Art Of Death Flashcards
What are the 2 main categories of evidence for burials?
Excavations of tombs and markers of these tombs
What biases are found in the distribution of excavated tombs?
Biases are found in distribution, region, date and setting
Outline the biases associated with the relationship between excavation and modern economic development.
Has caused a bias in our knowledge of funerary practices since burials in the South-east and urban Britain predominate excavation. This is partly to do with modern excavation priorities as well as the development of infrastructure and buildings. Also, no single region has sufficient excavated evidence to show differences of burials between different types of settlements which compromises the understanding of Romano-British societies where heirarchies are unlikely to be represented in a cemetery of a single community
What is the issue with date?
After late antiquity there is an increase in inhumation rather than cremation. This reflects the changing nature of treatment of the dead
What is the issue with different settlements?
There is a higher number of burials in towns than rural settings. This reflects excavating biases as well as the specific funerary practices
What is understood by the landscape context?
This is a consideration of the relationship between the living and dead. How did the impact of the Roman invasion change the emphasis of the relationship
Outline the advantages of evidence of skeletal remains
Osteological and biomolecular analysis can help identify individual attributions and biographies as well as characterisations of the larger population.
Using dietary stable isotopes, analysis of chemical remind of foodstuff in the skeletal tissue can help show the jet of the person throughout their life as well as associate them with a particular area based on the food consumed
Outline the uses and problems of ritual remains
Ritual remains are very diverse, with inclusion of grave goods an containers. However it is heavily biased towards inorganic materials like ceramic. If a person is buried wearing a yoga, this is very unlikely to have survived and so there is a slew over remnants
Outline the uses and problems of epitaphs and monumental evidence
Epitaphs and monumental evidence show outward markers of graves as well as the status of the buried. However they are very skewed towards military sites although there is little excavated evidence of such sites. This is due to reacquisition and spoliation of such inscriptions and so many are decontextualised. The repurposing of materials in churches and castles means no epitaphs are left in situ
Outline the approach to the study of funerary evidence of ‘oddities’
Oddities looks at the sensational like Ian Morris’s work on both Roman and Greek graves. It tends to focus on anomalies and of graves with an emphasis of violence. An example of this is decapitation with contention over pre and post mortem work
Outline the traditional intellectualist approach
Discussion around the 1970s and 80s focused on using the wider sources to extrapolate meaning from the material remains. They had a focus on the advent of Christianity and eschatology of graves. However, when looking at more accessible sources from Rome, there appears to be a wide variety of interpretations of the afterlife and so while burial rituals between Rome and Britain appeared similar, such beliefs cannot be extrapolated from the burial practices
Outline the traditional cultural-historical approach
This approach entailed relating certain burial styles with certain groups. An example of this is episodes of violence between the Germanic tribes in Britain during the Germain insurgencies along the Empire boarders in the 4th century. Archaeologists looked for graves and broaches to associate with the Germain presence however biomolecular analysis has undermined this approach since the geographical origins of the Germans in Britain and their burials do not match those of a geographical on continental Europe
Name the revisionist strand that has replaced the traditional intellectualist and culture-historical approaches
A combination of looking at the burial remains as either a mirror of the living or an arena where identity can by transformed with better skeletal samples providing more confident attributions to an individual’s origins, sex and age
Outline the ‘mirror of the living’ approach and it’s uses
The mirror of the living approach looks to read a cultural identity from the remaining burial evidence.
This can provide insight into how a society was stratified with differenation between rich and poor graves.
It can also provide insight into the role of women upon which the literary source have remained collectively quiet. This can help us assertion of women were treated the same or differently in society and what role and status they held
What are the problems associated with the revisionist approach to the study of funerary evidence
The revisionist approach can be complicated by knowing how much to assertion from the extant evidence. If there is clear differentiation between rich and poor graves does this equate to how society was stratified or does it signify if other processes to transform identity were used which can skew the understanding of status.
