Ritual sites, offerings, and sacrifice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Armit
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Individual Household ◽  
Ritual Activity ◽  
La Tene ◽  
The Individual

This chapter examines the disparate scales of ritual deposition in Iron Age Europe, from the individual/household to the wider region. It explores commonalities underlying different practices, including the pervasive interest in human remains, the deployment of ritualized violence, the formalization of religious practice, and the roles of natural, domestic, and monumental spaces. The Iron Age is notable for the ritualization of domestic life, with certain objects, including human body parts, deposited in houses. Watery places provided another focus; bodies showing heavily ritualized treatments have been found in bogs from Scandinavia to Ireland. From the middle La Tène period, more formal cult centres appear, some as foci for deposition on an enormous scale. Elsewhere, as in Ireland, ritual activity focused on ‘ancestral’ landscapes. Motivations behind acts of deposition are difficult to ascertain, but the material residues suggest a widespread concern with sacrifice as a means of securing benefits for the community.

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.

Defining the Individual

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Sharples
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Soil Layer ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Human Bone ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Left Femur ◽  
Southern England ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

During the 1985 excavation at Maiden Castle (Sharples 1991a), a large grain storage pit cut into the back of the rampart of the Early Iron Age hillfort was excavated. About half way down the fill of that pit the left femur of a mature adult was exposed. This bone was lying in a relatively sterile soil layer and it was not marked by any special finds or careful constructions; in many respects it could easily be dismissed as a discovery with little significance. Fifty years ago such bones would have been regarded as accidental losses, simply rubbish conveniently disposed of in a handy receptacle. It could be an indication that excarnation was the general means of disposal and that this occurred close to or actually inside settlements, but it might also indicate the accidental disturbance of human remains in graves located at the hillfort. In recent years we have come to understand that these deposits are much more significant. A number of archaeologists (Whimster 1981; C. Wilson 1981; Cunliffe 1992) came to realize that the presence of human remains on Iron Age settlements was a distinct cultural tradition characteristic of central southern England. The work of J. D. Hill (1995b) has enhanced our understanding of this phenomenon by emphasizing that the deposition of human remains is part of a complex suite of actions which involves the arrangement of different categories of material in carefully placed deposits. The process of deposition was clearly intimately involved in the definition of social relationships in the Iron Age of central southern England. It is difficult to imagine that if we, as archaeologists, could immediately recognize a human bone, our ancient pit diggers could not. The placement of this bone was a deliberate act, and the location of this deposit was carefully chosen. Hill (1995b) has shown that these pit deposits were carefully structured. Human remains are normally found in layers that are largely sterile, but a pit chosen for the deposition of human bone will normally have fills containing other carefully selected deposits. These mark the pit as a bank of socially constructed material.

Bodies Transformed: Negotiations of Identity in Chalcolithic Cyprus

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsi O. Lorentz
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual

This paper focuses on how the human body, and the dead body in particular, was used to create social categories and identities in prehistoric Cyprus. Specifically, it explores how a particular condition, such as death, was integrated into social processes, and how the treatment of dead bodies both created and reinforced social categories and identities. The material the paper focuses on is the mortuary evidence from Chalcolithic Cyprus (3800–2300 BC). In particular, it argues that the extensive, intentional manipulation of dead bodies and human remains visible in Cypriot Chalcolithic cemeteries was aimed at integrating the individual to communal, collective wholes on the occasion of death and during the time period that followed.

Iron Age Square Enclosures in Rhineland

Antiquity ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 36 (143) ◽  
pp. 175-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. V. Decker ◽  
I. Scollar
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
The South ◽  
Individual Family ◽  
La Tène ◽  
La Tene ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First Time

Banked and ditched rectangular burial enclosures, called ‘Grabgärten’ (grave garden, literally) by the local folk, are found frequently in the southern Rhineland, with distribution centred on the south east Eifel, the Rhine-Moselle junction and the northern part of the Hunsriick mountains. All examples known to us up to the time of writing are plotted on the map (FIG. I).Within these enclosures are found incineration burials, either in urns, pits or stone cists made of schist slabs, or simply a scatter of bones in a pit. In some cases post holes which have been found may belong, by analogy with finds in Champagne, to mortuary houses, cult stelae or the like. Chronologically, the enclosures in the Rhineland fall partly in the late La Tène period, but the majority are early Roman Imperial in date. Inasmuch as the origin of these enclosures, due to the paucity of data, is still unclear, it is not possible to comment on that aspect of the question.In the fifties of the last century attention was paid to these earthworks for the first time by von Cohausen, though he misinterpreted them as Roman fortifications. Half a century later, R. Bodewig recognized that the ‘Grabgärten’ which he excavated in the Koblenz municipal forest were flat graves, and he contrasted them with the round barrows which often accompanied them. He considered them to be the individual family burial plots of the Treveri, a view which the present writers support?

The Walbrook skulls

2021 ◽  
pp. 248-256
Author(s):  
Dominic Perring
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
The Road ◽  
The North ◽  
North Side ◽  
War Dead ◽  
Corpse Abuse ◽  
The City

Many disturbed burials, including the river-rolled crania known to archaeology as the Walbrook skulls, are dated to the period following the rebuilding of London after the Hadrianic fire. This rebuilding involved the construction of a new road on the north side of the city which may have connected London with a ford over the river Fleet near King’s Cross. The road was built over partly articulated human body parts, and subsequently attracted a cemetery that included instances of execution and corpse abuse. Hundreds of reworked human crania have been found in waterlogged contexts where this road bridged the Walbrook and at other locations in the Hadrianic city. Various ideas accounting for this evidence are reviewed. Drawing on ancient sources and ethnographic parallels it is suggested that some of the remains were war dead and the victims of retributive violence, subjected to post-mortem corpse abuse, denial of burial leading to body fragmentation, and dedication to watery places on liminal locations in necrophobic ritual. The intensification of such practices in Hadrianic London may have been occasioned by a war that destroyed the city c. AD 125/126. Some of the partially articulated human remains might even mark the site of a battlefield or execution ground.

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.

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.

A Medieval Burial from Graham Street, Leith, Edinburgh

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-169
Author(s):  
Paul R. J. Duffy ◽  
Olivia Lelong
Keyword(s):  
Contextual Information ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Housing Development ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Archaeological Excavation ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
Physical Evidence ◽  
Research Division ◽  
The North ◽  
The Individual

Summary An archaeological excavation was carried out at Graham Street, Leith, Edinburgh by Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division (GUARD) as part of the Historic Scotland Human Remains Call-off Contract following the discovery of human remains during machine excavation of a foundation trench for a new housing development. Excavation demonstrated that the burial was that of a young adult male who had been interred in a supine position with his head orientated towards the north. Radiocarbon dates obtained from a right tibia suggest the individual died between the 15th and 17th centuries AD. Little contextual information exists in documentary or cartographic sources to supplement this scant physical evidence. Accordingly, it is difficult to further refine the context of burial, although a possible link with a historically attested siege or a plague cannot be discounted.

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION ON DISASTER PREPAREDNESS CASE STUDY OF 2012 INDIAN OCEAN EARTHQUAKES ON THAILAND’S

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raya Muttarak ◽  
Wiraporn Pothisiri
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Emergency Preparedness ◽  
Disaster Preparedness ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Disaster Experience ◽  
Individual Household ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Individual

In this paper we investigate how well residents of the Andaman coast in Phang Nga province, Thailand, are prepared for earthquakes and tsunami. It is hypothesized that formal education can promote disaster preparedness because education enhances individual cognitive and learning skills, as well as access to information. A survey was conducted of 557 households in the areas that received tsunami warnings following the Indian Ocean earthquakes on 11 April 2012. Interviews were carried out during the period of numerous aftershocks, which put residents in the region on high alert. The respondents were asked what emergency preparedness measures they had taken following the 11 April earthquakes. Using the partial proportional odds model, the paper investigates determinants of personal disaster preparedness measured as the number of preparedness actions taken. Controlling for village effects, we find that formal education, measured at the individual, household, and community levels, has a positive relationship with taking preparedness measures. For the survey group without past disaster experience, the education level of household members is positively related to disaster preparedness. The findings also show that disaster related training is most effective for individuals with high educational attainment. Furthermore, living in a community with a higher proportion of women who have at least a secondary education increases the likelihood of disaster preparedness. In conclusion, we found that formal education can increase disaster preparedness and reduce vulnerability to natural hazards.

Study on Pramana Shareera in relation to Prakriti

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajendra Pai N. ◽  
U. Govindaraju
Keyword(s):  
Observational Study ◽  
Upper Limb ◽  
Lower Limb ◽  
Characteristic Property ◽  
The Body ◽  
Artificial Limbs ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Unit Of Measurement ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Parts

Ayurveda in its principle has given importance to individualistic approach rather than generalize. Application of this examination can be clearly seem like even though two patients suffering from same disease, the treatment modality may change depending upon the results of Dashvidha Pariksha. Prakruti and Pramana both used in Dashvidha Pariksha. Both determine the health of the individual and Bala (strength) of Rogi (Patient). Ayurveda followed Swa-angula Pramana as the unit of measurement for measuring the different parts of the body which is prime step assessing patient before treatment. Sushruta and Charaka had stated different Angula Pramana of each Pratyanga (body parts). Specificity is the characteristic property of Swa-angula Pramana. This can be applicable in present era for example artificial limbs. A scientific research includes collection, compilation, analysis and lastly scrutiny of entire findings to arrive at a conclusion. Study of Pramana and its relation with Prakruti was conducted in 1000 volunteers using Prakruti Parkishan proforma with an objective of evaluation of Anguli Pramana in various Prakriti. It was observed co-relating Pramana in each Prakruti and Granthokta Pramana that there is no vast difference in measurement of head, upper limb and lower limb. The observational study shows closer relation of features with classical texts.

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