Poster Session 1-La regola dell'eccezione. La morte atipica, il defunto atipico, il rito atipico. (original) (raw)

Forthcoming in V. Nizzo (ed.), Archaeology and Anthropology of Death, Rome 2016

Located in the ruins of a deserted Roman villa in rural Umbria, there was an infant cemetery containing 47 burials of infants, from prenatal to 2-3 years, that has been termed an «abnormal cemetery» by its excavator, David Soren. The infants had been interred over a brief period about A.D. 450, as a result of a malaria epidemic. Associated with this mass grave were 13 puppies, most of them dismembered, the skeleton of a toad, and a raven's talon. Two stones had been placed over the hands of the oldest child in the cemetery while his feet had been 'weighed down' by a large roof tile. The archaeological record has been interpreted as evidence of apotropaic magical practices, stimulated partly by fear of fatal disease, partly by necrophobia. By contrast, the interments of the youngest children, mostly fetuses, had the character of discardsas the excavator called it -, with almost no attention given to burial form and no significant offerings. Using this record as a starting point, the paper will address the following questions: What exactly makes a burial a «deviant» one? Is there really anything like a «normative» or «typical» burial, an identical code of ritual for all members of a given community, regardless of factors such as gender, age, social and legal status, circumstances of death, etc.? And if there are different kinds of burial in one and the same community, which one should be considered the typical one? The burial of an adult male belonging to the elite and having died a peaceful death? And all other members of the community would have been buried in deviant ways? Acting as a kind of advocatus diaboli, this paper will argue for a reconsideration of terms like «atypical death» or «deviant burial», asking if it wouldn't be more fitting to talk about «adequate burials», i. e. adequate for a given individual and given circumstances of death. After establishing that, the kind of burial given to an individual still could be used as evidence for his or her place/status in society.