, dreaming of the past. Feeling it. I know that it was moments like this, when I could see and feel the humanity of the past that made me want to become an archaeologist. The immediate encounter with an individual from the past is a privileged moment. For a brief moment our destinies cross paths, and hundreds, even thousands of years are transcended. Scenes like this one, of children gazing at the dead and seeing the past, are not unusual. In museums across Europe, the archaeological findings from burials, including both the human remains and the items that accompanied the dead, are often displayed with pride and confidence. The public expects this and is drawn in with fascination to stand face-to-face with the deep past. Beyond this, the display of the dead and of death itself, with all of the allure and drama that accompany it, becomes a privileged locus for pedagogy and communication. But while this confident attitude towards the display of the dead may be typical in Europe, it is not as evident in North America. In North American museums, it is rare to see human remains from archaeological contexts displayed in any form (exception seems to be given to Egyptian mummies, which still are prominently displayed by many institutions that have them among their collections).

Land of the Cremated Dead: On Cremation Practices in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Scandinavia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Harvig
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
The Dead

As contract archaeology has emerged and larger connected areas have been excavated since the 1990s, focus has naturally changed from single finds of graves right below plough soil or in connection to mounds, towards the study of the surrounding cultural landscapes. In the Late Bronze Age and the Pre- Roman Iron Age settlements seldom overlap grave sites. This implies that the ‘land of the dead’ was considered separate from the ‘land of the living’. Although regionally differentiated, we further gain a better understanding of many of these accumulated grave sites and their gradual change during the transition period. In many cases we see a change from a personalized commemoration of the cremated dead in the Late Bronze Age, towards a focus on the act of cremation (rather than the post-cremation human body) around the beginning of the Iron Age. The increasing commemoration of pyre remains instead of human remains and deliberate ‘cremation’ of personal belongings in the Early Iron Age indicates a shift in funeral tempi from the post-cremation deliberate burial in the Bronze Age towards the actual cremation process as the primary locus of transformation in the earliest Iron Age. Throughout time, societies have grasped death, the dead, and the duration of death in very different manners. The process of death and relating to different stages of death may be more or less ritualized, that is, subject to specific repeated rules or laws within a society. Whether used to speed up or slow down the process of transformation—for example, keeping, embalming, dismembering, or exhuming the body in various stages—these rituals help the living create death through their acts. In interpretive archaeology we analyse these meaningful acts in the past and their continuation or discontinuation. Decoding single sequences within these acts therefore helps us designate non-negotiable repetitive actions in the archaeological record, as the material evidence of shared ‘embodied knowledge’ in a given prehistoric society (Nilsson Stutz 2003, 2010). Decoding and separating past actions and post depositional disturbances—the degree of intentionality—are crucial for plausible reconstructions of post-cremation treatment of cremated human remains.

Modeling the effect of rail sub-slope on the wear

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
R. M. Kurtikov ◽  
◽  
E. A. Sidorova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Calculated Data ◽  
Wear Intensity ◽  
Rolling Stock ◽  
Maximum Pressure ◽  
Average Value ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Universal Mechanism

The relevance of the issue of modeling the effect of rail sub-slope on the wear intensity is due to the need to find technological solutions to reduce the wear rate in the contact of wheels and rails. The aim of the work is to find the relationship between the sub-slope of rails and the wear intensity. The research is based on experimental data obtained from the results of full-scale measurements of the sub-slope carried out in 2019-2020 on the Moscow Railway. In this article, it was proposed to divide the measurement sites into two types according to the sub-slope parameter. The authors proposed two types of functions describing two different types of rail sub-slope deviations registered on the rail track. The influence of deviations of the sub-slope described by the first and second types of the obtained functions on indicators of the force interaction of the track and rolling stock and wear in the contact zone of the wheels with the rails was evaluated using the Universal Mechanism software package. As a result of calculations, the values of lateral and frame forces, as well as indicators of wear - slip and maximum pressure at the point of contact of the wheels with the rails are obtained. The adequacy of the obtained values of the wear intensity in the contact zone of the wheels with the rails was estimated by the authors on the basis of comparison of the calculated data with the experimental data of the wear intensity obtained on the sections of the Moscow Railway. A change in the sub-slope along the length of the section can cause an increase in the intensity of wear in the contact area of the wheels with the rails, especially if there are significant deviations from the average value of the sub-slope.

Analysis and Identification of Damages Caused by Canine (Canis lupus familiaris) Manipulation of Woven Textiles as Cultural Evidence in Forensic Cases

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Molina ◽  
Stefano De Luca ◽  
Fabiana Scarso
Keyword(s):  
Analysis Of Variance ◽  
Canis Lupus ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Domestic Dogs ◽  
Canis Lupus Familiaris ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Statistical Program ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Woven Textile ◽  
Age And Sex

Scavenging of human remains by dogs can make the process of identification and analysis of perimortem trauma difficult. Numerous scientific studies have been published about the damage caused to osseous remains by dogs due to postmortem consumption orlethal attacks. However, few studies deal with the issue of the analysis of clothing associated with human remains. The purpose of this investigation was to identify patterns of damage caused by domestic dogs to commonly used, woven textiles. Forty-five cloth bags were used (20 × 30 cm each), made by hand with three different types of woven textile (15 of each textile): stretch(polyester with elastic), denim, and polyester, with a thickness of 40.84, 57.95, and 31.46 threads per cm², respectively. The canine sample consisted of 15 dogs, differing in size, age, and sex, coming from the “Fundación Chile Mestizo,” in Santiago, Chile. Through analysis of variance, researchers examined the relationship between the type of textile and presence of damage, and later, they calculated the frequency of damage according to type of textile. The statistical program Minitab 19 was used to do this. According to the results, four types of patterns were identified: puncture and mastication, present in 62% and 75% of the cases, respectively; perforation; and “hole and tear” damage in 91% of the analyzed cases. Regarding the relationship between textile type and frequency of damage, researchers found that the thickness and weight of the textile are directly connected to the type of damage. 

The Neolithic of Mainland Scotland

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Rubbish Dumps ◽  
The Relationship

What was life like in Scotland between 4000 and 2000BC? Where were people living? How did they treat their dead? Why did they spend so much time building extravagant ritual monuments? What was special about the relationship people had with trees and holes in the ground? What can we say about how people lived in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age of mainland Scotland where much of the evidence we have lies beneath the ploughsoil, or survives as slumped banks and ditches, or ruinous megaliths? Each contribution to this volume presents fresh research and radical new interpretations of the pits, postholes, ditches, rubbish dumps, human remains and broken potsherds left behind by our Neolithic forebears.

scholarly journals Stone Dead: Uncovering Early Mesolithic Mortuary Rites, Hermitage, Ireland

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimée Little ◽  
Annelou van Gijn ◽  
Tracy Collins ◽  
Gabriel Cooney ◽  
Ben Elliott ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Short Duration ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Microscopic Analysis ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Burial Practice ◽  
Funerary Rites ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Bronze Age ◽  
Insight Into

In Europe, cremation as a burial practice is often associated with the Bronze Age, but examples of cremated human remains are in fact known from the Palaeolithic onwards. Unlike conventional inhumation, cremation destroys most of the evidence we can use to reconstruct the biography of the buried individual. Remarkably, in Ireland, cremation is used for the earliest recorded human burial and grave assemblage (7530–7320 bc) located on the banks of the River Shannon, at Hermitage, County Limerick. While we are unable to reconstruct in any great detail the biography of this individual, we have examined the biography of a polished stone adzehead interred with their remains. To our knowledge, this adze represents the earliest securely dated polished axe or adze in Europe. Microscopic analysis reveals that the adze was commissioned for burial, with a short duration of use indicating its employment in funerary rites. Before its deposition into the grave it was intentionally blunted, effectively ending its use-life: analogous to the death of the individual it accompanied. The microwear traces on this adze thus provide a rare insight into early Mesolithic hunter-gatherer belief systems surrounding death, whereby tools played an integral part in mortuary rites and were seen as fundamental pieces of equipment for a successful afterlife.

scholarly journals The Main Results of Studies of the Archaeological Complex Kastyki in the Upper Reaches of the Viliya (Minsk Region of the Republic of Belarus)

2021 ◽  
pp. 391-416
Author(s):  
Н. А. Плавинский
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Late Neolithic ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Funerary Rites

Целью публикации является анализ основных результатов раскопок комплекса археологических памятников Костыки Вилейского района Минской области, проводившихся в 1973, 2016 и 2018 гг. Комплекс археологических памятников Костыки состоит из курганного могильника древнерусского времени Костыки и многокультурного открытого поселения Костыки II. Некрополь в Костыках функционировал на протяжении середины XI - XII в. Он принадлежал группе жителей Полоцкой земли, которые имели определенное представление о христианской погребальной обрядности. Многокультурное поселение Костыки II функционировало от эпохи позднего неолита и начала эпохи бронзы до третьей четверти I тысячелетия н. э. The publication's purpose is the analysis of the main results of archaeological sites' excavations in Kastyki, Viliejka district, Minsk region, carried out in 1973, 2016 and 2018. The complex of archaeological monuments of Kastyki consists of the Kastyki barrow cemetery of Old Rus' period and the multicultural open settlement of Kastyki II. The necropolis in Kastyki functioned throughout the middle of the 11 - 12 centuries. It belonged to a group of Polotsk land residents who had some perspective of Christian funerary rites. The multicultural settlement Kastyki II functioned from the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age to the third quarter of the 1st millennium AD.

Diffraction effects calculated for structural models of K-saturated montmorillonite containing different types of defects

Clay Minerals ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. A. D. Rits ◽  
A. Plançon ◽  
B. A. Sakharov ◽  
G. Besson ◽  
S. I. Tsipursky ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Chemical Composition ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Stacking Faults ◽  
Structural Models ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Diffraction Patterns ◽  
Diffraction Effects ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Independent Parameters

AbstractThe general approach to the problem of the real structure of smectites requires an analysis based on the relationship between structural characteristics and diffraction patterns. This paper, which considers only the models corresponding to dioctahedral smectites saturated by K-cations and collapsed, includes: 1. Successive consideration of all models which are crystallochemically possible. These models may differ in (i) the structure and chemical composition of layers and interlayer spaces; (ii) the azimuthal orientations, translations and the mode of alternation of the layers; (iii) independent parameters which describe quantitatively the models (e.g. abundance of each type of layer, probability parameters defining the succession of layers, …). 2. Calculation, in all accessible domains of reciprocal space, of the distribution of intensities and profile variations, obtained by changing only one parameter at a time, that defines one type of structural feature (e.g. cation distribution in individual layers, stacking of the layers, nature of stacking faults, …). 3. A systematical analysis of the calculated diffraction patterns to establish the diffraction criteria which will help to interpret the experimental data explicitly.

A study on fiber motion in the drafting zone and hook removal

2019 ◽  
Vol 90 (11-12) ◽  
pp. 1277-1290
Author(s):  
Yuanying Shen ◽  
Chongwen Yu ◽  
Jianping Yang
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Time Domain ◽  
Fiber Length ◽  
Domain Model ◽  
Dynamic Motion ◽  
Fiber Motion ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Good Agreement

In this study, the hook removal of four types of hooks during the drafting process has been investigated, and the theory of fiber straightening was further improved by analyzing the relationship between fiber length, fiber straightness, draft ratio, and the fiber accelerated point. Simultaneously, a time domain model was used to simulate the dynamic drafting process based on the straightening analysis, which provided an approach to capture the dynamic motion of different types of fibers and hook removal in the drafting zone. The model is validated by a previous study and experimental work, with the result that the output fiber straightness is both in a good agreement with those calculated by classical theories and experimental data. The straightening effect of the drafting process on four types of hooks under the same drafting conditions is compared. It is shown that the drafting effect on different types of hooked fibers is varied, with the clumped fiber removed preferentially followed by both end hooks or the trailing hook, whereas the leading hook is the most difficult to remove.

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