ARC 1010 - Disposing of the dead

• Funerary contexts have the potential to reveal insights into burial rights and beliefs of past peoples
• Through examining the dead we learn about the living.
• Funerary contexts inform us about social organisation of past societies – tribal, chiefdom and state-level organisation.
• Burials contain a wealth of social information – but this can be very difficult to interpret.
• Best interpretations incorporate different strands of evidence – biological and funerary, and interpret these with references to the social, political and cultural context.

• Inhumations/ burial – ground, coffin, tombs, caves, houses, walls, boundaries
• Cremation – cremated bone scattered or buried
• Cannibalism – ritual (respect or disrespect), or survival
• Water – rivers or sea
• Excarnation / exposed – ground, platforms, trees, mountain tops, fed to animals, middens
• Preserved – mummification
• Secondary manipulation – recover the remains often to be placed in tomb or buried

Method of disposal will affect the amount of information which may be retrieved from the sample.

• Social status
• Social Identity
• Gender
• Kinship
• Landscapes of death
• Deviant burials
• Royal deaths
• Violence and warfare
• The politics of death

Looking at artefacts and placement of bones, we can discern info about themes represented in graves --> the representation of the person in life according to the living and what they want the grave to say

• Appease forces of nature
• Misfortune – supernatural origin
• Sacrifice made to appease gods
• Ensure good harvest, hunt
• Grant fertility
• Success in war
• Protection for family or community
• Preserve good health & strength
• Not solely human – metal objects, food, animals etc.

NB: mostly used to change the course of an event 

• Lindow Man (found 1984) is the best preserved of the British Bog Bodies
• In his 20s when he died, well built, 1.68 m (5 ft 6 in) tall weight approximately 60 kg.
• In good health, suffered from worms and rheumatism.
• Violent death – blow to the head with an axe, blow to the back (broke a rib), when unconscious garrotted with a cord tied around his neck.
• Throat slit and dropped face down into the bog: killed 3 times with excessive force (ritualistic)
• Shortly before he died Lindow Man had eaten: wholemeal bread, probably unleavened – cooked over a griddle over an open fire
• Made of finely ground wheat and barley
• Drank water from the bog
• Last meal 12-24 hours before he was killed consisted of: gruel made of barely, linseed, ‘gold-of-pleasure’ knotweed and a variety of arable weeds
• Special meal for the condemned or standard fare?
• May have died in winter or early spring – no summer or autumn fruits or leafy vegetables in his stomach 

• Found in 1950
• Male in his 40’s
• Short stature – 5 ft 3 in
• Short cropped hair
• Stubble on jaw
• C14 dates suggest 4th – 3rd century BC
• Discovered lying crouched on his right side
• Head to the west and looking south
• Eyes were closed
• Completely naked apart from a leather cap, a leather belt (can tell because no marks)
• A leather thong noose, made from plaited animal hide, was secured tightly around his neck.
• He had been hanged.

• Found in 2003
• Male, approximately 20-30 years old
• C14 dates suggest 4th – 2nd century BC
• Found in a peat cutting machine
• 3 blows to the head, likely caused by a stone axe
• Large laceration across the nose under the right eye
• Diet rich in vegetables
• Through his hair was a substance made of plant oil and pine resin which was imported from France or south-west Spain indicating trade with the Continent
• ******* cut (high status or king)

• Many individuals have clear evidence of how they died: hanging, strangling, throat cutting, battery with a blunt instrument, decapitation, stabbing and possibly ******* down and drowning
• Several had evidence of more than one of these
• Many were badly beaten
• Excessive violence both before and after death
• Hands and feet indicate that these people had an unusual social status (no callouses, suggesting high status individuals or people raised to be sacrifices)
• Bog bodies tend to be in the taller range of the Iron Age population
• Many are naked or almost naked
• Close association with leather items: capes, armbands, shoes, hats, belts
• Partially shaved heads – impropriety?
• Stuff thrown into bogs, suggests complex ritual tradition to ask for help/intervention/etc. (Cunliffe)

Parker Pearson (1999, 70) suggests that the symbolic geography of the Iron Age dead may have been divided into three realms:

• Worthy dead above, released through fire or excarnation
• Middle world of the living
• Wet underworld of the sacrificial or executed dead who remained untransformed or released from their bodies

Victims of human sacrifice, executions of war captives, social scapegoats, victims of conflict, accidental deaths, outcasts such as witches, shamans or priests

Bog bodies often have physical abnormalities. Were they considered touched by the gods and were imperfect by special.

Raised specifically to be sacrificed?

• Inca period c. 1476-1534 AD.
• 2500 miles – Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, NW Argentina.
• Inca worshipped natural features, including mountains.
• Most revered – ‘apu’ – mountains which were inhabited by mountain deities
• Built small shrines on mountain tops.
• 1500s Spanish priests – sacrificed children to mountain gods
• Preservation: Frozen, Dehydrated by cold, dry mountain air --> Natural mummification
• 20,000 feet (6000 meters) above sea level – at heights challenging to even modern mountain climbers
• Human sacrifice not common but they served a particular need*– animals (especially Ilamas), kumpi (a fine cloth woven from wool), spondylus shells (from the waters off Ecuador). 

• Humans – 6 yrs – adult, mostly teenagers.
• Strangled, necks broken, buried alive, died of exposure
• 'Capac hucha' = children, normally of high status selected to be sacrificed, considered an honour
• Victims – beautiful
• Momentous occasions e.g. death of royal, success in battle, climatic deterioration
• Youth – Cuzco, procession to homeland, sacrificed & buried in mountain cairn
• Sacrificed to 'apu' 

• May be ritual indicating respect (family) or disrespect (enemies), or survival cannibalism.
• Famous cases of survival cannibalism include: Uruguayan rugby team 1972 lost in the Andes who ate others to survive and used Catholocism to justify; the Franklin expedition to the Arctic, departed England in 1845.

• Disarticulated bones, breakage of long bones, and crushing of spongy bones to extract marrow.
• Cut marks at the attachment and insertion points of muscles.
• Burning and pot polishing of bone fragments.
• Disposal pattern residues which are similar to faunal patterns of food preparation. 
• Academics always argue against cannibalism, e.g. Herxheim, Germany (Neolithic site), 

• Human remains from minimum 500 ppl. Likely site contains over 1000 individuals. 
• Linear Pottery culture (LBK), 5500 BC-4500 BC
• A total of 1906 bone fragments, all deposited in a single event
• Remains of 10 individuals (two perinates, one young child, one adolescent and six adults).
• Deposited with the bodies were fragments of pottery from regions 2000 – 3000 km away
• Skinning marks on frontal and left parietal, cutmarks on mandibular ramus, scrapemarks and cutmarks on maxilla, crushing on a scapula, peeling on a rib (peri-mortum)

• The distribution of bones, and their fragmentation patterns indicate human induced breakage according to nutritional content
• Abundant defleshing.
• Similarities with faunal processing.
• Chewing marks which could be due to either humans or carnivores (esp. dogs) have been found near the broken ends of metatarsals, metacarpals, phalanges, and on the olecranon process of the ulna. As these are quite specific elements, seems to indicate human choice rather than animal scavenging

• Survival cannibalism – improbable (too many people represented).
• Funerary cannibalism – as a sign of respect is also improbable given the very large numbers of individuals represented.
• Cannibalism of enemies – This would indicate that raids took place up to several thousand kilometres away.
• Did people travel to Herxheim to take part in ceremonies of a sacrificial nature? (Boulestin et al. 2009, 979)
• Further isotopic research will reveal more about this site. 

• Analysed 60 000 human remains dating from the 1996-1999 excavations
• Large diversity of depositional patterns
• High fragmentation of human remains - >90% affected.
• Selective elements (e.g. mandibles) cannot be missing due to cannibalism
• Smashing of skulls to create skull caps, not to extract the brain.
• Human induced breakage and defleshing are clearly abundant – but do not mean that there was cannibalism practised.
• Cut-marks are evident on 56% of skull caps, but only 1% of long bones.
• Chewing marks cannot be definitely associated with humans – could be carnivores
• Could be secondary burial rites. 

(Orschiedt and Haidle, 2012)

• 1150 CE
• 5MT10010 – pithouses with human remains and coprolites
• Mancos – pithouse with disarticulated remains of 30 individuals 

• This site is a prehistoric Puebloan site in southwestern Colorado. The site dates to c. AD 1150.
• Inhabitation in three pit houses. During, or soon after the abandonment of the site, the bodies of 7 individuals (4 adults, 1 adolescent and 2 sub-adults) were defleshed, disarticulated and cooked – presumably for consumption.
• Incomplete remains were left on the floor in non-burial contexts. 
• Processing of human bones in a similar manner in which animal bones are processed.
• A pot contained residue of human myglobin – a protein found in the human heart and muscle.
• Human coprolite (preserved poo) found unburnt in the fireplace. This contained the human myglobin protein indicating that flesh has been consumed, but interestingly no plant remains.
• Definitive evidence of at least one case of cannibalism. 

• Deviant burials are non-normative or atypical burials – they differ from the burial tradition of the culture.
• The term ‘deviant’ should not necessarily have negative connotations.
• Reynolds (2009) suggests that: battle, judicial execution, superstition, suicide, homicide, massacre, plague and sacrifice may all lead to deviant burials.
• Social agency – the idea that the dead still play a role in the lives of the living for a period after their death.
• Revenant is someone who returns from the dead, they are often given different names in different cultures, ghosts, vampires, zombies, ghouls etc.

• Predisposition (different/unpopular, sinner, suicide, refusal to be buried in consecrated ground)
• Predestination (no fault of own: conceived during holy period, illegitimate, 7th child, birth defects)
• Events – things that happen to people and things they do (fiction - bitten by revenant on neck, folklore - bitten on thorax, 1st to die of epidemic)
• Nonevents – things that are left undone (funerary practice: corpse should not be left unattended therefore ppl who die in battles or plagues = lots of unattended dead, thr4 revenants)

• Mutilation of corpse, physical restraints, various funerary rites, deception to trick spirits.
• Objects:
  • Kashubes, W. Prussia – potsherd/coin/dirt in mouth – prevent corpse chewing.
  • Romania – candle, coin, towel.
  • Bulgaria – Lighted candle placed at head or in hands of sick person.
  • E. Serbia – small hawthorn peg in grave.
  • Romania – Incense in nose, eyes, ears.
  • Bulgaria – Millet & garlic in nose, eyes, ears
  • Slavs - Thorns unsertred unter the tongue to prevent vampires sucking blood
  • Romania - vampires get a needle in naval/heart or red hot skewer/stake in heart
• Potential vampires buried face-down to stop them biting their way out of the ground

• 333 well preserved human remains
• Individuals buried in a supine and extended position, westeast orientation.
• May have been used for epidemics as well as for normal burials.
• Pagan beliefs may have existed alongside Christian beliefs as long as Christian rituals were maintained.
• At Drawsko 1 – there are 6 deviant burials which have been identified as graves with anti-vampiristic alterations:
  • 1/6 sickle at neck (16-19 y/o female) coin on R of body
  • 2/6 sickle across abdomen and stone under chin

• Preventative action – no evidence of secondary disturbance, so these preventative measures were put in place when the individuals were buried.
• Included in the cemetery – not segregated in geographical placement
• Maintain social order, Catholic church did not deny the presence of vampire.
• Evilness of vampires provided a good contrast for the goodness of the church.
• By promoting this idea, people were less likely to deviate from expected behaviours.
• Apotropaic grave inclusions such as coins, indicate a lasting concern for the dead. 
• Christians happy for alterations to take place

• 8 th century.
• 2 males – 40-60yrs; 20-30 yrs.
• Buried beside each other although not at same time in Christian burial site
• Both had large rock wedged in mouth in peri-mortem period – so potentially quite abusive to corpse.
• Mouth portal to soul – fear? Evidence in Venice as well 
• Dangerous criminals?
• Disease, plague?
• Pre-date folklore evidence in Ireland of revenants 
• Not excluded from community but treated differently 

• Contextual analysis of human remains can provide a great deal of information about the dead, but also about the living and their beliefs.
• It is difficult to interpret the archaeological record – and so you need to examine all available evidence. It is important to consider both the biological remains and the cultural context.