Mortuary practices, problems, and analysis

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Harding
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Community Group ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
Final Disposal ◽  
The Dead ◽  
A Site

Archaeological investigation is sometimes likened to opening a window on to the past. The problem is that, except in cases of unexpected and sudden disaster, for example where a shipwreck has been preserved untouched or a town was engulfed by volcanic ash, the archaeologist never examines a site as it was in its living heyday, only as it was after it had been abandoned, leaving only what survives of what its occupants chose to leave behind. Burials likewise represent only what communities chose to deposit for whatever reason, modified by taphonomic factors that determine the state of surviving evidence. Other ephemeral forms of disposal, and any elaborate or protracted rituals that preceded the final act of deposition that did not involve substantive structures, will pass unremarked in the archaeological record. It has been suggested in Chapter 1 that human remains may have been buried either in a dedicated cemetery where the dead were segregated or confined, perhaps in the equivalent of consecrated ground, or integrated within the environs of settlements, whether as complete or near-complete bodies or as fragmented parts or individual bones. A third option, of course, and one which would certainly contribute to the difficulty of tracing a regular burial rite archaeologically, would be segregated burial on an individual basis rather than in a community group, however small or selective. The concept of a cemetery assumes a degree of social cohesion in Iron Age practice which may not have been universal. An obvious question must be why should there have been these alternatives, and what might have governed the decision as to which alternative should be adopted? Ethnographic analogies suggest that the spirits of the dead could have been regarded as malevolent, more especially during the interim phase between death and completion of decomposition. So it might make sense to consign the dead directly to a dedicated cemetery that was detached from the settlement, or to confine them initially within a secure location, such as a hillfort, for excarnation or interim burial, before final disposal.

scholarly journals The Sandby Borg Massacre: Interpersonal Violence and the Demography of the Dead

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Alfsdotter ◽  
Anna Kjellström
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
The Dead ◽  
And Control

During excavations of the Iron Age ringfort of Sandby borg (ad 400–550), the remains of twenty-six unburied bodies were encountered inside and outside the buildings. The skeletons and the archaeological record indicate that after the individuals had died the ringfort was deserted. An osteological investigation and trauma analysis were conducted according to standard anthropological protocols. The osteological analysis identified only men, but individuals of all ages were represented. Eight individuals (31 per cent) showed evidence of perimortem trauma that was sharp, blunt, and penetrating, consistent with interpersonal violence. The location of the bodies and the trauma pattern appear to indicate a massacre rather than a battle. The ‘efficient trauma’ distribution (i.e. minimal but effective violence), the fact that the bodies were not manipulated, combined with the archaeological context, suggest that the perpetrators were numerous and that the assault was carried out effectively. The contemporary sociopolitical situation was seemingly turbulent and the suggested motive behind the massacre was to gain power and control.

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.

Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Harding
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Regular Form ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Minimal Impact ◽  
Animal Remains ◽  
The Dead ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Burial Rite

Archaeologists have long acknowledged the absence of a regular and recurrent burial rite in the British Iron Age, and have looked to rites such as cremation and scattering of remains to explain the minimal impact of funerary practices on the archaeological record. Pit-burials or the deposit of disarticulated bones in settlements have been dismissed as casual disposal or the remains of social outcasts. In Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain, Harding examines the deposition of human and animal remains from the period - from whole skeletons to disarticulated fragments - and challenges the assumption that there should have been any regular form of cemetery in prehistory, arguing that the dead were more commonly integrated into settlements of the living than segregated into dedicated cemeteries. Even where cemeteries are known, they may yet represent no more than a minority of the total population, so that other forms of disposal must still have been practised. A further example of this can be found in hillforts which, in addition to domestic and agricultural settlements, evidently played an important role in funerary ritual, as secure community centres where excarnation and display of the dead may have made them a potent symbol of identity. The volume evaluates the evidence for violent death, sacrifice, and cannibalism, as well as age and gender distinctions, and associations with animal burials, and reveals that 'formal' cemetery burial or cremation was for most regions a minority practice in Britain until the eve of the Roman conquest.

Building for the Cremated Dead: Ephemeral and Cumulative Constructions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Wessman ◽  
Howard Williams
Keyword(s):  
Archaeological Excavation ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Inherent Nature ◽  
Early Historic

Given its inherent nature as fiery transformation, the archaeological traces of past cremation practices are always partial and fragmentary. However, recent advances in archaeological excavation and osteological analyses, and novel theoretical investigations of cremation’s variability, character, and context, have enriched and developed the archaeology of cremation in prehistoric and early historic societies (for a review, see Chapter 1, this volume; see also; Williams 2008, 2015b; Wessman 2010; Cerezo-Román and Williams 2014). For the later first millennium AD, archaeologists persist in underestimating the potential for investigating cremation practices, and this is particularly true of the study of mortuary structures and monuments associated with cremation burials (see also Chapter 4, this volume; Chapter 13, this volume; Williams 2013, 2014a). To some extent, the impoverished archaeological investigation of the architectural dimensions of cremation in particular is understandable. Archaeologists are well acquainted with the fact that burial monuments can be multiphased and become subject to uses and reuses over millennia, and indeed, many early medieval cemeteries focus on, reuse, and adapt, far older monuments (Williams 1997;Wessman 2010). There are also examples of large monumental barrows built over cremation burials, as in the late sixth and early seventh centuries at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, showing that cremation ceremonies could be utilized to make enduring, prominent monuments to commemorate the dead and project remembrance down the generations (Carver 2005). However, the more ephemeral mortuary architectures of the late first millennium AD which characterize the majority of cemeteries in most regions—mounds, ring-ditches, stone-settings, post-holes, and the like—are often damaged or destroyed by postdepositional processes. When burial monuments are identified they often appear to have been inherently modest structures that defy familiar explanations as status-markers and landmarks to project the commemoration of the dead across the landscape and through time. It is often all too tempting for archaeologists to dismiss these structures and refer to cemeteries in which cremation burials occur as ‘flat cemeteries’ or else to kaleidoscope these monuments into a single chronological phase and portray them as ‘collective’ structures. Hence, many archaeological accounts, emphasizing the spectacle and fragmentation of open-air cremation in the human past, wrongly imply, or explicitly stipulate, that cremation is counter-architectural.

The Useful Dead: Bodies as Objects in Iron Age and Norse Atlantic Scotland

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Shapland ◽  
Ian Armit
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Early Historic

This paper discusses a group of modified human remains from Iron Age and Norse sites in Atlantic Scotland, several of which have been discovered or rediscovered over the past decade, and all of which have recently been radiocarbon dated. It investigates the ways in which these remains seem to have been recovered, used, modified and deposited by living communities, and what this may reveal about past attitudes towards the bodies of the dead. These practices are placed within a wider European later prehistoric and early historic context, to highlight how this group of evidence may add to current debates surrounding social memory, the ritualization of domestic life, and the place of the dead within the world of the living.

Slave-Trade Archaeology and the Public: The Excavation of a ‘Liberated African’ Graveyard on St Helena

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pearson ◽  
Ben Jeffs
Keyword(s):  
Belief Systems ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
The Public ◽  
North American Archaeology ◽  
Technical Sense ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Uk ◽  
St Helena ◽  
A Site ◽  
And Training

Within the framework of contractual archaeology in the UK (in which both authors largely operate) individual graves and funerary sites are regularly encountered, while they are also the object of targeted research projects. The ability to investigate a burial and to exhume human remains is a practical skill that can be taught and which may be mastered by practice. The investigation of a cemetery of any age is essentially a repetition of this basic technique, in which each grave (or indeed any feature-type containing human remains) is revealed, excavated, and the human remains recorded and lifted. Such exercises vary in scale, but the largest can address very significant numbers of bodies: one obvious example is the cemetery at Spitalfields, London, in which several thousand skeletons were exhumed. Post-excavation methods are also fairly standardized, both in terms of general archaeological reporting and the specific osteological analysis of human remains. These approaches can reasonably be said to be universal within European and North American archaeology, though inevitably with some variation in detail. As a consequence, field archaeologists are, in a technical sense, expert in dealing with the dead. Archaeologists, however, are often less familiar with the more esoteric aspects relating to the dead. Taking the British example again, the field archaeologist generally arrives at a site only after any discussion about the moral or social aspects of exhumation has been concluded. Thus, while provided with technical guidance and being aware of the wider issues involved, they are essentially there to dig. But away from such controlled circumstances, governmental frameworks for dealing with cultural heritage are either less developed or do not exist at all. Here, archaeologists can find themselves enmeshed in matters that go far beyond the technical and, not uncommonly, do so in societies where local attitudes and belief systems are very different to their own. This requires a skill-set for which ‘standard’ archaeological education and training has not necessarily equipped them. This chapter offers a narrative of one such example, which took place on the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena during 2007–8. Here, a team of experienced British field archaeologists, tasked with the excavation of a graveyard of considerable size and international significance, came to deal with the dead— and the living—on a number of fundamental levels that extended far beyond the project brief.

Dead among the living landscape

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Harding
Keyword(s):  
Data Base ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Final Stage ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Burial Ground ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Age Studies ◽  
Grave Goods

The discovery of human remains in both hillforts and settlements has a long archaeological history, whether whole or partial skeletons or simply individual bones and fragments, though the former were often dismissed as the atypical disposal of social outcasts or malefactors, and the latter were never satisfactorily explained as casual discards. The fact that complete or near-complete skeletons were found in pits that evidently had been designed for another purpose, together with the absence of grave-goods, militated against their interpretation as formal burials, and set these apart from those grouped burials in pits that we have treated as small cemeteries. As regards fragmentary remains, the idea that the dead were exposed for excarnation, possibly over a protracted period of time, is now well established in Iron Age studies. What happened after excarnation is less clear, whether the skeleton was reassembled and buried, either in a formal cemetery or in a settlement context, or distributed as body parts or individual bones in pits, ditches, entrances, or other locations around settlements. Alternatively, in ethnographic contexts it is not unknown for the dead to be interred in a temporary burial ground for a period of months or even years, whilst the process of decomposition took place, before exhumation and re-burial following a final funerary feast. That final stage of re-interment in the British Iron Age likewise could have involved complete or near-complete re-burial, or separation of body parts and their distribution into liminal locations, as a means of incorporating the benign dead into the living community. And hillforts might well have served as the location, not only for excarnation platforms, but for temporary burial as well. We should not, however, exclude other possible interpretations. As Duday (2006: 30) warned, ‘one must not presuppose a funerary context of all such deposits because certain intentional deposits of human remains have nothing to do with burial’. Necessarily, of course, researchers are dependent upon the quantity as well as the quality of the excavated data-base, particularly in terms of statistical assessments, and for this reason Danebury has tended to dominate recent studies.

Beyond the Grave: Human Remains from Domestic Contexts in Iron Age Atlantic Scotland

2007 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 113-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Armit ◽  
Victoria Ginn
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Special Treatment ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Southern England ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
The Subject ◽  
A Site

The occurrence of human remains in Iron Age domestic contexts in southern England is well-attested and has been the subject of considerable recent debate. Less well known are the human remains from settlement contexts in other parts of Iron Age Britain. In Atlantic Scotland, human bodies and body parts are found consistently, if in small numbers, in Atlantic roundhouses, wheelhouses, and other settlement forms. Yet these have remained unsynthesised and individual assemblages have tended to be interpreted on a site-specific basis, if at all. Examination of the material as a corpus suggests a complex and evolving set of attitudes to the human body, its display, curation, and disposal, and it is improbable that any single interpretation (such as excarnation, retention of wa r trophies, or display of ancestral relics) will be sufficient. Although the specific practices remain diverse and essentially local, certain concerns appear common to wider areas, and some, for instance the special treatment accorded to the head, have resonances far beyond Iron Age Britain.

Iron Age burial in southern Britain

1977 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 317-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Whimster
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Negative Type ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
South West ◽  
Cultural Implications

Over 45 years have now elapsed since attention was first drawn to an apparent paucity of pre-Roman Iron Age funerary sites in southern Britain (Hawkes and Dunning 1930). This remarkable lacuna, contrasting with a wealth of Bronze Age burial forms, received little further attention until Hodson defined an absence of burials as a ‘negative type-fossil’ of his insular and otherwise prolific Woodbury Culture and emphasized the cultural implications of this uncomfortable gap in the archaeological record (Hodson 1964). With the exception of supposedly intrusive continental disposal forms in restricted areas of Yorkshire and south-eastern England and a third rather hazy rite from the extreme south-west, the British Iron Age was characterized by an embarrassingly invisible method of disposal that could neither be compared nor contrasted with contemporary continental traditions. Although efforts have been made to explain this absence in terms of hypothetical practices that would leave no archaeologically recognizable traces, there have been few attempts to consider in detail the scattered references to human remains that have slowly accumulated in the literature. A reconsideration of this evidence in the light of more recently excavated material suggests that the dearth of funerary remains is to an extent illusory and that further distinctive disposal rituals can now be added to those already recognized. It is also apparent that certain shared characteristics may force a general reconsideration of the origins of these different rites.

The History of the Judahite Bench Tomb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Mortuary Practices ◽  
Iron Age Ii ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Insight Into

The history of the Judahite bench tomb provides important insight into the meaning of mortuary practices, and by extension, death in the Hebrew Bible. The bench tomb appeared in Judah during Iron Age II. Although it included certain burial features that appear earlier in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, such as burial benches, and the use of caves for extramural burials, the Judahite bench tomb uniquely incorporated these features into a specific plan that emulated domestic structures and facilitated multigenerational burials. During the seventh century, and continuing into the sixth, the bench tombs become popular in Jerusalem. The history of this type of burial shows a gradual development of cultural practices that were meant to control death and contain the dead. It is possible to observe within these cultural practices the tomb as a means of constructing identity for both the dead and the living.

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