Regional Approaches to Mortuary Analysis

286 Pages·1995·8.452 MB·English

by  James Brown (auth.), Lane Anderson Beck (eds.)

Regional Approaches to
Mortuary Analysis
INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARCHAEOLOGY
Series Editor: Michael Jochim, University of California, Santa Barbara
Founding Editor: Roy S. Dickens, Jr., Late of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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DIVERSITY AND COMPLEXITY IN PREHISTORIC MARITIME SOCIETIES
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Regional Approaches to
Mortuary Analysis
Edited by
LANE ANDERSON BECK
Florida Museum of Natural History
Gainesville, Florida
Springer Science + Business Media, LLC
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ISBN 978-1-4899-1312-8 ISBN 978-1-4899-1310-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4899-1310-4
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Foreword
Trial and Error in the Study of Mortuary
Practices-Exploring the Regional Dimension
David Clarke ended Analytical Archaeology with a quotation from the philosopher
Francis Bacon: "Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion"
(Clarke 1978:487). There is no better way of learning new methods than by
contemplating old mistakes, and the mistakes that we find most revealing are
those that we have made ourselves. So this foreword is partly autobiographical. I
can best illustrate the potential of a new approach to mortuary practices by
describing the process of trial and error as it has affected my own research.
The meeting that gave rise to this book was the successor to a conference held
in London over 10 years ago and published as The Archaeology of Death (Chapman,
Kinnes, and Randsborg 1981), and it has a number of the same contributors.
Among them is Jim Brown who had edited an equally influential study of this
subject some years before (Brown 1971). As we shall see, his 1981 paper forms a
vital link with the contents of the present volume.
In The Archaeology of Death, I considered some of the changes of mortuary
ritual in the British Bronze Age and argued that these had a wider Significance
(Bradley 1981). Earlier Bronze Age mortuary rites involved the creation of large
mounds, the deposition of individual bodies, and the provision of complex grave
goods. Such burials often took place at prominent natural locations. In the later
phase this changed. Mounds were uncommon, and those that were built were
slighter than their predecessors. Burial was by cremation, and the remains were
placed in ordinary domestic pots. There was virtually no evidence of complex
grave goods, and cemeteries were located alongside settlements and their fields.
There was less emphasis on the individual, and the deposits could be found in
clusters of perhaps 10 to 20 burials.
At the time, I followed conventional wisdom in postulating a direct link
v
vi FOTewoTd
between the amount of differentiation in each series of burials and the structure of
Bronze Age society. The changes that took place between the Earlier and Later
Bronze Ages seemed to reflect a period of social collapse. From a society in which
gradations of wealth and status were emphasized in lasting form, there was a
change to one with less evidence on internal ranking. This, I suggested, might
reflect wider changes in the landscape, where a network of monuments to the dead
gave way to a system of rather uniform settlements, houses, and fields.
But Jim Brown's paper, on the search for rank in prehistoric burials, intro
duced two issues that came to dominate my work over the next 10 years (see
Brown 1981). I must say why my Original analysis now seems incomplete, and, in
particular, why a more subtle approach involves a regional dimension to the study.
Brown's points were straightforward, and, in retrospect, quite devastating.
First, there was the question of formation processes. How far might our observa
tions pick out different stages in the treatment of a single body? We needed to
consider mortuary rites as a process, not an event, and to trace the separate stages
in the rites of passage if we were to avoid the trap of supposing that each deceased
individual entered the archaeological record only once. At the same time, we
needed to broaden the scope of analysis in another way. The individual cemetery
should not represent the entire framework of our studies, as people of different
status might be buried in different places and in different ways. A regional perspec
tive was essential.
It would be dishonest to claim that these ideas led to my immediate
conversion. There was an intermediate stage in which I came to realize that my
arguments for social devolution failed to match the growing complexity of other
parts of the archaeological record. The rarity of bronze objects in cemeteries did
not imply a general absence of fine metalwork. In fact, weapons and ornaments
were made in large quantities, whilst the burials themselves became less frequent
with time. Such weapons were rarely found on occupation sites and were usually
discovered in rivers (Bradley 1990:Chapter 3). There was a second problem too.
From 1980 onwards new kinds of settlements were discovered, in particular a
series of fortified enclosures. These new discoveries had nothing in common with
the settlements found alongside the cremation cemeteries (Needham 1992). The
material associated with these sites is much more varied, and, most significant of
all, mold fragments show that these were among the places where weapons and
ornaments were made. Such evidence suggests a higher tier in the social hierarchy
than we had envisaged before. At first sight we could recognize differentiation in
the settlement pattern, but not in the mortuary sphere.
That is where Brown's arguments set me thinking. Had we been studying only
one aspect of the mortuary ritual and assuming that it represented the whole? We
had analyzed the cremation cemeteries, but were there other phenomena associ
ated with the treatment of the dead? And did these necessarily take place close to
the settlement at all?
Foreword vii
The contrast that I discussed in The Archaeology of Death was based on the
observation that weapons and ornaments were no longer discovered with the
dead. Let us consider the history of these finds. It is easy enough to suggest that
their disappearance from the mortuary record signals a wider social collapse, but
the rate at which they entered the archaeological record may actually have
increased (Bradley 1990:140-141). In fact, objects that would normally have been
buried with the dead changed their contexts from graves to other kinds of deposit,
including watery locations.
The first stage in rethinking the mortuary archaeology of the Bronze Age is to
ask whether some of these supposedly isolated finds actually formed part of the
funerary record. I am not the first person to ask whether the weapon deposits
represent the residue of a mortuary ritual-a kind of high-status "river burial" (see
Torbrugge 1971). The argument is rather tenuous, but it does have test implica
tions. Could human remains be discovered in the same rivers as metalwork?
Would they share the distinctive chronology and distribution of the weapon finds?
And, given the predominance of such weaponry, might we expect to find a
predominance of males?
In collaboration with Ken Gordon, I studied finds from the Thames, the most
prolific source of Bronze Age metalwork. Our results took us by surprise. Hidden
in London's museums, unstudied for nearly a century, were large collections of
human skulls from the river (Bradley and Gordon 1988). Enough had been
recorded to show that they were found in the same campaigns of dredging as the
weaponry and even had the same distribution. A review of the collection showed
that other parts of the body were absent although ordinary animal bones were
frequently recovered. Up to 600 human skulls are recorded from the Thames, of
which nearly 300 survive today. These fall into a restricted age group (there are
virtually no young people) and about 60% of the identifiable skulls are male. It
remained to expose this material to a closer scrutiny by radiocarbon dating. Two
thirds of our sample belong to the Later Bronze Age, precisely the period in which
the river is full of weapons whilst inhumations are absent on dry land.
This only raised another series of questions-questions that had been
anticipated in Jim Brown's paper. There were no mandibles with these finds, so
they must have entered the river as skulls rather than heads, yet none of them
showed any signs of injury. This suggested that certain of the dead had received
preliminary treatment elsewhere, and this required a further look into the
archaeological record. It did not take long to discover that among the finds from
the high-status settlements were small amounts of disarticulated human bone
(Needham 1992). Until recently these had been dismissed as "settlement refuse"
and considered to show a casual attitude to the dead. Now we can ask whether the
bodies of selected individuals had received preliminary treatment in the domestic
sphere.
Not all those bones were of males. Having traced a link between weapon finds
viii Foreword
and human skulls, we can also consider the treatment of bronze ornaments, which
are interpreted as female equipment because the same types are found with
women's skeletons on the Continent. But where weapons changed their associa
tions from burials to water deposits, bronze ornaments are usually found on dry
land. Often they were deposited in sets suggesting the equipment of one individ
ual. Again, the archaeological literature is revealing once it is approached with the
right questions in mind. Ornament sets did not occur with inhumation burials in
Britain, but they have been found with small groups of unburnt bones (Bradley
1990:113). There are no recent discoveries to allow us to analyze this material, but
once again it seems possible that fine metalwork was deposited with unfleshed
human remains.
So by broadening our geographic focus we can bring a series of phenomena
into play that are usually considered in isolation. It is only when we do this that we
become aware of the links between them. Without a regional focus there is nothing
to connect them with mortuary ritual. But having made those connections new
possibilities arise. There are suggestions of high-status funeral rites to set alongside
the undifferentiated cremation cemeteries of my earlier study. In addition to
cremation burials, we now have evidence for a more complex treatment of the
dead, in which some of their bones were taken away from the settlements and
depOsited in special locations together with elaborate metalwork.
But the business of reinterpretation is a continuing process, and it is not at an
end. There are limits to what we can infer from museum collections or early
publications. Once we know what questions to ask, new discoveries can be
revealing. No sooner had we dated the skulls from the Thames than excavation of a
waterlogged site in eastern England revealed a timber "wall" of Later Bronze Age
date leading into open water. With it were numerous metal finds, many of them
showing signs of deliberate damage. There was also a series of isolated human
bones (Pryor 1992). What we had inferred through museum work, we could
demonstrate by excavation.
In each case the moral is the same. By studying settlements as well as
mortuary deposits we can trace an unexpected level of complexity in the treatment
of the dead. And by linking deposits of different kinds-deposits that are often
studied by different specialists-we can start to recognize the full complexity of
ancient mortuary practices and correct earlier misunderstandings of the character
of Bronze Age society. The interpretation that is unfolding suggests much greater
differentiation than I saw 10 years ago, and is also more consistent with the
settlement evidence. My biggest mistake was to work on too small a scale. By
adopting a regional level of analysis I have corrected at least some of my errors, and
I expose them now so that other people can avoid the same mistakes.
I believe that the changes of perspective that I have described here encapsu
late some of the more promising approaches to the archaeology of death during
recent years. This book exemplifies many of those approaches and it provides a
Foreword ix
wealth of detail that British archaeologists are often denied. That is why it is so
welcome.
RICHARD BRADLEY
University of Reading
Reading, England
REFERENCES
Bradley, R., 1981, "Various styles of urns"-Cemeteries and settlements in southern England c. 1400-
1000 Be, in: The Archaeology of Death CR. Chapman, 1. Kinnes, and K. Randsborg, eds.), Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, pp. 93-104.
Bradley, R., 1990, The Passage of Arms, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Bradley, R., and K. Gordon, 1988, Human skulls from the River Thames, their dating and significance,
Antiquity 62:503-509.
Brown, J. A., ed., 1971, Approaches to the Social Dimensions of Mortuary Practices Memoirs of the SOCiety
for American Archaeology 25.
Brown,]. A., 1981, The search for rank in prehistoric burials, in: The Archaeology of Death CR. Chapman,
1. Kinnes, and K. Randsborg, eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 23-37.
Chapman, R., 1. Kinnes, and K. Randsborg, eds., 1981, The Archaeology of Death, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Clarke, D., 1978, Analytical Archaeology, 2nd ed., Methuen, London.
Needham,S., 1992, The structure of settlement and ritual in the Later Bronze Age of south east Britain,
in: [Habitat et [Occupation de Sol a LAge du Bronze en Europe Cc. Mordant and A. Richard, eds.),
Editions du Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, Paris, pp. 49-69.
Pryor, E, ed., 1992, Recent research at Flag Fen, Peterborough, Antiquity 66:439-531.
Torbriigge, W, 1971, Vor - und Friihgeschichtliche Flussfunde, Bericht der Riimisch-Germanischen
Kommission 51-52:1-146.