Belt Buckles and Burials in Southwestern Gaul

Objects recovered through mortuary archaeology are often incomplete, and yet they are presented as whole. In particular, items of personal adornment appear in illustrations or photographs either in a restored form or with outlines indicating what would or should have completed the items. Fragmentation, as such, is explained away as the result of degradative processes or of grave robbing. In the case of the ornate belt buckles of fifth- to seventh-century southern Gaul, the relative frequency of apparently intentionally broken objects invites further investigation. As part of the memorialization process, fragments of belt sets may have at once drawn a line between the deceased and those responsible for their burial, as well as serving as public proclamations of familial alliances that surviving kin claimed through the dead. Focusing on fragmentation as an intentional act likewise opens new possibilities for understanding the means by which objects of personal adornment moved across regions. While objects did not move without the intervention of people, the presence of incomplete belt sets in southern Gallic graves implies that belt sets circulated as a means of forming networks of allegiance.

The Odd, the Unusual, and the Strange

While death and dying are universal, the treatment of the dead is culturally and temporally specific, highlighting the influence of both the deceased individual and the living community within the mortuary process. This volume focuses specifically on non-normative or atypical mortuary practices situated within a contextually driven understanding of social and cultural norms surrounding the process of interment. Each chapter compares and contrasts the various elements of these mortuary treatments (e.g., body position, body orientation, artifact inclusion) and how they may represent specific ideological and/or cultural notions of identity and personhood after death (e.g., age, sex, gender, status, health). Care is taken to avoid simple binary classifications of “typical” and “atypical” by considering the range of mortuary treatments that characterize each society. Drawing on examples from North and South America, Europe, and Asia, this comprehensive volume stresses the commonality between non-normative or atypical treatments spanning millennia. Additionally, this volume strives to employ a holistic understanding of non-normative burials both in terms of assessing the significance and interpretation of individual cases of atypical interments, as well as to better understand the overall phenomenon of these mortuary practices, which continue to be the source of fascination and debate within mortuary archaeology.

Afterword

It is both a pleasure and a privilege to be asked to write an afterword to a collection of essays concerning a topic that for many years has lain at the core of my interests in the behavior of past societies. When, in the early 1990s, I first embarked on the study of deviant burials—and more on that particular turn of phrase in a moment—mortuary archaeology writ large had shifted in its emphasis from the descriptive and typological approaches that had typified its early development, through concerns about hierarchy and ranking, and had turned increasingly to nuanced social considerations. Life cycle and gender, illness and care, among other topics, steadily grew in importance as worthy of study. Twenty-five or so years ago, however, descriptions of people at the fringes of their respective societies were hard to find in the archaeological literature: “otherness” as a concept materialized in the burial record was largely unexplored beyond a few graphically spectacular and deeply intriguing finds, such as the northern European bog-bodies or the Andean mummified children....

‘Hier wil ik nog niet dood gevonden worden’. Bespiegelingen over de absentie van graven

Dead and gone: On the absence of graves. Every now and then, archaeologists come across periods or regions that seem to lack graves. Instead of addressing these absences, researchers often resort one of several standard explanations, such as “We haven’t found the burial location yet” or “Apparently, these people employed ways of disposal that cannot be traced in the archaeological record”. While such observations are entirely justifiable, they also leave many unaddressed questions. Did this society opt for archaeologically invisible ways of disposal of their loved ones? Why are these graves missing? Case studies from our PhD projects on mortuary archaeology, relating, respectively, to the Bronze Age in Greece and the Iron Age in northwestern Europe, aim to investigate such questions. Whereas archaeologists are generally reluctant to interpret “non-data”, we pose that the absence of graves also provides invaluable clues as to how people perceived life and death in prehistoric societies.

The Justinianic Plague: An inconsequential pandemic?

Existing mortality estimates assert that the Justinianic Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE) caused tens of millions of deaths throughout the Mediterranean world and Europe, helping to end antiquity and start the Middle Ages. In this article, we argue that this paradigm does not fit the evidence. We examine a series of independent quantitative and qualitative datasets that are directly or indirectly linked to demographic and economic trends during this two-century period: Written sources, legislation, coinage, papyri, inscriptions, pollen, ancient DNA, and mortuary archaeology. Individually or together, they fail to support the maximalist paradigm: None has a clear independent link to plague outbreaks and none supports maximalist reconstructions of late antique plague. Instead of large-scale, disruptive mortality, when contextualized and examined together, the datasets suggest continuity across the plague period. Although demographic, economic, and political changes continued between the 6th and 8th centuries, the evidence does not support the now commonplace claim that the Justinianic Plague was a primary causal factor of them.

The Elders of Early Dilmun

This chapter draws on bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology to investigate three adult men in a brief case study from Early Dilmun, a Bronze Age polity that spanned the western edge of the Arabian/Persian Gulf at the end of the third and the beginning of the second millennium BCE. We draw our evidence from the Peter B. Cornwall Collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Cornwall (1913–1972) excavated this evidence from Bahrain during his expedition to the region in 1940 and 1941. Cornwall later analyzed these mortuary contexts in several works—including his doctoral dissertation and a handful of articles—and then eventually deposited the skeletal remains and objects in the Hearst Museum. Since 2008, we have been analyzing and publishing materials from this collection under the auspices of the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project. Using this evidence, we demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of investigating masculinity in one specific ancient Near Eastern society.

A Path Forward to an Integrated Study of Bioarchaeology in Southeastern Arabia

This chapter provides an introduction and brief overview on major themes in mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology in southeastern Arabia. This context sets the stage for the subsequent chapters, which focus on identification of transitions in mortuary practice and bioarchaeological inquiry in this region.