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What I am going to try and do with this article is to talk a little about how people have treated their dead. Not just physically but ritually and religiously. I hope that we may gain some understanding, or at least insight, into how people through out the ages understood death and the 'otherworld' the land of the dead.
This will be a rather quick look at some of the major archaeological evidence and some interpretations that show how we, humans, have thought of and treated their dead over the ages. First off we need to understand exactly what archaeology is. Archaeology is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of cultural and environmental data, including architecture, artefacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes. Archaeology can tell you where people lived, what they ate, how they disposed of their dead and even what tools they used. What archaeology can not tell you is what they thought, what they believed or how they understood death and the other world. For that we have to 'interpret' the physical evidence. It is important to remember however that while archaeology can tell us a lot about the final disposition of the dead and even sometimes something about the rituals involved the interpretation of the evidence is necessarily a personal one. While reading this work its is important to remember the old maxim ' you can take the archaeologist out of the 21st Century but you cant take the 21st centaury out of the archaeologist. During our journey through time I will be attempting to show how the dead were first simply treated with reverence and simple ritual, |
which survived massive changes in society as human society and skill sets developed, but eventually developed into a complex ritual and physical landscape where the dead had a very real part in the living community.
We will see how the rise of the individual moved peoples view of the other world away from being a real, and communal, part of the living world to a separate place of individuals where people travelled and needed the tools of their trade. We will also see how changes in society, both in the social stratification of people and the gender differentiation, were reflected in the 'other world', with different roles for men and women which were reflected in the goods they took with them. Finally we see the rise of the Christian church and how that impacted on the living and the view of the after life and how, in certain cases echoes of the ancient belief structures may still be present. Where possible I will try and keep to British archaeological sources and as such the interpretation is quite naturally a British one. I suspect that societies from other parts of the world went through similar stages and experienced similar developments in their view of the after life but such interpretations are well beyond the scope of this work. It also needs to be said that I am in no way a professional archaeologist and that the interpretation I place on the archaeological evidence is purely my own, prejudiced as it is by my own pagan beliefs and upbringing. |
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This journey will take us from the early Paleolithic, about 250,000 years ago, through the Stone and Iron ages, the times of the roman occupation, through the 'dark ages' right up to the middle ages when Christianity had fully established it's self in these islands. 'Click' on the period that interests you or follow the forward and back links at the bottom of the page
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