Boat-rivets in Graves in pre-Viking Kent: Reassessing Anglo-Saxon Boat-burial Traditions (original) (raw)

2007, Medieval Archaeology

THE IDENTIFICATION of a number of clench-nails and roves in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries suggest the deliberate deposition of boat fragments and tokens in burial. The distribution of this practice, centred on 6th-to early 7th-century Kent, contrasts with that of the more commonly discussed form of boat-burial known particularly from 7th-century East Anglia. In this paper the characteristics of this burial rite are considered from a number of identified examples to provide for a preliminary typology of 'pseudo-boat-burials' and rove-graves. In conclusion, an interpretation is offered to account for their use in early Anglo-Saxon England, and the preferential deposition in Kent. Among the wide diversity of Anglo-Saxon mortuary rites the symbolic use of burial-ships represents both the most iconographic and elusive of customs. Despite discovery nearly 70 years ago, the most famous example of Anglo-Saxon burial, that of the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship-grave (Suffolk), still has only a handful of comparable finds in England. Of these, it is really only two, Sutton Hoo Mound 2 and Snape 1 (Suffolk), which provide evidence of anything like the same monumental deposition of an entire ocean-going vessel. The remaining corpus of boat-burials falls into two broadly defined groups: one comprising burial in much smaller craft, usually of the dugout logboat variety, and another characterised by the inclusion of boat timbers or parts of boats within the grave, often as biers or covers for the interred. This second group have sometimes been called 'pseudo-boat-burials', after Charles Green, who first drew attention to their sporadic occurrence in pre-Viking contexts. 1 Burials of the first group have a number of contemporary, or near contemporary, parallels in northern Europe. In southern Scandinavia, in particular, the adoption of boat-burial appears to have been much more widespread and