Two of a Kind: Conceptual Similarities between Cremation and Inhumation in Early Anglo-Saxon England

The physical difference in the archaeological traces of the bodies produced by cremation and inhumation have polarized discussions of these two burial practices. Conceptually, the wet, fleshy, decaying inhumed body has long been viewed as the binary opposite of the dry, skeletal, fragmentary cremated body. Inhumed bodies rot in situ, usually below ground, while cremains become portable, capable of being stored above ground. Recent studies aimed at re-integrating our understanding of cremation and inhumation have tended to focus on transitions between the hiatus of one burial mode and the (re-)introduction of another (e.g. Rebay-Salisbury 2012). However, in early Anglo-Saxon England (fifth to seventh centuries AD), cremation and inhumation were concurrently practiced, often in the same cemetery for tens if not hundreds of years. Therefore focusing only on transitions substantially reduces the field of investigation. Such different but contemporaneous burial modes may well have been influenced in part by contrasting and evolving beliefs concerning the body, death and the afterlife. In a recent transhistorical study of cremation and inhumation, Katherine Rebay-Salisbury (2012) identified religion as the primary influential context for funerary practices, with social concerns influencing the choices made within religious practices. However, any divergent cosmologies underpinning this difference still remain frustratingly veiled (Hutton 2010). While early Anglo-Saxon burials reveal a degree of genuine difference in the type and quantity of grave-goods and animals accompanying cremations and inhumations, a range of similarities also exists between them, ripe for further exploration. Cemeteries from Essex and Cambridgeshire provide particularly useful evidence of both cremation and inhumation practices, especially in light of recent publications of organic-rich burial sites of the fifth and sixth centuries AD from this area, notably Mucking I and II (Hirst and Clark 2009) and Springfield Lyons (Tyler and Major 2005). Three overarching concepts of body orchestration are addressed: containment, wrapping, and structuring, the evidence for which is first outlined thematically, then discussed as a whole. These shared concepts may be symptomatic of broader concerns for managing cadavers, which transcended the cremation-inhumation divide that is most clearly expressed through artefact and animal selection.