Diachronic variation in secondary burial practices in Bronze and Iron Age Moravia

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 460-471
Author(s):  
Anna Pankowská
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Secondary Burial

Conclusion: A Sense of Place

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Harding
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Funerary Monuments ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Local Landmark ◽  
Social Expression ◽  
Significant Measure

It has often been supposed that the Anglo-Saxon poet lamenting the passing of an heroic society was referring to the ruins of Roman walls, for some reason decorated with serpentiform designs. But it seems more likely that the walls in question were those of an older order altogether, the grass-covered ramparts of a long-abandoned hillfort, winding serpent-like around the contours of a conspicuous local landmark like the Lambton Worm of Wearside folklore. However derelict, such sites must have retained a sense of place that heightened in collective memory the importance of people and events that were associated with them. Archaeology by convention characterizes ancient societies on the basis of the artefacts that they leave behind, whether structural and monumental, or portable and ephemeral. What survives will depend in significant measure upon the durability of material or construction, and upon a variety of taphonomic and environmental factors relating to the deposit or residual context. It will also self-evidently depend upon what communities chose to create and to leave behind, since artefacts are essentially proxy expressions of what they regarded as important, reflecting not just a basic utility but something of the identity and social values of the makers. As hillforts are the most substantial, monumental constructions of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age communities in north Alpine Europe, exceeding in scale even funerary monuments of those local groups that created lasting memorials to the dead, we may infer that they were the most potent expression of what mattered to the communities that built them. One of the recurrent frustrations of archaeology is that for periods or regions in which settlement remains are well represented, burial sites can prove elusive, and vice versa. What appears to be an exasperating demonstration of Murphy's Law nevertheless must have a significant explanation. In effect, some communities leave a mark predominantly in terms of settlement remains and others predominantly in funerary monuments. Diepeveen- Jansen (2007: 385) observed that in the Iron Age of the Marne-Moselle region, ‘the use of hillforts alternates with the employment of increasingly ostentatious burial practices’ (my emphasis), with the implication that this must reflect a meaningful shift in social expression.

scholarly journals ‘Tuesday Morning’, the schoolboy and Mann

2020 ◽  
Vol 149 ◽  
pp. 115-129
Author(s):  
Nyree Finlay ◽  
Ruby Cerón-Carrasco ◽  
Paul Duffy ◽  
Adrián Maldonado ◽  
Dene Wright
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Tuesday Morning ◽  
South West ◽  
Tuesday Afternoon ◽  
Processing Site ◽  
Burial Rites ◽  
Insight Into

The rediscovery of human remains, correspondence and other unpublished excavation archival material in the Glasgow Museums collection of Ludovic McLellan Mann prompted the reappraisal of a short archaeological investigation undertaken in April 1931 at Holm Park, near Ballantrae, Ayrshire, by a schoolboy, Eric French and his biology teacher, William Hoyland. This article offers a re-evaluation of their fieldwork which exposed two inhumation burials, named ‘Tuesday Morning’ and ‘Tuesday Afternoon’. Eight dog whelk shells remain from an overlying diffuse shell midden spread that may reflect the remnants of a dye-processing site. The skeletons and marine shells went on temporary display at Bryanston School, Dorset. The area south of Ballantrae is well known for prehistoric flint scatter sites and the finds presented the intriguing possibility that the burials might be Mesolithic in age, the excavators believing they might even be Palaeolithic. A collection of flint cores, initially associated with the archive, now appears unrelated to this excavation for it was found with a note written by a local lithic collector, William Edgar. New osteological analysis confirmed the presence of at least two adult individuals, and one bone sample returned an early medieval radiocarbon date. This evidence contributes to national understandings of early historic burial practices in unenclosed cemeteries during the transition from Iron Age pagan to Christian burial rites, important given the paucity of 1st millennium evidence in south-west Scotland. It also offers insight into an earlier account of multiple inhumation burials, found in the general vicinity in 1879, although aspects of the precise location and relationship between the two discoveries is currently unresolved. Mann’s correspondence with French’s father, a prominent Glasgow industrialist, and with Hoyland reveals the character of archaeological social networks in western Scotland during the 1930s which have been a neglected aspect of research to date. Canmore ID 60957 Canmore ID 60935 Canmore ID 275902

The Eastern Baltic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valter Lang
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Entire Region ◽  
Baltic Region ◽  
The South ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
South West ◽  
The Baltic

This chapter examines Iron Age funerary and domestic archaeological sites, and economic and cultural developments from c.500 BC–AD 550/600, in the east Baltic region (present day Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). While the early pre-Roman Iron Age was to some extent a continuation of the late Bronze Age in material culture terms, many changes took place in the late pre-Roman Iron Age. At the change of era, new cultural trends spread over the east Baltic region, from the south-eastern shore of the Baltic to south-west Finland, which produced a remarkable unification of material culture over this entire region up to the Migration period. Differences in burial practices and ceramics, however, indicate the existence of two distinct ethnic groups, Proto-Finnic in the northern part of the region and Proto-Baltic to the south. Subsistence was based principally on agriculture and stock rearing, with minor variations in the economic orientation of different areas.

“Let the Dead Bury Their Own Dead”; Secondary Burial and Matt 8:21–22

1990 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byron R. McCane
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
First Century ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Secondary Burial

New Testament interpreters have long puzzled over the meaning of the saying, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22; Luke 9:60), and although many ingenious solutions have been proposed, none has been generally convincing. It is surprising that Jewish burial practices have not been brought into this discussion. For the burial practices of first-century Jews in Palestine are well known: many tombs have been carefully excavated, and several rabbinic texts explicitly discuss the care of the dead. Yet this information has never (to my knowledge) been brought to bear on Matt 8:21–22. In this paper, I propose that secondary burial, a widespread burial custom among Jews in first-century Palestine, can solve the riddle of these verses. Against the background of secondary burial, both the meaning of the disciple's question and the force of Jesus' response become clear. In particular, it is not necessary to suppose, as many interpreters do, that Jesus was talking about the “spiritually” dead. On the contrary, if the references to the dead are taken literally, the saying sounds both ironic and eschatological.

Pits and Post-holes in the British Early Iron Age: some alternative explanations

1971 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Ellison ◽  
Peter Drewett
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Type Site ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Post Hole ◽  
Ways Of Life

From ethnography and social anthropology ‘the prehistorian learns how particular peoples adapt themselves to their environments, and shape their resources to the ways of life demanded by their own cultures: he thus gains a knowledge of alternate methods of solving problems and often of alternative ways of explaining artefacts resembling those he recovers in antiquity. Study of ethnography will not as a rule … give him straight answers to his queries. What it will do is to provide him with hypotheses in the light of which he can resume his attack on the raw materials of his study’ (Clark, 1957, 172). Such a controlled use of ethnographic parallels has recently been applied successfully in the spheres of art and burial practices (e.g. Ucko, 1969, 262 and references there cited) but not as yet to the study of prehistoric settlement patterns or economy. In this paper it is hoped to show how the consideration of ethnographic parallels can help us to reach some possible alternative interpretations of two classes of excavated evidence: the pits and the two-, four-, five- and six-post-hole structures found mainly on Lowland Zone Iron Age settlements in Britain. These, usually interpreted in the literature as storage pits, ‘drying-racks’ and ‘granaries’ have been taken to be characteristic features of the ‘Woodbury Type’ economy of the earlier pre-Roman Iron Age in the Lowland Zone (Piggott, 1958, 3–4 and Bowen, 1969, 13–5), bearing in mind that ‘the type site must be clearly distinguished from the economy, and the economy itself seems to have been as variable as possible within the rather narrow Iron Age technical limits, (Bowen, 1969, 13).

scholarly journals Connective Tissue: Embracing Fluidity and Subverting Boundaries in European Iron Age and Roman Provincial Images

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 351
Author(s):  
Miranda Aldhouse-Green
Keyword(s):  
Connective Tissue ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Animal Species ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Animal Imagery ◽  
The Times

There is a mounting body of evidence for somatic exchange in burial practices within later British prehistory. The title of the present paper was sparked by a recent article in The Times (Tuesday 1 September 2020), which contained a description of human bone curation and body mingling clearly present in certain Bronze Age funerary depositional rituals. The practice of mixing up bodies has been identified at several broadly coeval sites, a prime example being Cladh Hallan in the Scottish Hebrides, where body parts from different individuals were deliberately mingled, not just somatically but also chronologically. This paper’s arguments rest upon the premise that somatic boundary crossing is reflected in Iron Age and later art, especially in the blending of human and animal imagery and of one animal species with another. Such themes are endemic in La Tène decorative metalwork and in western Roman provincial sacred imagery. It is possible, indeed likely, that such fluidity is associated with deliberate subversion of nature and with the presentation of ‘shamanism’ in its broadest sense. Breaking ‘natural’ rules and orders introduces edge blurring between material and spiritual worlds, representing, perhaps, the ability of certain individuals (shamans) to break free from human-scapes and to wander within the realms of the divine.

A 5th CenturybcIron Age Chariot Burial from Newbridge, Edinburgh

2010 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 31-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Carter ◽  
Fraser Hunter ◽  
Andrea Smith ◽  
Mhairi Hastie ◽  
Steven Lancaster ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Burial Mound ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Construction Techniques ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Bronze Age

The remains of the first Iron Age chariot burial in Britain outside Yorkshire were discovered during the winter of 2000–1, near the Bronze Age burial mound of Huly Hill, at Newbridge, Edinburgh. Excavated by Headland Archaeology (UK) Ltd with the assistance of the National Museums Scotland, the chariot proved unique beyond just its burial location. The Newbridge chariot was buried intact, a method consistent with the burial practices of Continental Europe rather than Yorkshire, where they were predominantly buried disassembled. Detailed post-excavation analysis revealed a history of repair and reuse, and construction techniques that indicate links with the chariot building traditions of both Yorkshire and Continental Europe. Fifth centurybcradiocarbon dates for the burial place it firmly within La Tène A, consistent with its similarities to European examples and indicating that it pre-dates the known Yorkshire examples. This indicates the emergence of a British tradition of chariot construction by this time, familiar with Continental habits and technology but distinctively different in such areas as wheel construction and suspension fittings. Based on the findings, a reconstruction of the chariot was built for display in the National Museums Scotland, providing an opportunity further to understand and confirm the construction techniques observed or hypothesised during excavation.

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