Reconstructing Death: The Chariot Burials of Iron Age East Yorkshire

Author(s):  
Melanie Giles

Visitors to the Hull and East Riding Museum used to reach the climax of the Iron Age exhibition, Celtic World, by coming face-to-face with the extraordinary funerary offerings from three chariot burials at Wetwang Slack (Dent 1985). Now removed for urgent conservation, the iron swords from two male burials, their scabbards decorated with intricate, incised Celtic art, and the corroded iron mirror and sealed bronze container from the female burial, were displayed in Perspex cases. Beads of red glass ‘enamel’ adorned both swords and box, and a slender iron pin shone with a thin strip of glowing gold, entwined around a coral bead. These artefacts are marvellous testimonies to Iron Age craft skill, speaking of the repertoire of decorated objects through which power amongst these communities was underpinned and reproduced (Giles 2008). Behind these cases, setting the scene for these personal possessions or funerary gifts, is an oversized image—now the focus of that section of the museum: a reproduction of Peter Connolly’s impressive and moving reconstruction of a chariot burial (Fig. 19.1), loosely modelled on the Kirkburn K5 inhumation (see Stead 1991) and painted in the late 1980s. The image shows a tableau of mourners surrounding a grave, in which has been interred the body of an adult male (Fig. 19.1). He is lying over the wheels of a dismantled chariot, with a shield placed over his chest, and forequarters of pig lain on top. The box of the chariot (still attached to the pole shaft) is being lowered over the body like a coffin, before the grave is back-filled. The participants in this ceremony are predominantly male, with one woman at the edge in an apparent state of grief: two others are in the background, one keeping a pair of children at a distance from the proceedings. Two ponies are being led away from the scene, tossing their heads as if perturbed by the event. Such images have a powerful, instantaneous impact: ‘act[ing] at a distance, across the gallery, in a way a block of text cannot’ (James 1999a: 121).

Iraq ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 79-87
Author(s):  
Arlette Roobaert

During the 1993 season of excavations at Tell Ahmar, three pieces of a life-size basalt statue were found in a pit dug into one of the large walls surrounding an Iron Age vaulted tomb (Fig. 1). The head, the tors o and the lower part fitted together perfectly. When correctly assembled, these three pieces formed the figure of a standing beardless man with clasped hands (Fig. 2a−b). Only the feet were missing. The maximum height of the reconstructed statue is 1.45m. It was clear from the damage to portions of its body that the statue had been deliberately broken in antiquity. Details, such as a large hole on the right side of the chest, a smaller one on the top of the head and, above all, the defacement of the head suggest that the statue may have actually been “killed”.All three pieces of the statue, which was carved out of a blue greyish basalt of medium texture, were found lying on their backs (Fig. 4). The head lay next to the lower part of the statue, but was buried in a slightly deeper position. The relative placement of these fragments seems to be a clear indication that the statue was not knocked down at this particular spot, but was brought to this location in separate pieces, perhaps with the deliberate intention of burying them.The head was cut off as if the statue had been decapitated. The torso was separated from the lower portion of the statue by an oblique cut that divided the figure just below the waist. The cut runs downwards from the back and continues underneath the clasped hands at the front, leaving the hands almost completely undamaged. The lower part of the statue seems to have been separated from the missing feet by a horizontal cut. This may indicate that the base of the statue was left in situ, probably because it was solidly set in the ground.


1966 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene B. Cooper

Interrelationships among client progress in stuttering therapy, the nature of the affect interchange between client and clinician, and certain personality characteristics of both client and clinician were studied. Sixteen young adult male stutterers and their 11 graduate student clinicians served as subjects. Results support observations that the clinicians' and clients' personalities are significant variables in the stuttering therapy situation, support observations that important similarities exist between stuttering therapy and psychotherapy, and suggest that it is more accurate to note stages in the therapeutic relationship, rather than to characterize the relationship as if it were the same throughout therapy.


2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica T. Whitty

AbstractWhile flirting is a relatively underresearched area within psychology, even less is known about how people cyber-flirt. This paper explores how often individuals flirt offline compared to online. Moreover, it attempts to examine how men and women flirt within these different spaces. Five thousand, six hundred and ninety-seven individuals, of which 3554 (62%) were women and 2143 (38%) were men, completed a survey about their flirting behaviour both in face-to-face interactions and in chatrooms. The first hypothesis, which stated that the body would be used to flirt with as frequently online as offline, was partly supported. However, it was found that individuals downplayed the importance of physical attractiveness online. Women flirted by displaying nonverbal signals (offline) or substitutes for nonverbal cues (online), to a greater extent than men. In chatrooms men were more likely than women to initiate contact. It is concluded that cyber-flirting is more than simply a meeting of minds and that future research needs to consider the role of the body in online interactions.


1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-140
Author(s):  
Thaddeus J. Trenn ◽  

The Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth with but a faint image, continues to capture the interest of many people of diverse beliefs. Although the measured age of the cloth is relatively recent, other scientific findings indicate an earlier provenance. Any firm conclusions regarding the cloth's history remain premature. No satisfactory explanation has been found as yet for how the image on the cloth was produced structurally or stylistically. Iconographic evidence suggests that the image was the source of facial peculiarities found in early works of religious art. The body image bears a striking yet preternatural correlation with Scriptural accounts of wounds. Curiously, the image on the cloth functions as a photographic negative, exhibiting a high degree of resolution, as if the original were produced in pixels. Despite serious efforts to discover some artistic origin md medium, scientific evidence points in the direction that it was not produced by hands. If it is tme that the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, then the Turin Shroud may be a parable for the modern age.


Archaeologia ◽  
1785 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 211-213
Author(s):  
Pegge
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  

Besides the common mistake of the annalists and historians in regard to this passage in Juvenal,Regem aliquem capies, aut de temone BritannoExcidet Arviragus—Juvenal IV. 126.By taking Arviragus for the proper name of a person, and not of an officer; the words of the satyrist are memorable in another respect, as serving to inform us, by the word temone, of a singular mode of fighting amongst the Britons; as if by leaving his carriage, and running upon the pole, the combatant from thence, or from the yoke, engaged the enemy, as long as he thought prudent and convenient, and then retreated back into the body of the vehicle.


Author(s):  
K. Mendelssohn ◽  
J. D. Babbitt ◽  
Frederick Alexander Lindemann

Until a year ago it was generally accepted that if a body is made supraconducting while in a magnetic field the lines of magnetic force were "frozen in," i. e ., whatever lines of force passed through the body at the time when it became supraconducting remained there afterwards, unaffected by any change in the external field, so long as the body was supraconducting. Meissner and Ochsenfeld, however, showed that this supposition was not true. They measured field strengths in the immediate neighbourhood of cylinders which had been cooled to supraconductivity in an external magnetic field, and found that the field of force was then of the same nature as that to be expected in the neighbourhood of perfectly diamagnetic bodies. Thus it appeared that when a body becomes supraconducting in a magnetic field the lines of force are all pressed out of the body, and the induction inside the body falls to zero. At the same time, however, these authors report on another experiment, the result of which appears to us not entirely in accordance with the assumption that the induction in the whole body became zero. They measured the field strengths inside and outside a hollow cylinder, after it had become supraconducting in a field perpendicular to its axis, and found again that the field strength outside was as if the cylinder were almost perfectly diamagnetic, but the field inside was appreciably the same as if the cylinder were non-supraconducting. We therefore made a number of experiments, hoping to find out more exactly the nature of the phenomenon.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oussama Boularess ◽  
Hatem Rmili ◽  
Taoufik Aguili ◽  
Smail Tedjini

This paper discusses the electromagnetic (EM) signature of Arabic alphabets that can be considered as standards particles to form chipless tags. Normalized Arial font is suited as example but the method can be applied for any other font. The letters are realized by metallic strips or better, by conductive ink. All the 28 letters have been simulated and their EM signatures for both field polarizations are extracted. It is demonstrated that combining vertical and horizontal responses allow the identification of letters without ambiguity. Moreover, the case of letter with punctuation (one to three points) is considered in more details. Indeed, we propose to modify very slightly these letters by connecting the points to the body of the letters. This connection is made by a unique straight and very thin strip. Under this modification these letters exhibit more exploitable signatures. Finally, a lookup table for identification of the 28 letters is carried out.


2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hideko Takeshita ◽  
Masako Myowa-Yamakoshi ◽  
Satoshi Hirata

In this review, we discuss the implications of placing an infant in the supine position with respect to human cognitive development and evolution. When human infants are born, they are relatively large and immature in terms of postural and locomotor ability as compared with their closest relatives, the great apes. Hence, human mothers seemingly adopt a novel pattern of caring for their large and heavy infants, i.e., placing their infants in the supine position; this promotes face-to-face communication with their infants. Moreover, infants in the supine position can interact with other nearby individuals in the same manner from an early age. In addition, the infants can also explore their own body parts and/or objects with their hands since the hands are not required to support the body and are therefore, free to move. These activities are considered to be fundamental to the early development of human social and nonsocial cognition, including knowledge of self, in the first six months after birth. Further, developmental continuity in the voluntary exploratory movements in the prenatal period (in utero) to the early postnatal period is also discussed.


2020 ◽  
pp. 65-75
Author(s):  
Julianne Newmark

D. H. Lawrence’s essays ‘The Spinner and the Monks’ of 1913 and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ of 1924 offer evocative textual considerations of aesthetic mediation through acts of the body. In these essays, readers can understand ‘traditional’ aesthetic acts to be those that are not contrivances of modernity; through such acts, history is invoked in the now, as if unchanged. This chapter identifies Lawrence’s engagements with traditional aesthetics as unique experiences of the human sensorium. The examples this chapter examines – the first from Lawrence’s earliest trip outside England (Italy), and the second from New Mexico (in the Southwestern United States) – show how Lawrence progressively experienced and then wrote about ‘traditional’ aesthetic acts as having a unique capacity to engage with community, history and truth. They thus have broad implications concerning Lawrence’s movement toward a refined articulation of aesthetic difference and viscerally mediated relationships. Lawrence’s accounts of Hopi dance and Italian handiwork reveal an openness to the viscerally-mediating capacity of aesthetic experience. As a result of his multi-sensorial engagements, Lawrence experiences and textually records ‘traditional’ aesthetic performances or outputs as both meditating and transformational.


Author(s):  
Dennis Harding

In recent years the issue of violence in Iron Age society has become polarized between those who believe that it was endemic and those who believe that it has been exaggerated, particularly by conventional stereotypes of ‘warrior Celts’ based on classical and Irish literary sources. Currently, the ‘postprocessual consensus that dominates academic archaeology in the United Kingdom retains, as its default position, a more or less pacifist view of the prehistoric past’ (Armit, 2011: 503). The conventional interpretation of ‘war cemeteries’ and ‘massacre sites’ in hillforts especially may have been unduly simplistic, and it is these therefore that we shall consider first. The archetypal Iron Age war cemetery was that excavated by Wheeler (1943) in the eastern entrance at Maiden Castle, Dorset, where several skeletons bore traces of physical trauma compatible with the sack of the hillfort by Vespasian’s Second Augustan legion. An adult male in grave P7A had an iron arrow-head buried in his spine, and another adult male in grave P7 had a small, square perforation through the left temporal bone, consistent with a Roman ballista bolt. In some instances there were multiple injuries, notably skeleton P12 whose skull bore at least nine sword cuts, a measure of ‘overkill’ that reflected either the ferocity of the attack or systematic degradation after death. In reviewing the physical evidence for warfare in Iron Age Britain Knüsel (2005) divided instances of weapon trauma into three principal categories, those inflicted with a sharp-bladed weapon, such as a sword, those resulting from crushing from a blunt instrument, and wounds from a weapon or missile that penetrated the skeleton. The first two are essentially the same classification as those offered by Wheeler (1943: 351) for the Maiden Castle war cemetery. He too had raised the question whether the peri-mortem injuries apparent on some of the victims were the cause of death, or were inflicted after death.


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