Symbolism, Social Relations and the Interpretation of Mortuary Remains. By E llen -J ane P ader (original) (raw)
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Archaeology supplement (November 2014)
Aggersborg is the largest of the Danish circular fortresses of the Viking Age. Built by the king, Harald Bluetooth, in the second half of the tenth century, it was strategically placed on the shore of the Limfjord. Together with other Danish fortifications it was intended to play a major role in the politics of northern Europe.
The choice of a very homogeneous corpus (typology, geographic area and chronology -Late Bronze Age (LBA) = 'Bronze final IIIb'-allows to compare the deposits which make it up through the study of forming of the objects, and of the exhaustive components analysis. These investigations highlight, beyond the traditions of bronze work, common of each deposit, an image very different from each set according to the types of objects and elementary composition. Some are heteroclite where each object results of a different operation of casting, others homogeneous, are composed of groups of objects resulting from only one operation of casting. These last observations suggest that the objects had bonds between them before the deposition and kept them. Other similarities of the metal component show bonds between various deposits and let's approach the historical level of deposition phenomenon. Thus the technical investigations represent an additional means to apprehend the hoards and to open a door to their interpretation.
In: D. Hofmann (Hrgs.), Magical, mundane or marginal?: Deposition practices in the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik culture (Leiden 2020) 149-168. , 2020
The question whether an artefact in a burial is a grave good, an artefact intentionally buried with the dead, or was simply accidentally included, has been answered in very different ways by archaeologists. Often, the value one assigns to the object is a decisive factor. In this paper, we try to investigate the formation of burial assemblages from a more neutral starting point, although we are of course not claiming to be free from assumptions. As a working hypothesis we distinguish between the finds from the base of burial pits and those from the fills. While the former should be “structured” in the sense of Richards and Thomas (1984), or more specifically, should display intentionality or indicate a “positive selection” (Eggers 1959), the latter have often been ignored. We conclude that the possible interpretations for pottery and stone artefacts are different and that there is no single deposition scenario that suits all materials. In addition, finds from the fill and the base of burials should be accorded more analytical weight in the future.
European Bronze and Iron Age specialists have pointed out the existence, during these periods, of a dialectical relationship between part of the hoards and the grave goods found in the elite graves. Recent works on this subject suggest that this relationship, as well as the social reality it reflects, is likely to have been already in existence as early as the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. Elite graves can be classified in two distinct categories: graves of local chieftains (Neolithic battle axes bearers, sword bearers from the Middle Bronze Age or the Hallstatt C period…) (G2), and “royal” graves, such as the Maikop Chalcolithic grave or the Hallstatt D/Early La Tène complex Fürstengräber (G1). The same gilts for hoards: H2 hoards contain precious goods (sword, battle axe, adze, and axe), H1 hoards exceptional goods with a sacral dimension (for instance cult wagons). These exceptional goods are common to G1 graves and H1 hoards. Our intention in this article is to try and support the hypotheses that the two couples G1-H1 and G2-H2, and the dialectical relationship between hoards and elite graves already existed in the Neolithic (with the “royal” graves of the Gulf of Morbihan and hoards with axes made of Alpine rocks) and the Chalcolithic. We postulate the existence of an “elite grave and hoard system” that appears as early as the end of the 6th millennium BC in Central Europe and lasts till the end of the first millennium AD, when the non-literary and non-Christian societies of Northern and Eastern Europe collapse. This long-lasting system is part of the visible archaeological traits of the Barbarian Europe as it is described in the antique and Early Medieval texts. After a competition with the other systems during the 5th and 4th millennia BC, it settles down all over the European continent during the 3rd millennium. By structuring the social relationships and the relationship between sacred and policy, it is, in particular, the source of the socio-political cycles which, all over the continent and from the Neolithic to the Early Medieval period, generate the emergence and the rapid fall of numerous royal societies with proto-state features. The examples of the Danubian adze and axe hoards (5100-4500 BC) and the “princely” graves of Mané Er Hroeck, Tumiac and Saint-Michel (southern Brittany, ca. 4500 BC) testify that the emergence of this system is not linked to the main technical innovations of the 5th and 4th millennia. One of them, metallurgy, is on the contrary a secondary product of this system. It is the existence of non-egalitarian societies with endemic competition among the elites which induced the emergence of the main technical innovations. The anthropological womb that our system constitutes is one of the main keys for understanding European late Prehistory. It illustrates its great homogeneity and leaves no place for the idea of an introduction of radically new political and social structures in a period (4th/3rd millennia) a majority of specialists assume to have been the time of arrival of the so-called Indo-European ideology.
2020
Britain is internationally renowned for the high quality and exquisite crafting of its later prehistoric grave goods (c. 4000 BC to AD 43). Many of prehistoric Britain's most impressive artefacts have come from graves. Interred with both inhumations and cremations, they provide some of the most durable and well-preserved insights into personal identity and the prehistoric life-course, yet they also speak of the care shown to the dead by the living, and of people’s relationships with 'things'. Objects matter. This book's title is an intentional play on words. These are objects in burials; but they are also goods, material culture, that must be taken seriously. Within it, we outline the results of the first long-term, large-scale investigation into grave goods during this period, which enables a new level of understanding of mortuary practice and material culture throughout this major period of technological innovation and social transformation. Analysis is structured at a series of different scales, ranging from macro-scale patterning across Britain, to regional explorations of continuity and change, to site-specific histories of practice, to micro-scale analysis of specific graves and the individual objects (and people) within them. We bring these different scales of analysis together in the first ever book focusing specifically on objects and death in later prehistoric Britain. Focusing on six key case study regions, the book innovatively synthesises antiquarian reports, research projects and developer funded excavations. At the same time, it also engages with, and develops, a number of recent theoretical trends within archaeology, including personhood, object biography and materiality, ensuring that it will be of relevance right across the discipline. Its subject matter will also resonate with those working in anthropology, sociology, museology and other areas where death, burial and the role of material culture in people’s lives are key contemporary issues.