Death and the Body in Bronze Age Europe: From Inhumation to Cremation 1009247395, 9781009247399

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
One Introduction: Changing Practices and Perception of the Body
Reflections on Aims and Scope
The Body: As Materiality and the Location of Death
Discussing Beliefs
About Burials and Cremations
Our Position
Two A Brief History of Urns, Urnfields, and Burial in the Urnfield Culture
Tripping over Urns: Early Recognition and Explanations of Urns and Urnfields
Framing Time: The Birth of the 'Urnfield'
Ethnic Explanations: 'Urnfield People' and 'Urnfield Culture'
Understanding How Cultural Practices Spread: Migrations and Diffusions
Explaining Urnfield Symbolism, Beliefs, and Religion
Recent Trends
Three Theoretical Framework
The Corpse Is a Body, Too
Materiality: Making People and Burials
Briefly on Methodology: Investigating How Burials Are Conducted and Graves Constructed
The Importance of Temporality: Chaînes Opératoires and Biographies
Four The Bronze Age: Setting the Scene
Chronology: Event or Process
The Social Landscapes
The Body in Domestic Contexts
The Individual, Mobility, and Life Expectancy
Aspects of Beliefs: Hoards and Iconography
Representations and Treatments of the Body
Burial Practices
People-Objects Relations
The Challenge of Change
Five The Changing Bronze Age Body: Introduction of Case Studies
Hungary: Early Cremations and Regional Variations
Pitten: Experimentation and Within-Cemetery Variation
Vollmarshausen: Conformity and Post-Funerary Engagement
Bavaria: Objects and Pyre Debris (Zuchering, Grundfeld)
Marburg: Mounds and Memory Spaces
Lüneburg Area: Transformation of People-Object Relations
Denmark: Complex Choreographies in Burial Mounds
Six The Treatment of the Body: Compatibility and Divergence
The First Stage: The Temporal Span between Death and Cremation
The Second Stage: The Technology and Performance of Cremation
The Third Stage: Treatment of the Fragmentary Cremated Remains - Categories for Separating and Remaking Bodies
Different or Similar: Cremated Bodies and Other Human Bodies
Different or Similar: Entanglement of Cremated Bodies, Animals, and Things
Summative Reflections
Seven The Construction of Graves: Coherence and Variations
Variation in Graves: Form and Shape
Summative Reflections
Eight After the Burial: Prolonged Engagement with the Body
Feeding the Dead and Commensality at Graves
Creating Spaces for Continued Interaction
Disturbing the Grave: The Phenomenon of 'Grave Robbing' or Reaccession
Post-Burial Practices as Part of Local Webs of Meaning
Nine Conclusions: On the Nature of Change in Burial Practices
The Mechanisms of Change
The Anatomical Body
The Need for a Room: Transforming Dimensions
Containers and Containment
Returning to the Question of 'Origin'
References
Index

Citation preview

DEATH AND THE BODY IN BRONZE AGE EUROPE

This volume offers new insights into the radical shift in attitudes towards death and the dead body that occurred in temperate Bronze Age Europe. Exploring the introduction and eventual dominance of cremation, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury apply a case-study approach to investigate how this transformation unfolded within local communities located throughout central to northern Europe. They demonstrate the deep link between the living and the dead body and propose that the introduction of cremation was a significant ontological challenge to traditional ideas about death. In tracing the responses to this challenge, the authors focus on three fields of action: the treatment of the dead body, the construction of a burial place, and ongoing relationships with the dead body after burial. Interrogating cultural change at its most fundamental level, the authors elucidate the fundamental tension between openness towards the ‘new’ and the conservative pull of the familiar and traditional. Marie Louise Stig Sørensen is Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. She has made important contributions to the scholarship on the European Bronze Age in a range of topics, including dress, creativity, the construction of identities, and the role of ‘things’. Katharina Rebay-Salisbury is Research Group Leader at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She specializes in the interdisciplinary analysis of Bronze and Iron Age burials. She was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for her project ‘The value of mothers to society’ and teaches at the University of Vienna.

DEATH AND THE BODY IN BRONZE AGE EUROPE FROM INHUMATION TO CREMATION MARIE LOUISE STIG SØRENSEN University of Cambridge

KATHARINA REBAY-SALISBURY Austrian Academy of Sciences

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009247399 doi: 10.1017/9781009247429 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Sørensen, Marie Louise Stig, author. | Rebay-Salisbury, Katharina, author. title: Death and the body in Bronze age Europe : from inhumation to cremation / Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, University of Cambridge, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Austrian Academy of Sciences. description: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022024067 (print) | lccn 2022024068 (ebook) | isbn 9781009247399 (hardback) | isbn 9781009247382 (paperback) | isbn 9781009247429 (epub) subjects: lcsh: Dead–Social aspects–Europe–History–To 1500. | Human remains (Archaeology)–Europe. | Human body–Social aspects–Europe–History–To 1500. | Death– Social aspects–Europe–History–To 1500. | Burial–Europe–History–To 1500. | Funeral rites and ceremonies, Ancient. | Bronze age. classification: lcc gt3170 .S67 2023 (print) | lcc gt3170 (ebook) | ddc 393.094–dc23/ eng/20220607 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024067 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024068 isbn 978-1-009-24739-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

page ix

List of Tables

xi

Acknowledgements 1

2

3

xiii

I N T R O D U C T I O N : C HA N G I N G P R A C T I C E S AND PERCEPTION OF THE BODY

1

Reflections on Aims and Scope

3

The Body: As Materiality and the Location of Death

5

Discussing Beliefs

7

About Burials and Cremations

8

Our Position

9

A B R I E F HI S T O R Y O F U RN S , U R N F I E L D S , A N D BU RI A L I N T H E U R N F I E L D C U L T U R E

15

Tripping over Urns: Early Recognition and Explanations of Urns and Urnfields

15

Framing Time: The Birth of the ‘Urnfield’

18

Ethnic Explanations: ‘Urnfield People’ and ‘Urnfield Culture’

20

Understanding How Cultural Practices Spread: Migrations and Diffusions

23

Explaining Urnfield Symbolism, Beliefs, and Religion

28

Recent Trends

33

T H E O R E T I C A L F R A M E W O RK

36

The Corpse Is a Body, Too

38

Materiality: Making People and Burials

47

Briefly on Methodology: Investigating How Burials Are Conducted and Graves Constructed

50

The Importance of Temporality: Chaînes Opératoires and Biographies

51 v

vi

CONTENTS

4

5

6

T H E B R O N Z E A G E : S E T T I N G T H E SC E N E

54

Chronology: Event or Process

55

The Social Landscapes

59

The Body in Domestic Contexts

64

The Individual, Mobility, and Life Expectancy

68

Aspects of Beliefs: Hoards and Iconography

71

Representations and Treatments of the Body

74

Burial Practices

76

People-Objects Relations

80

The Challenge of Change

83

T H E C H A N G I N G B R O N Z E A GE B O D Y : INTRODUCTION OF CASE STUDIES

86

Hungary: Early Cremations and Regional Variations

89

Pitten: Experimentation and Within-Cemetery Variation

92

Vollmarshausen: Conformity and Post-Funerary Engagement

95

Bavaria: Objects and Pyre Debris (Zuchering, Grundfeld)

98

Marburg: Mounds and Memory Spaces

103

Lüneburg Area: Transformation of People–Object Relations

105

Denmark: Complex Choreographies in Burial Mounds

107

T H E T R E A T M E N T OF T H E B O D Y : C O MP A T I B I L IT Y A N D DI V E R G E N C E

113

The First Stage: The Temporal Span between Death and Cremation

115

The Second Stage: The Technology and Performance of Cremation

125

The Third Stage: Treatment of the Fragmentary Cremated Remains – Categories for Separating and Remaking Bodies

136

Different or Similar: Cremated Bodies and Other Human Bodies

142

Different or Similar: Entanglement of Cremated Bodies, Animals, and Things

145

Summative Reflections

148

vii

CONTENTS

7

8

9

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRAVES: COHERENCE A N D VA RI A T I O N S

149

Variation in Graves: Form and Shape

152

Summative Reflections

171

A F T E R T H E BU R I A L : P R O L O N G E D E N G A G E M E N T W I T H T H E BO DY

174

Feeding the Dead and Commensality at Graves

176

Creating Spaces for Continued Interaction

181

Disturbing the Grave: The Phenomenon of ‘Grave Robbing’ or Reaccession

185

Post-Burial Practices as Part of Local Webs of Meaning

190

CONCLUSIONS: ON THE NATURE OF CHANGE IN BURIAL PRACTICES

191

The Mechanisms of Change

193

The Anatomical Body

196

The Need for a Room: Transforming Dimensions

197

Containers and Containment

197

Returning to the Question of ‘Origin’

198

References

201

Index

225

FIGURES

2.1 Excavating urns as a leisurely, yet educational, pursuit in 1877 2.2 Distribution of early urnfields in Europe and the expansion of the Urnfield Culture 2.3 Spread of the Urnfield Culture and the ‘sea peoples’ 4.1 Bronze Age chronology for the Carpathian Basin, central and northern Europe 4.2 Ritual object from Potsdam-Eiche, Germany 4.3 Nebra Sky disc, Germany 4.4 Depiction of charioteers and a possible cremation pyre on the ceramic urn from Veľké Raškovce, Slovakia 4.5 Oak coffin of Guldhøj, Denmark, during the excavation in 1891 5.1 Map and chronology of the case studies 5.2 Pottery and the material body in Hungarian Middle Bronze Age graves 5.3 Map of burial forms at the cemetery of Pitten, Austria 5.4 Map of burial forms and grave types at the cemetery of Vollmarshausen, Germany 5.5 Grave 314 of Zuchering, Germany 5.6 Grave 31 of Grundfeld, Germany 5.7 Excavation plan of Marburg-Stempel, Germany 5.8 Heathland of the Lüneburger Heide, Germany 5.9 Oak coffin of Egtved, Denmark 6.1 Mortuary house at Schutschur, Germany 6.2 Grave 155 (and 160) of Pitten, Austria 6.3 Reconstruction of a cremation platform with reconstructed pyre at Aparn/Zaya, Austria 6.4 Bones and wood remains after experimental cremations in Hallstatt, Austria 6.5 Grave 192 of Pitten, Austria 6.6 Oak coffins with inhumation burial of Borum Eshøj and cremation burial of Hvidegård, both Denmark 6.7 Grave 537 of Zuchering, Germany 6.8 Grave 348 of Zuchering, Germany 6.9 Vessel with breasts and arms from Százhalombatta, Hungary

page 17 24 27 58 72 74 75 78 87 90 93 96 99 102 103 105 109 117 128 129 133 139 140 142 144 146

ix

x

LIST OF FIGURES

7.1 Chaîne opératoire of inhumation and cremation graves in the Bronze Age. Processes focussed upon the treatment of the body, its preparation for the status of being a member of the deceased, and for the creation of the grave for the deceased. 7.2 Reconstruction of the funerary space at Marburg-Botanischer Garten, U18, Germany 7.3 Grave 88 of Mezőcsát, Hungary 7.4 Grave 153 of Zuchering, Germany with preserved parts of the wooden grave construction 7.5 Schematic view of a Vatja urn, Hungary 7.6 Burial mounds of Gravhøje, Maglehøj, and Brederød, Denmark illustrated by Andreas Peter Madsen 1887 7.7 Core and layering of a cremation grave 7.8 Cremation Grave 24 and inhumation Grave 35 of Streda nad Bodrogom, Slovakia 8.1 Feeding the dead at the cemetery of Gelej, Hungary 8.2 Urns with artificial openings from Vollmarshausen, Germany 8.3 Pottery clusters in relationship to graves at the cemetery of Pitten, Austria 8.4 Door opening of Grave 121 of Pitten, Austria 8.5 Rectangular funerary enclosure at Marburg-Tanzplatz, Germany 8.6 Grave 220 of Franzhausen I, Austria with traces of targeted disturbance of the upper body, while the lower body remained intact 8.7 Oak coffin of Storehøj, Denmark, with evidence of grave robbing in the form of a hole in the coffin and the hooked rod that was left behind

151 153 158 159 163 166 169 171 177 178 181 182 184

186

188

TABLES

5.1 Cemetery phasing and burial type at the cemetery of Grundfeld, Germany (data from Ullrich 2004) 6.1 Stages, activities, and concerns of cremation burials 6.2 Artefacts included in scattered cremation and urn graves at Zuchering, Germany 7.1 Grave and coffin dimensions in relation to age and sex of buried individuals at Zuchering (data from Schütz 2003)

page 101 114 122 159

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume emerged from research initiated within the context of the fiveyear, cross-disciplinary Leverhulme Research Programme F/07907/A ‘Changing Beliefs of the Human Body’, based at the University of Cambridge from 2005 to 2010. Under the guidance of John Robb, a team of researchers based at the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Faculty of Classics, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology explored how and why humans change what they believe about the human body. We are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting this research and to our colleagues John Robb, Dušan Boric´ , Oliver J. T. Harris, Jessica Hughes, Maryon McDonald, Preston Miracle, Robin Osborne, Marilyn Strathern, Simon Stoddart, and Sarah Tarlow for many inspiring discussions. Within the project, our work focused on changing social practices of death in Bronze Age Europe in connection with the introduction of cremation. Over the years, we have discussed burials, cremations, bodies, and how to interpret past actions, with many individuals, gaining considerably from their free sharing of ideas, questions, and suggestions. We have gained substantially from feedback provided on numerous occasions presenting our research and on our publications. There have been too many to name, but we must single out Jo Appleby, Claudio Cavazzuti, Daria Ložnjak Dizdar, Kerstin Hofmann, Flemming Kaul, Viktória Kiss, Michaela Lochner, Christophe Snoeck, Joanna Sofaer, and Magdolna Vicze, as having inspired us to keep on with our work over many years. Katharina Rebay-Salisbury would like to acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme for the project ‘The value of mothers to society: responses to motherhood and child rearing practices in prehistoric Europe’ (grant agreement No 676828). The Covid-19 pandemic confined us both at home during much of 2020, in Britain and Austria, and thus gave us the time to finalize this project. Marie Louise would like to thank Christopher Evans and Katharina would like to thank Roderick B. Salisbury for their ever-ongoing critical advice and support of this research.

xiii

ONE

INTRODUCTION Changing Practices and Perception of the Body

y the later Bronze Age, almost all of Europe had ‘converted’ from inhumation to cremation burial practices. Although this change began a few hundred years earlier, it is commonly associated with the spread of the ‘Urnfield Culture’, the beginning of which is dated to c. 1300–1250 BC, depending on the region investigated. By then, cremation had become a dominant rite as witnessed by thousands of cremation burials in urns located within flat cemeteries, ranging in size from a few to many hundred burials. Although poorly understood, the change raises significant questions about alterations of cultural practices at the most fundamental level of society – its attitude towards death and the status of the deceased body. It is the nature of these changes that this volume aims to address. Most earlier approaches to this change have searched for explanations in either religious conversion or external influences. In contrast, we argue that the changes were an expression of the working out of fundamental ontologies and that they were, therefore, as much about new understandings of the body as about ‘religion’ or ideological convictions. We also posit that rather than just causing ruptures, external influences were transformed and translated in terms of pre-existing attitudes to the body and death and thus were integral to and interwoven with local cultural dynamics. The arguments we put forward have been influenced by body-centred approaches within the social sciences during the last decades, but they do not rest there. Although informed by such theories, this volume is primarily an attempt at engaging with the complexity

B

1

2

DEATH AND THE BODY IN BRONZE AGE EUROPE

of the evidence, of pursuing questions about what was actually going on in Middle Bronze Age cremation burials and asking what this reveals about the attitudes of different Bronze Age communities, who altered their ways of dealing with death. The central question considered is: what did it mean to go from a world in which the dead body was buried intact and displayed with fineries, tools, and clothing to one in which the dead body is cremated and the remains then collected and buried in an urn? Moreover, what does this transformation tell us about the period specifically and about the nature of change more generally? To answer these questions, we have investigated a substantial number of biritual1 Middle Bronze Age cemeteries or burials. They were selected because each in its way informs about what characterised the early stages of the conversion to cremation. They reveal aspects of how cremations were performed at a time when there was not an already existing tradition of how to do them, a local ‘know-how’ of ideas and practices. This, therefore, provides insights into how this transition happened and what decisions were made that involved or resulted in changes to customary burial practices. The investigation shows, as discussed in the following chapters, that rather than being a swift and coherent horizon of change, as commonly presented, the full adaptation of cremation took time and explored different trajectories. The adaptation of cremation is throughout affected by a concern with finding a new physical form for the burials and with the redefinition of the cremated bones as still constituting some kind of corporeal substance. There was, therefore, considerable local experimentation with what these new forms may be. The expressions of these concerns vary, but they form a persistent theme in all the regional studies during this period of change. Two features stand out in these processes. One is the recurrent evidence of how the attempts at formulating a proper, but new, burial tradition drew on existing local traditions – clearly such traditional ways of doing things provided familiar practical ‘answers’ and mental templates for how a burial should be built and shaped. The other is how the drawing of associations between the characteristics of the living and the deceased body, such as the ability to use jewellery or the need for clothing, helped to reconstitute the fragmented cremated bones as a corporeal body. These insights are significant. We believe that the patterns and trends we have distilled, and the arguments they give rise to, are important for understanding major aspects of the changes that took place during the end of the Middle Bronze Age in temperate Europe. They help to show this as a period during which new ideas about death, and through that the living, were being formulated and enacted, and how in the process new cultural conventions and traditions were being made. 1

We use the term bi-ritual to refer to burial sites in which inhumations and cremations were used at the same time.

INTRODUCTION

The changing attitudes to and treatment of the body during the Middle to Late Bronze Age is, therefore, the focus of this volume. The analysis and arguments are explicitly concerned with the concrete observable consequences and impacts of the new burial rites. The classic question of the spread of cremation is accordingly discussed through a radically altered lens of inquiry with a resolution at the level of local communities: what did they do? However, while our observations and interpretations are contextualised in terms of the cultural milieus in which the changes were shaped, our aim is still comparative. The resulting comparison is concerned with common trends and tendencies, aiming to reveal underlying similarities in cultural reasoning. The chapter structure aids this comparison, as each analytical chapter relates to a particular stage in the burial ritual, enabling detailed comparative discussions of particular kinds of decisions. REFLECTI ONS ON AIMS AND SCOPE

We explore how ideas and understandings arising from the recent focus on the body within the Social Sciences and Humanities can be used to investigate the fundamental change in burial activities, which the widespread introduction of cremation represents. The change from inhumation to cremation is not simple. Although cremations occasionally appear in earlier periods, two features make the transformation that led to and characterised the Urnfield Culture burial practices significant and distinct. One is that cremation became the absolute dominant rite in most of Europe, rather than simply being an additional burial form. The other is that the introduction of urns at some stage in this transformation must have affected the ontological status of the cremated remains in a manner never seen before, as the cremated body became ‘containable’ as matter or fragments in a vessel. Burial practices were also altered in other ways, such as through the introduction of large cemeteries (the so-called urnfields) and the changing role of grave goods. It has been common to present this change in burial practice as accompanied by a new and widely shared iconographic language (reflected by the use of the bird-sun-boat symbols, see also Chapter 4), intensified ritual practices (in particular the deposition of large amounts of bronzes in hoards), and changes in settlement pattern. It is thus possible that the shift in burial practices took place in tandem with broad social and political changes, including a remarkable change in how the individual is expressed within various social contexts, as further discussed in Chapter 4. The connections between these changes do, however, remain very poorly understood. Presenting them as a ‘package’ carries the risk of reiterating the notion that this was a horizon of cultural change, whilst downplaying the evidence of more fragmentary processes of change.

3

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DEATH AND THE BODY IN BRONZE AGE EUROPE

Earlier research primarily approached the differences between inhumation and cremation as reflecting two alternative rituals, creating an almost mystical sense of cremation expressing new beliefs and novel social needs. Until recently, interpretations of the introduction of cremation were accordingly commonly dominated by a concern with explaining why this change happened, leading to much debate about whether, for example, this development was linked to the idea of a soul (see Chapter 2) or arguments about cremations being associated with ideas about ‘essence’ (e.g. Barrett 1994). We believe, and this position has become strengthened through our research, that this focus has resulted in a neglect of the equally important question of how the transformation happened, in other words, what people did. It is surprising, and a substantial challenge, that we do not have a well-developed, theoretically informed understanding of what these changes and transformations actually were about. Interpretations, typically, have not linked the question of why this transition took place to investigations of how communities changed their ways of practising burials; and they usually pay little attention to variations in the actual responses to the body that can be seen within burial practices. Greater clarification of the nature of these changes and the way they unfold is therefore called for, especially since within them we may be able to locate processes and mechanisms that can contribute to more general debates about the nature of societies and their capability of change. The opportunity to conduct the research presented here arose as part of the project ‘Changing beliefs of the human body: a comparative social perspective’, a cross-disciplinary research initiative, based at the University of Cambridge from 2005 to 2010. The project addressed the question of why and how humans change what they believe about the human body (Robb and Harris 2013). It approached this question within a long-term perspective covering different cultural contexts including literate and non-literate, hightech and traditional, as well as ancient and modern societies. The investigation of the spread of cremation in Europe during the second millennium BC was a case study within the project. The aim was to study the changes in attitudes to the body (and associated beliefs) that must have been behind this example of a radical change in the treatment of the dead body. The research focus arose from the recognition that the archaeological data linked to these changes suggest much greater complexity, in terms of variation and transitional stages between different forms, than was normally presented in discussions of the period. A return to the question of the spread of cremation was timely. Renewed research needed, however, a change of focus. We argued that the concern must be the mechanisms through which new practices were emulated and adapted within local settings, the relationship between local and general processes, and whether and how these changes in burial practices imply alterations in beliefs. Research should aim to elucidate the variations in the

INTRODUCTION

performance and ritualisation of cremation and the specific changes observed in the shift from the use of inhumation burials to cremations in urns. Since the project began, other scholars have responded to the same challenge (e.g. Becker 2007, Cerezo-Román, Wessman, and Williams 2017, Hofmann 2008, Kuijt, Quinn, and Cooney 2014, Lochner and Ruppenstein 2013), and our collective understanding of the transition is gradually becoming more contextual and nuanced. The reasons for this change during the Bronze Age, the social mechanisms through which the new burial practices could spread so widely and seemingly so rapidly, and the extent to which this reveals alterations in beliefs about the body (and thus potentially also fundamental views about the world) are core questions that may provide us with insights into some aspects of the capacities and workings of Bronze Age societies. In particular, documenting change in how local communities organise seminal social activities as well as respond to and absorb general trends and external influences is an important contribution as it helps to shed light on cultural dynamics at two distinct levels: the local and the grander scale. This concern with differential scales of practices and impact echoes the principles underwriting Fernand Braudel’s influential notion of different times (Braudel 1973 [1949]), and has been recognised as a dynamic underwriting long term history (e.g. Hodder 2000, Hodder and Preucel 1996). Recognising different scales of practice has, nonetheless, remained surprisingly under-explored in the investigation of major transitional periods in prehistory. In response to these aims, we have constructed an analytical framework that is focused on how the essential changes unfold – at various levels from single sites to regions. Through this, we aim to look at how people, through their actions, interpretations, negotiation, and discursive experimentations with forms and reasons, make the changes rather than merely being subjected to change. This approach has been borne out by the type and range of variations we have observed within individual sites and by how overarching tendencies and structural changes are manifest locally in a range of different ways. THE BODY: AS MATER IALITY AND THE LOCATION OF DEATH

The body has been a central thematic focus in the Social Sciences and Humanities since the 1980s. The reasons behind the intensified debates are many and interwoven, being formed both within the academic environment created by first post-structuralism and then post-modernism as well as feminism, and being reinforced by the individualising tendencies of modernity (Latour 1993, Robb and Harris 2013). In this development, the role of the body has changed from a foundational condition taken for granted to an object of study and discourse. The potentials of the body as a new analytical platform from which we can initiate investigations of society as well as individuals have

5

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DEATH AND THE BODY IN BRONZE AGE EUROPE

been laid out. In this development, the body has proved to be a powerful analytical ‘lens’, whether in a social, metaphorical, or phenomenological sense or when referring to its physical constitution. These concerns have been influential for our engagement with the Middle Bronze Age body, and in Chapter 3 we briefly reflect on how we may use these arguments to investigate the dead body and the way societies react to their deceased members. The varied cultural responses to death suggest that its interpretation is in some ways usually linked to attempts at understanding life, however abstract and reified these reflections may appear. We suggest that interpretations of death are limited by our imagination, which in turn is restricted by language and experiences. From this position, death is essentially incomprehensible; but despite or because of this incomprehension, people, community, and society need to and do make sense of death in their own ways. They tend to incorporate it into their ontologies, and through this life and death become mutually intelligible – one becomes understandable through the other. Death is an obvious, to some extent necessary, foundation of ontology – we need to be able to place ourselves including our death into the ‘grand scheme of things’; we need to be able to make death imaginable and thus to formulate our responses to it. In the formulation of responses, in the forms of death and burial rituals, communities construct order and propriety, dressing the unimaginable in a cloak of reasons and thus understanding. In Chapter 3, we pursue this point a bit further, proposing that the varied responses to the dead body all in their ways are informed by understandings of the world and that they, in turn, become fundamental to such understandings; they reveal ways of reflecting and reasoning about the body and its relationships, meditating on causalities. The study of the treatment of the dead body therefore obviously involves issues of beliefs. However, it seems to us that Bronze Age2 belief about death was largely constituted in the act of burying, so that it was through performing a particular act according to prescribed conventions that belief was formulated and experienced socially, rather than necessarily having to do with faith in a modern conventional sense (Sørensen 2012). Apart from burials we see little, if any, evidence of formalised reflection on death during this period; there are no temples or shrines, nor any deities that we can recognise in contexts linked to death. This also suggests that whatever changes in belief cremation was introducing, understanding what it was about would have been worked out and articulated through the gradual development of cremation as a formal burial rite; meaning was generative of and generated through practice. This argument is also supported by the archaeological data as the variations

2

Throughout we are referring to the Bronze Age in temperate Europe, unless otherwise specified.

INTRODUCTION

observed suggest that the understanding of what burial ‘stood for’ and the status of the deceased was far from uniform but rather was being ‘worked out’. DISCUSSING BELIEFS

The change to cremation has in various ways and for a number of reasons often been linked to ideas of changes in the belief system. Although we assume that belief3 was relevant to how burials were performed, this is not our focus of interest. Nonetheless, it is helpful to briefly clarify our understanding of the term. The concept of belief has been much debated within anthropology (e.g. Needham 1973). Critique has been raised against the use of the concept, arguing that it too easily implies an essentialism that is misleading and analytically counter-productive, or that its character as an internal state cannot be expressed in language without compromising the experience of belief. Eradicating the world from our vocabulary risks, however, that a veil is pulled over a particular range of human reactions and behaviours, which, however varied and differently argued and formed, relates to how people think about and make the world understandable in their own terms. It risks ignoring how people create order and reason about aspects of their world, which, although affecting them, are beyond their control (see also Sørensen 2012). Rejecting the idea of beliefs as an integral part of cultures is a reactionary move, in the sense of being an almost predictable reaction and response to the shortcomings and ideological burden of functionalist anthropological arguments of the twentieth century, which gave rise to an anthropological approach to belief that made it an almost definitional matter in terms of the recognition of cultural groups. A terminological rejection, however, risks denying that people ‘have’ beliefs. Of course, beliefs cannot be approached simply as an integral, almost definitional, part of cultures. But we must nonetheless acknowledge that people behave as if they ‘share beliefs’ and that this is often used by them to understand and articulate their social and cultural belonging and to rationalise their behaviour. In this volume, we are not concerned with beliefs understood as some kind of internal state, such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s ‘interior state’ (Barnard and Spencer 1996: 64) beyond language and maybe even as part of cognition. However, we think there is merit in investigating the formation of shared practices formed around shared understandings or agreements about challenging aspects of how one experiences the world and reflects on its causalities. 3

The format of Bronze Age beliefs, as indeed our own, probably ranged widely from mundane, momentary assumptions of causalities (e.g. ‘We will be blessed because the sun shone when the fire touched her’) to beliefs that have become ritualised and turned into conventions (e.g. ‘Our beliefs dictate that the cremation must be over before the sun sets’).

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In this sense, the concept of belief that underwrites our approach is not limited by language, as a means of describing and sharing beliefs, but indeed resides in language, as a form of and a complement to bodily practice: belief is, we propose, imminently social. Belief in that sense is constructed through communication (not compromised by it) and enacted by society. It should be noted that beliefs in this sense should not automatically be coupled to the concept of religion. Against this background, it becomes obvious that substantial changes in how societies react to and deal with the deceased bodies of their members may show radical transformations and changes in belief systems. In turn, it follows that changes in beliefs, however generated, will often influence thinking about death. The introduction of cremation as a common and dominant burial practice in Bronze Age Europe constitutes a ‘horizon’ of change, during which, we argue, beliefs in the form of fundamental attitudes towards and understandings of the nature of bodies and their status when dead, are being challenged and reworked. ABOUT BURIALS AND CREMATIONS

Burials are cultural and social events. They are also important archaeological evidence. Archaeological discussions about burials have intensified over recent decades, reflecting a growing recognition of the importance not only of the data burials provide but also of how they offer evidence of important social practices and evidence of the lives of individuals as well as groups. In particular, attention has been drawn to how burials, in addition to embedding responses to death, are also situations of social upheaval and restructuring as well as confirmation of social bonds (e.g. Barrett 1994, Parker Pearson 1999, 2014, Tarlow and Nilsson Stutz 2013). Moreover, it has become ever more clear that . . . burials can be understood as deliberate and intentional constructions in which objects and space are used together to make important social statements. This means that graves often are potent semiotic spaces. Values and meanings of importance to their communities were being worked out through their construction and embedded within them (Sørensen 2004: 168).

The change from inhumation to cremation is an important example of the roles of burials, providing evidence of how fundamentally they can change. Within the Middle Bronze Age, the change in burial practices must have constituted a major social and socio-psychological rupture as cremation treats the body in a manner that is radically different from that of inhumation. In contrast to earlier occasional uses of cremation, what we see with the introduction of cremation during the Middle to Late Bronze Age is a change in

INTRODUCTION

burial rite that led to a new dominant practice – ways of doing things were being transformed and the new practice was transmitted, copied, and imitated so that it spread widely within Bronze Age communities. Moreover, the change was obvious, it was not just a matter of nuances and slight alteration. In terms of the deceased body, this was a fundamental change. This leads to challenging questions: why did it happen, and how could such a change take place over such large areas and during such a short time? We gain some insights into how radical this change in the treatment of the dead body is through some of the debates linked to the reintroduction of cremation in historic times. There was, for instance, an intense debate in Europe during the nineteenth century about whether within a Christian belief system, cremation could be acceptable, with particular concerns expressed about the necessary state of the corpse on the day of resurrection (Ebner 1989, Jupp 1990, Thalmann 1978). Even today, such discussions surface in the public domain. For instance, when in 2008 the Greek government made cremation legal, this provoked considerable public critique and resistance from the Orthodox Church. OU R POSITIO N

In response to the issues raised, we wish to place the agency in people and to stress that this really does mean investigating them as people who respond, think, and negotiate about meaning through the materiality of dead bodies and grave constructions. How did they formulate their ‘right’ way of performing burials as social activities, what were the roles and potencies of existing forms, and how did they respond to the potentials and challenges arising from creating new conventions? As a starting point, we found it necessary to provide a historiographic background in order to make it clear how the change to cremation has been conceptualised and conventionalised. In a very literate sense, our research is investigating how different communities in Europe during the Middle Bronze Age worked out and developed new norms of burial practices. It is based on observations of the various ways they constructed graves and of the different ‘things’ they did to the body. The cultural practices we have investigated have, however, been studied and discussed since the late eighteenth century, so while our analysis pursues a new angle of investigation and shifts the focus of attention, it is both embedded within and reacting to the research traditions that have shaped this data. Previous work is both the point of departure and the positions against which we have constructed our field of vision. In Chapter 2, we, therefore, identify the roots of our questions through a historiographic review. We aim to trace two formative aspects. One is the realisation that pots found underground were graves and how through the eighteenth and nineteenth century these ideas were formalised leading to an

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increase in evidence about this burial form. The other is the concomitant erection of the intellectual scaffolding in the form of chronologies, terminologies, and explanatory models that was needed to make sense of these observations. The chapter demonstrates how the labelling of the period and the definitional emphasis on the shared practice of burying the cremated remains in urns over the centuries have concretised a concept of the Urnfield Culture and placed the change to cremation as its starting point. This concretisation has happened in two ways. On one hand, an understanding of the Urnfield Culture and its link to cremations have become part of how we ‘know’ the Bronze Age and this understanding has been stabilised through the continued use of the terminology and assumptions established by the canon of this research (Kimmig 1964, Kossack 1954). Certain ways of thinking about the phenomenon have become relatively unquestioned praxis. On the other hand, the increased tendency for researchers to work on single cemeteries or within well-defined but small regions means that they tend to interpret their data as local variants of the general scheme rather than reflecting on how their data may also challenge it. Only in recent years have we returned to monographs that deal with larger regions of the Urnfield Culture more comprehensively (e.g. Hofmann 2008). The hugely varied local versions of how cremations were performed and new grave forms invented have therefore not been fully explored, nor have the variations been used to further develop our understanding of these changes. There has been little attempt at reflecting on, for example, what it means that these changes appear different when we use a local rather than a metaperspective. Our theoretical position we spell out in Chapter 3. We aim to clarify our understanding of scientific knowledge claims and discuss how we pursue body theories. As discussed above, our analysis is built around two mutually reinforcing interpretative propositions, and we explain these in that chapter. One is about death and our proposition that death and the attempt at understanding it are of fundamental importance for how societies formulate themselves. The other point we make is that the body plays a central role in the construction of worldviews. We argue that burial practices, as an expression of the practitioners’ sense of order and propriety, relate to and are framed within such understandings. Investigating burial practices can, therefore, help to better reveal how communities construct their understandings of the world and, in particular, how changes within these domains can be initiated, transmitted, and widely accepted; or in other words, how change becomes possible. Some general cultural background to the transformation in burial practices was also needed, which we provide in Chapter 4. The intention is to provide a rough contextualisation of the practices and people studied through a sketch of the period. Our approach is hermeneutic and heuristic. Our initial starting point was the dramatic transformation of the burial rite and what this may tell us about

INTRODUCTION

Bronze Age communities specifically and cultural change more generally. As we became more deeply embroiled with these questions, it became obvious that the necessary first step was to gain detailed insights into what people actually did in terms of ‘doing’ cremation burials – we had to engage in a kind of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) aiming to describe and through that identify the nuances (and thus shifts and transformations) in cultural action. An analysis of all Bronze Age cultural practices, however, would be too wideranging, lack focus, and prevent us from a detailed scrutiny of practice. A further limitation of the subject had to be made. The focus we developed was that of tracing the activities and decisions taking place in connection with the treatment of the dead body – the chaîne opératoire, so to speak, of preparing the body and making the grave. This provided us with two axes of analysis: the range of activities involved with the physical treatment of the body itself (Chapter 6), and the various activities involved with the construction of a place/container for the body as its place of burial (Chapter 7). In addition, in Chapter 8 we consider the range of evidence that suggests some kind of continuous interaction with the deceased after burial; this richly documents the extent to which the transition was progressed through the development of distinct local practices and experimentation with forms. We did, however, need to create some further limitations on our data to make a coherent investigation feasible, and for this, we selected to use a case study approach with evidence from other sites used more sporadically. The case studies, which are described in Chapter 5, are distributed widely in time and space; nevertheless, they share a common narrative of how the body is being responded to during the introduction of cremation at a particular location. This means that actual, contextualised examples of what people did, and how within this we find common themes as well as great variation, inform and direct the investigation. The purpose of the case studies, which work as ‘thinking-platforms’ and documentations, is not to use them as explanatory models, but rather to use them to build up better knowledge about the process through which cremation developed as a different type of burial, in which the construction of meaning had shifted, and the concerns were altered. We did not find it useful to approach this in terms of one set of actions being replaced by another, as this clearly would mask the transformative mechanisms that affected local communities’ ability to (adopt) change. We accordingly focused on transformation rather than change. The case studies are used as the ‘means’ of dissection of what this transformation was about and how it became articulated. They bring with them an awareness of scale, with the possibility of a new type of dialogue opening between the study of the locally specific and that of general trends. This turned out to be extremely helpful in terms of discerning underlying structural similarities and appreciating what the variations relate to. The case studies vary from

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single sites to regions, making it possible to engage with variations of cultural practices at different scales of social action and interaction. In other words, the volume aims to provide an embedded explorative ‘reading’ of these changes in terms of the agency of communities, individuals, objects, and constructions. Through the analysis, it became clear that the traditional interpretation of Bronze Age cremation being caused by a package of ideas and practices that spread rapidly is unsupportable. Throughout the area investigated we find there is strong evidence for a distinct temporal dimension to the change, and that the full transformation from inhumed bodies to cremations placed in urns commonly takes place over a period of three to four generations with considerable alterations and experimentation taking place during that time and with much attention still focused on the wholeness of the body. Indeed, we can identify a transitional stage within most sites and regions. This is the time it takes within each community to change their burial practices to one in which the cremated bones are no longer treated in a manner that focuses on recreating likeness to the skeleton or fleshed body or in other words maintains their likeness to inhumations. We do not propose this as a ‘period’ in the traditional sense of archaeological chronologies that divide timelines into successive blocks, or as a horizon in absolute time; rather, we aim to stress that there is a temporal dimension to all action and that the development of particular forms of new normative practices ‘takes time’. It is, therefore, to be expected that the length of the transitional period will vary and unfold in different manners when sites are compared, although they share having a period of transformation as well as the general direction of change. For the cremation burials constructed during this transitional period, we identify three phases4 of body manipulation during which concerns can become articulated and materialised; this is the theme of Chapters 6 to 8. The first phase we label the transformative phase. During this phase, the body is cremated, through which it appears to gain a status of mixture: it becomes ash and bone fragments and there is a sense of a disembodied-bodiness. In the next phase, the reassemble-phase, the remains are commonly manipulated to regain bodiness during their burial; this may include the use of objects and placing the bones to imitate shape and involves placing the remains in some kind of resting place. The third phase, the re-integration phase, is expressed through secondary interaction with the bones (or their place of burial) or the removal of associated objects. Through the transition period, each of these phases lessened (more or less) in intensity and in terms of how explicitly they 4

Although there are obvious similarities between these phases and those traditionally linked to arguments about rite de passage, namely separation, liminality, and incorporation (van Gennep 1960 [1909]), we selected to use terms that arose directly from our interpretative engagement with the practices we could discern.

INTRODUCTION

are stated. Whereas variations of the first two phases either are observed or can be inferred throughout the areas of study, the third is only found on some sites and there is considerable variation in how it is expressed. This may suggest that of the three phases of the transformation of burial practices, it is the relationship to the body after it is buried that is most locally specific and least likely to involve imitation and influences from other groups; this scenario is further discussed in Chapter 8. We interpret the practices dominating the second phase, the reassemblephase, as particularly revealing of attitudes to the body and their gradual transformation. We interpret these practices as shaped around the ‘body reimagined’, insofar as the physicality of the cremated bones is explored as a means of creating a link to the real (lived) body through the re-imaged or remade body. This is the starting point for the reconstitution of the cremated body as a new kind of whole. Typically, the cremated bones may be reassembled or annotated to regain similarities or similar properties to the lived body, such as shape or proportion. The body’s materiality is remade after its cremation. This, for instance, commonly takes the form of a reorganisation and laying-out of the bones themselves in the shape of a body. Usually, it is a spatial presence, the dimensionality of the body shape, that is emphasised, in other words, long and slender and realistic in proportion; but in some cases, there is an additional emphasis on the different parts of the body – the head, the abdomen, and the feet. It is also common to see objects used, in particular dress fittings, to annotate the body, for example when pins are placed where the chest would be or when arm rings are placed at the sides of the cremated remains. Objects, especially pottery, may also be used to outline the space of the body or even to indicate its extreme points: head and feet. These and other characteristics suggest that the concern that had to be ‘solved’ during the transitional period from inhumation to cremation was about the wholeness of the body – despite the fragmentation introduced by cremation. It seems it was difficult to let go of an emphasis on wholeness. It even seems possible that this emphasis on bodiness in some cases was maintained for some high-status graves late into the Urnfield period. Thus, we see a tension between an embrace of the idea of cremation and yet a reluctance, or indeed a sociopsychological inability, to let go of the perception of the dead body as a corporal existence. Over time, the tension lessened and a different attitude to the dead body formed when cremated remains became things that could be collected up and placed in a container. However, in general, a complete change in attitudes to the body is first seen after a few generations have experimented with and altered how they conduct cremation burials. This emphasis on wholeness, furthermore, suggests that practices that involve circulation or other utilisation of the distributive qualities of body fragments or the partial body were not regularly carried out in the study regions. It is

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interesting to note that this seems different in England, where it has been suggested that fragmented cremated bones were circulated amongst the living (Brück 2009, 2019), and where the introduction of Bronze Age cremations as a dominant ritual seems to have followed a different trajectory being both early and immediately linked to the use of urns. Based on the analysis in Chapters 6–8 of practices associated with these three phases we return to the question of their significance, including what they reveal about attitudes to the dead body in Chapter 9. There we also return to the question of how transformations take place and the role of memory. We do not concern ourselves with the specific content of attitudes and beliefs, as we find the question of ‘what is going on inside people’s heads’ beyond the evidential potentials of our data; but we do propose that we can expose the underlying consistency in the practices surrounding death during this period and how substantially they were influenced by, and in turn influenced, how the body was perceived. Therefore, this volume does not aim to be an exhaustive account of why cremation was introduced and the different forms it takes in the European Bronze Age, but the range of data explored allows us to draw comparisons between the responses and practices of different local communities and through this to trace both common tendencies and distinct variations. Through this, a new kind of comparison emerges, and Bronze Age cremation practices become more nuanced and varied than usually presented, startling in their diversity and yet a more grounded practice than expected. Due to its distinct focus and approach, the volume can argue for a different way of understanding the spread of cremation – and through this it also contributes to the reflection on how change within fundamental aspects of society can take place. It introduces the local cultural context as a crucial influence on how the idea of cremation was absorbed and adapted. It also provides a rich range of examples to support the argument that the understanding of the deceased body was articulated through contemporary embodied understandings of the human form. Lastly, it suggests that this way of perceiving the body was finally broken when cremation began to be placed in urns as a matter of routine – at that stage, the association between the living and the dead body had become dramatically altered.

TWO

A BRIEF HISTORY OF URNS, URNFIELDS, AND BURIAL IN THE URNFIELD CULTURE

I

n this chapter, we trace the diverse manners in which cremation urns and urnfields have been interpreted through time; how their discoveries gave rise to ideas of changing beliefs and spreading cultures. For the periods until the development of professional archaeology, we use examples ranging widely within Europe, whereas from the mid-nineteenth century onwards we shall focus more specifically upon discussions within central Europe and especially the German tradition, due to their significance for the historiography of the introduction of cremation as a research topic. The aims are to search for and reflect on the assumptions that still affect the framework within which we work, and the terminology used within Bronze Age mortuary studies. We shall not detail the parallel distinct historiography of how the cremated remains themselves have been perceived and analysed (but see Schafberg 1998).

TRIPPING OVER URNS: EARLY RECOGNITION AND EXPLANATIONS OF UR NS AND URNFIELDS

Bronze Age urns were usually buried in a manner that has left little or no indication on the ground, and yet they are often found intact. Finding them would have been a different encounter than finding other burial forms, especially inhumation graves with skeletons. It would also have been different from the discovery of buried ‘treasures’, such as hoards, as the value of the objects in such finds appears obvious. In addition, their content of cremated 15

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bones was presumably not easy to understand for communities for whom inhumation in Christian churchyards was an established and unquestioned practice. Nonetheless, they were often encountered but often considered a strange phenomenon. Urns were recovered accidentally during farming and building work, and from early on such discoveries led to imaginative speculations about what they were. Ideas about urnfields and the concept of an Urnfield Culture have accordingly arisen out of a long history of discoveries, speculations, and research through which observations have been interwoven with changing trends of interpretation. In the age of antiquarianism (e.g. Mushard 1927), several accounts of finding whole pots in the ground provided insights into the varied popular beliefs they gave rise to. Examples of early explanations include the idea that urns were self-growing and thus seen as natural objects; they were ascribed similar properties of growth and development as, for example, potatoes (Gummel 1938: 11). During the late medieval period, a common superstition of ‘magic crocks’ growing out of the earth was documented in central Europe (Sklenárˇ 1983: 16). In other instances, urns were associated with the activities of dwarfs or other magical creatures. Such beliefs lasted until at least the nineteenth century. For instance, Johanna Mestorf’s annotations in her collection of burial data show that such ideas had not fully died out in the countryside of northern Europe by 1886 (Mestorf 1886: 96). Yet, from the medieval period, some arguments already recognised the urns as cultural objects. An account of Martin Luther’s visit to Torgau in Saxony in 1529 mentions that some urns were discovered near the town, and this was thought so important that a commission was appointed to investigate matters; they concluded that a sepulcrum had been at the place (Gummel 1938: 11). This demonstrates that it was possible even then to associate urns with burial practices. The inspiration for the interpretation of urns as burials was often various classical writers. One core source was Homer’s description in the Iliad and Odyssey of the cremation burials for the funerals of Patroclos (Il. 23, 161), Hector (Il. 24, 778), and Achilles (Od. 24, 65); but cremation is also mentioned as an established custom by writers such as Cicero, Lucretius, Pliny, and Plutarch (Nock 1932). So, in contrast to the ‘common people’, for the gentlemen of the Enlightenment, the idea of cremation graves was well established and, in many cases, it became a leisurely pursuit to excavate urns. These classical sources were, for instance, the inspiration behind Sir Thomas Browne’s seventeenth-century theological discussion of urns found in Norfolk, England, in which he interprets the urns and burned human remains as the result of a specific burial tradition (Browne 2005). A letter from the philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz further illustrates how the idea of urns and cremation was becoming shared amongst learned individuals without them necessarily having seen one; in a letter to a friend in 1691 he

HISTORY OF URNS, URNFIELDS, & BURIAL

2.1 Excavating urns as a leisurely, yet educational, pursuit in a German book for children, 1877 (after Sklenárˇ 1983: 109)

enquires about urnae sepulchrales, asking if he knew of such finds, what they looked like, and how and where they were found (Gummel 1938: 101). Urns were also included in artefact classifications by antiquarians in their pursuit of discovering the world’s order (Fig. 2.1). Chronological systems that place the phenomena of urns and urnfields in a specific time frame had, however, yet to be developed. In an early version of the Three Age System, outlined in a letter from 1818, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen listed grave urns as one of his three main categories; the others were firstly weapons and tools made of stone and secondly objects made of metal. His taken-for-granted reference to ‘grave-urns’ leads us to conclude that urns had a prominent presence in archaeological collections by that time and that people would recognise what he was referring to. He seems to have used the term to refer to a wide range of vessels, which were then further divided according to the material they were made of, such as soapstone, clay, copper, silver, or gold (Street-Jensen 1988: 20). Clearly, not all of the vessels he spoke of were actual funerary urns. Thus, in his work, the term ‘urn’ was confusingly applied to pottery in general and not only to vessels containing human remains in the

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form of burnt bones. This ambiguity in the use of the term ‘urn’ has remained a problem in archaeology, with complaints about lack of clarity voiced as early as 1824 (Büsching 1824: 24–25). Thomsen published the final version of his Three Age System in 1836. Taking the context of the finds into account, he came to the conclusion that, in the full Bronze Age, weapons and cutting tools were made of copper and bronze, and that the dead were cremated and buried in urns under small tumuli (Trigger 1989: 76). For further arguments about the urns’ place in time, the development of the concept of stratigraphy was essential. Based on the observation that urns were repeatedly found in the barrow fill over inhumation burials, Nils Gustaf Bruzelius argued in 1854 that urns belonged to the later Bronze Age, as a new mode of burial came into use (Gräslund 1987), and by the late nineteenth century it was widely accepted in northern Europe that cremation in urns and the use of urnfields constituted the dominant burial practice of the Late Bronze Age. This split of the Bronze Age into an early and late part was the first step towards the later division of the Scandinavian Bronze Age into six periods by Oscar Montelius (Montelius 1885). In the further development of Bronze Age archaeology, finds played a major role. They provided the basis for typology and were the means of identifying cultural groups and tracing trade networks. This meant that the gravegoodspoor cremation burials generally were of much less interest than the much richer inhumation graves (Hofmann 2008: 28, Olausson 1992: 251). FRAMING TIME: THE BI RTH OF THE ‘U RNFIELD’

By the middle of the nineteenth century, urns and urnfields were widely recognised as an established burial practice of later prehistory, and substantial data was being accumulated across the continent. In Montelius’ 1885 construction of the Nordic Bronze Age chronology (Montelius period VI), urns and cremation burials were securely placed in the Late Bronze Age (periods IV– VI). The discussion of where to place urnfields chronologically was not, however, yet resolved in central Europe. The Three Age System was not fully accepted there even in the late nineteenth century. This is probably because the archaeological record did not lend itself as easily to an idea of a ‘pure Bronze Age’ as it did in northern Germany and Scandinavia (Sørensen and Rebay 2008a). In addition, in central Europe chronological discussions were interwoven with ethnic interpretations early on, making cultural groups rather than time the dominant interpretative framework. Another important difference was the Roman occupation, which in central Europe provided a convenient basis for classifying archaeological finds into pre-Roman (= Celtic), Roman, and post-Roman (= Germanic). For instance, the first rough classification of the cemetery of Hallstatt as ‘Celtic’ was built on the arguments that

HISTORY OF URNS, URNFIELDS, & BURIAL

the lack of weapons implied it was not Germanic whereas the lack of coins suggested it was not Roman (Gaisberger 1848). Paul Reinecke was the first to apply Montelius’ typological method south of northern Europe. As curator of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (Roman-Germanic Central Museum) in Mainz, he attempted to display the prehistoric collection in chronological order and thereby established a system with four principal divisions (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Hallstatt, and Latène periods), each of which was further subdivided into A, B, C, and D (Reinecke 1965). Reinecke’s main aim was a clear definition of the different periods and the construction of a coherent chronological system. The Hallstatt material, however, confusingly contained mixed assemblages of bronze and iron finds, which covered the Late Bronze Age (Ha A–B) and the Early Iron Age (Ha C– D). The result was a terminology that was distinctly different to the chronological systems used in northern Europe. The traditional Reinecke chronology and its subdivisions are still widely used (e.g. Gerloff 2007): the Urnfield period now commonly refers to the period of Bronze Age D and Hallstatt A and B. Further refinement of the chronology (Müller-Karpe 1959) and the implementation of C14 and dendro-chronological dates (Sperber 1987, 2017) have significantly advanced our ability to understand the temporal sequence of changing burial rites but have not yet had any lasting effect on the terminology. That the cremations were not of Christian people was clear. Using the word cemetery in the sense of a ‘Kirchhof’ (churchyard) was, therefore, generally rejected, as this term suggests a connection to the church, and more neutral terms like ‘Urnenfriedhof’ (urn-cemetery) or ‘Urnenfeld’ (urnfield) were preferred. After Christian Hostmann’s publication Der Urnenfriedhof bei Darzau (Hostmann 1874) the term ‘Urnenfriedhof’ became more and more popular in northern and eastern Germany, whereas in southern Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire large cremation burial sites tended to be called ‘Urnenfelder’. Ingvald Undset and Johanna Mestorf, both scholars with great international influence on terminology and interpretations during the second half of the nineteenth century, used both ‘Urnenfelder’ and ‘Urnenfriedhöfe’ as terms to describe cremation cemeteries from the end of the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age (Undset 1882: 32, 38). Moreover, they wrote about them as if the type of site was generally well known. They also note they were particularly numerous in Hungary (Undset 1882: 36), which probably was part of the reason for the later idea that the Urnfield Culture developed and spread from Hungary. Similarly, Otto Tischler commented in 1886 on Ernst Wagner’s book Hügelgräber und Urnenfriedhöfe in Baden, using the terms ‘Urnenfelder der Bronzezeit’ (Probst 1996: 258). Such discussions of terminology continue today and vary regionally. In some areas, terminology from Roman period studies have been influential. At the site of Pitten, Austria, for

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example, the Roman terminology ‘bustum’ was used for burials that took place at the location of cremation whereas ‘ustrinum’ was used when the place of cremation and burial were separated (Hampl et al. 1981: 16). In other regions, the great variability in cremation burials without urns has been much discussed, and various terminological categorisations proposed. This can already be seen as a concern in 1939 when Jacob-Friesen (1939: 9) discussed the difference among cremation burials. The variability among cremations without urns has continued to be of the greatest concern. Mogens Bo Henriksen’s contribution to Danish field recording methods (1995a, 1995b) is a clear illustration of an ongoing endeavour to create categorical clarity over the range of cremation burial practices. The classificatory differences are also a major concern in Hofmann’s analysis of cremation burials in the Elbe-Weser triangle (Hofmann 2008). Cremation burials without the use of urns and with little indication of what practices took place are common during the latest phase of the Bronze Age and the earliest Iron Age in parts of northern Europe, and they are among the range of contemporary burial forms during the Late Bronze Age generally in central Europe. The terminological wrangles they give rise to are in themselves indicative of the range of variations. ETHNIC EXPLANATI ONS: ‘URNFIELD PEOPLE’ AND ‘U RNFIELD CULTURE’

Simultaneous with the development of detailed chronological systems, the ethnicity of the peoples who had used the urnfields became a focus of interest. Identifying the ‘people’ behind the change in burial practice thus emerged as a research focus, and questions about people, races, and cultures became paramount. This was closely associated with the rise of the nation-state and the explicit interest in national archaeology fuelled by the general politics at the time (e.g. Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996, Sklenárˇ 1983). Differences in material culture were explained by reference to different peoples, more modest variations by reference to tribes. Two cultural–historical approaches that mutually influenced each other have been particularly important in shaping this way of thinking about the ‘Urnfield Culture’: ‘Kulturkreislehre’, especially influential in Austria and southern Germany, and ‘Siedlungsarchäologische Methode’, which had wider influence. The Kulturkreislehre (Theory of Cultural Circles) was developed in ethnography, but due to its focus on material culture, it could easily be applied to prehistory. Aimed at developing a ‘universal history of mankind’, cultural circles were created through the gathering of data as well as description, classification, comparison, and mapping of the spatial distribution of artefacts. These were then placed within a chronological sequence. Cultural change was

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primarily explained by contact between the cultural circles and through migrations. Evolutionary approaches, including arguments about social development, were explicitly rejected due to the conservative-catholic background of most of the protagonists of the Kulturkreislehre, who believed in God’s creation as the starting point for a limited historical development. This rather static view of prehistory, as well as the associated methodology, has remained a hidden paradigm in central Europe until today (Rebay-Salisbury 2011). Otto Tischler had, for example, already divided the Hallstatt Culture into a ‘Westhallstattkreis’ and ‘Osthallstattkreis’ based on the cemetery of Hallstatt (Tischler 1881), when Moritz Hoernes expanded the model to fit a wider area and established a division of the culture into four groups (Hoernes 1885, 1905). Cultural circles defined by urnfields, ‘Urnenfelderkreise’, were traced by following similar general distributions and divisions and simply projecting the groupings back in time. The central European Urnfield Cultures were understood to be on the receiving end of cultural development of more advanced and innovative cultures in the Mediterranean (Sklenárˇ 1983: 144). The idea of Ex Oriente Lux with its assumption that cultures at a less developed stage are dependent on innovations from a more developed one, and that the more developed ones were to be found in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, lay at the heart of the explanations put forward. Such ideas not only guided interpretations of the origin and spread of the Urnfield Culture, but also cemented the notion of cremations being a foreign, externally generated change brought about through the disruptive influences of people from outside the area. Gustaf Kossinna’s ‘Siedlungsarchäologische Methode’ (settlement archaeological method) overlapped in some respects with the Kulturkreislehre (Bernbeck 1997: 27), and it is interesting to note that Kossinna at times used the term Kulturkreis synonymously to culture or even peoples (Grünert 2002: 72). Despite methodological similarities, the Siedlungsarchäologische Methode was rooted in history rather than ethnography. It aimed at writing the history of peoples, especially the Germans, clarifying their origins and defining their geographical boundaries (Gummel 1938: 316–371, Veit 1989: 40–42). Kossinna’s main guiding principle was that ‘sharply defined archaeological culture areas correspond at all times to the areas of particular peoples or tribes’ (translated by Härke 2000: 44, Kossinna 1911: 3). Instead of understanding prehistoric Germany as dependent on or inferior to Mediterranean people, Kossinna argued for independent cultural development in northern Europe after the Ice Ages (Sklenárˇ 1983: 149). Kossinna literally equated the distribution of specific types of prehistoric vessels with historical tribes – an approach already criticised during his lifetime (Baudou 2005). Tracing the roots of specific peoples far back into prehistoric times, achieved by linking the earliest historical documentation of peoples to archaeological data and thus following the development of

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archaeological cultures in reverse, is a typical trait of the method. The interpretation of these was shown on maps (Grunwald 2017). Specific values were ascribed to peoples, cultures, and races in the Siedlungsarchäologische Methode, not least to demonstrate the superiority of the German race. Late Bronze Age groups were also subject to such classifications. Kossinna consistently assigned the Nordic Bronze Age to the Germanic people but found it more difficult to decide about the southern German and Lusatian Urnfield Cultures. Through time, Kossinna’s interpretation of these groups shifted from one historically named people to the other including Ancient Germans, Slavs, Illyrians, Kapodacians, and Celts. It is most revealing to see how such arguments were formulated alongside contemporaneous political debates and claims on land. For instance, the urnfields in northeastern Europe at the German-Polish border, and therefore a sensitive political region, were assigned to the ‘Lausitzer Typus’ by Rudolf Virchow (Virchow 1874). Kossinna interpreted them as ‘un-germanisch’ (not germanic), but he was reluctant to accept them as legacies of the Slavs. In 1899 he declared them to be Thracian and in 1912 Illyrian. In Poland, in contrast, the Late Bronze Age Lusatian graves were linked with cremation graves of the Slavs, a link that has remained influential until today (Sklenárˇ 1983: 151). Not all archaeological research in the first half of the twentieth century was focused on ethnicity, however. An example of an alternative trend is the Marburg School and Gero von Merhart, who in 1928 became the first professor of prehistory in Marburg. Although he was Kossinna’s contemporary, he disagreed with the germanophile worldview that biased prehistoric research, and instead promoted regional studies with detailed chronological analyses. Working within Reinecke’s chronological system (Theune 2001: 158), he used ethnic interpretations scarcely and with caution. He aimed to find the origin of objects and trace the development of material culture through detailed comparison (Merhart, 1928). Merhart’s approach demanded extensive comparative studies of the material culture of a given geographic area to establish chronological order. The studies conducted in this spirit by his pupils, particularly regarding the Late Bronze Age, remain influential to this day (e.g. Kimmig 1940, Kossack 1954, Müller-Karpe 1948). After the Second World War, simplistic ethnic interpretations largely went out of fashion. In post-war Germany it became politically correct to understand archaeological cultures as no more than a shorthand for an entity of material culture or cultural practice that is spatially and chronologically distinguishable within the general prehistoric development. Detailed documentation and classification of the archaeological record became the aim rather than the means of research, and this resulted in numerous publications focused on the cataloguing of finds. An example of this is the series Prähistorische Bronzefunde. Descriptive accounts of the material characteristics of individual

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object types as well as the areas of their production, distribution, and exchange were central to this influential series (Müller-Karpe 1973, 1975: 74–81, Dietz and Jockenhövel 2016). Another focus was archaeological cultures within smaller regions (Kristiansen 1998: 21). The question of the ethnicity of the Urnfield Culture remained unanswered, and it was increasingly doubted that a general ethnic label could be found. Despite this, the underlying concepts of peoples and tribes have not died out, and the attempt to relate linguistic research, for example the IndoEuropean languages, to the history of ethnic groups by archaeological means has not become obsolete (Kossack 1995: 3). Furthermore, new scientific methodologies, such as isotope analysis and the study of ancient as well as modern DNA, have aided a revival of migration studies (Brown 2000, Budd et al. 2004, Burmeister 2000, Mulligan 2006, Oelze et al. 2012, Smits et al. 2010). So far, such data have been little used in debates on the development of cremation as a dominant new practice; but it is worth taking note of how once again material culture, language, and biological traits are studied together (e.g. Allentoft et al. 2015, Heyd 2017, Kristiansen et al. 2017). This time the arguments are based on scientific methods and through them new assumptions, including, of course, political ones even if these are not explicit (for discussions see Hakenbeck 2019, Sommer 2009). UNDER STANDING HOW CULTURAL PRACTICES SPREAD: MIGRATIO NS AND DIFFU SIONS

In contrast to examples of cremation from other periods, the challenging question regarding the Urnfield Culture was how the change in burial practice could spread so widely and so rapidly and become the dominant practice from northern Italy to southern Scandinavia and from the Balkans to the Low Countries. This phenomenon has accordingly given rise to several interpretations about the mechanisms of spread. In turn, the notion of a rapid spread in itself became an intrinsic part of how the Urnfield Culture was thought about. The appearance of material culture and a burial practice that were without clearly traceable local predecessors or with clear indicators of these being local innovations were taken as evidence for the migration and expansion of the ‘Urnfield people’. Georg Kraft (1926) and Jaroslav Böhm (1937) were among the earliest scholars to apply these arguments explicitly to the Urnfield Culture as they linked historical events of the second millennium BC in the eastern Mediterranean to postulated population movements in central Europe. This linkage between the spread of cultural elements and the movement of people was maintained by Vere Gordon Childe, who argued that the movement of people and the importance of cultural influences were the core mechanisms of cultural change (Childe 1950).

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2.2 Distribution of early urnfields in Europe and the expansion of the Urnfield Culture to the east and west according to Childe (Childe 1950: 182)

Childe was informed by different political ideas to those that inspired Kossinna, but there are substantial overlaps in their definition of culture, which, in the application of their approaches to the Urnfield Culture, resulted in very similar interpretations (Fig. 2.2). Childe is therefore in many ways one of the most direct proponents of Kossinna’s view (Veit 1984, 1989), although he stripped these interpretations of their specific ideological baggage. Similar to Kossinna, Childe defined culture as regularly associated types of artefacts, domestic and funerary structures over a given area (Childe 1930: 41–43), and believed there is ‘good reason to recognize the material expression of that community of traditions which distinguishes a people in the modern sense’ (Childe 1930: 42). From this assumption, he deduced that culture, in other words people, and their cultural practices, can move around, and migrations can, therefore, be detected through the archaeological record when we see the spread of a whole complex of types, habits, and fashions rather than just single types. He argued that change in pottery and burial rites as they are the ‘more intimate and imponderable traits of a culture’ (Childe 1930: 42) are particularly strong indicators of migration; he believed such aspects were unlikely to be the result of trade or imitation.

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Whereas Childe’s definition of culture and his view on the underlying forces of change were relatively consistent throughout his academic work, his interpretation of the origin of the Urnfield Culture seems to change throughout his career. Childe’s first contribution was to broaden the discussion by widening the geographical scope; his focus on the Lausitz and Danubian cultures, in particular, added new areas to the debate (Childe 1928, 1929), and his work has been influential in many areas of central Europe. Childe’s focus was not, however, the change of burial practice, as he believed the people who cremated their dead were linear descendants of the ones who previously inhumed them, thus labelling the Lausitz people the ‘heirs of the Aunjetitz folk’ (Childe 1928: 39). It was the spread of the Urnfield Culture that interested him, and it was extensively discussed in his volume ‘The Bronze Age’ (Childe 1930). In this work, he pointed out that despite its strong oriental flavour, the Late Bronze Age civilisation was industrially based in central Europe (Childe 1930: 194). He described the period as ‘. . . an epoch of turmoil and migration though it witnessed immense industrial and economic progress, forced upon the barbarians by these times of stress’ (Childe1930: 192). In effect, while Childe argued for continuity in the burial population and the origin of the Urnfield Culture in temperate Europe, he simultaneously outlined the spread of the Urnfield Culture over much of Europe, including the ‘invasion’ of Great Britain, which he described quite imaginatively as a ‘complex process effected by the infiltration of discrete bands of invaders’ (Childe 1930: 225). In the concluding chapter titled ‘races’ Childe proposed continuity both in ‘blood and tradition’ between the Bronze Age and modern population (Childe 1930: 240) and argued that the multitude of Bronze Age cultures could be connected to branches of the Indo-European linguistic family. He stated that it should be possible to label them with names derived from classical authors such as Teutons, Celts, Italici, Hellenes, Illyrians, Thraco-Phrygians, and Slavs, although he conceded that results were still ‘frankly disappointing’ (Childe1930: 240). At this stage in his career, inherent contradictions seem to have emerged between Childe’s stress on continuity and his simultaneous focus on invasions and spread of cultural traits, but he does not try to resolve this for the Urnfield Culture. By 1950, Childe appears to have changed his views about the origin of the Urnfield Culture. In his volume ‘Prehistoric Migrations in Europe’ (Childe 1950), he argued that Troy VI, at the time dated to the fourteenth century BC, was the model for the development of cremation in central Europe. This in turn led him to conclude that cremation was introduced from Greece, not by a mass migration but by missionaries, chieftains, or a conquering aristocracy (Childe 1950: 209). For northern Europe, Childe, assuming that Montelius Periode II and III of the Nordic Bronze Age were contemporary with the Late Bronze Age of central Europe (Reinecke BzD, Ha A and B), pointed out the

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possibility that ‘Urnfield chieftains did reach the Baltic’ and that they influenced the Nordic Bronze Age until cremation in large urnfield cemeteries became the dominant rite (Childe 1950: 204). Understanding the relationships between the eastern Mediterranean and central Europe and creating clarity about where cultural impulses came from, were initially hindered by poor chronological frameworks (Raczky, Hertelendi, and Horváth 1992), and such arguments were often based on prepositions rather than solid data. In addition, as many chronological sequences were established through connections to better datable sequences in the Near East and the Mediterranean that were supported by written text, there was a strong tendency to place central Europe later in the sequence. The idea of Ex Oriente Lux with its implication that the triggers for cultural change can eventually be traced to earlier developments in the Mediterranean (or the Near East), lingered in interpretations of scholars that were less focused on national/nationalistic interpretations. Similar to Childe, Merhart proposed that the origin of the Urnfield Culture was to be found in the Danube-Balkan region. He argued that several waves of migrations were the reason behind the distribution of certain types of objects, such as ornaments, weapons, and sheet armour further south and east of the area of their origin, reaching as far as the Aegean (Schauer 1975: 121). The interpretation of a central European origin of the Urnfield Culture developed into a discussion of the varied nature of the relationships between central Europe and the Mediterranean. Among others, Hermann Müller-Karpe argued for mutual, complex relationships and contacts between the areas (Müller-Karpe 1962: 280–284), thus introducing an interpretation that could not be understood solely in terms of people’s migrations and individual mobility. Conversely, Wolfgang Kimmig combined the archaeological record and historical sources in his article ‘Seevölkerbewegung und Urnenfelderkultur’ (Kimmig 1964) to construct an argument for the Late Bronze Age as a period of migration and warfare. He saw the disruptions in the eastern Mediterranean by the ‘Sea People’ as connected to the spread of the Urnfield Culture. Being particularly interested in weapons and defensive armour, Kimmig evaluated the relationships between central Europe and the Mediterranean in some detail. He saw the spread of cremation as a defining element of the Urnfield Culture, commenting that ‘among the many forms cremation can take, for the purpose of this paper primarily the urn burials are of interest’ (Kimmig 1964: 245), thus stating that, for him, the defining concept of the Urnfield Culture is a developed, finished practice of an urn burial, and not the other forms cremations might take. Kimmig identified an autonomous Anatolian centre of cremation around the mid-second millennium BC, which was distinct from the sub-Mycenaean and proto-geometric urnfields in the Aegean. He further stressed that there were so many similarities in the details of funerary customs

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2.3 The spread of the Urnfield Culture and the ‘sea peoples’ according to Kimmig’s model (Kimmig 1964: Fig. 17)

between the areas that there can be no doubt about where the influence came from (Kimmig 1964: 246). He described the changes in thirteenth century central Europe, of which the emergence of Iron and the cremation burials are merely symptoms, as a deep break in Bronze Age continuity, including religious changes, migrations, social changes, and climatic changes. Moreover, he identified the Danube-Balkan area as the centre of these phenomena, because cremation was already well established there, and because, he argued, a substantial metal industry flourished through contacts with the Mediterranean (Fig. 2.3). Kimmig saw the Danube-Balkan area as a mediator and hub for the rest of continental Europe, and thus as an area through which the transfer of cultural elements passed on a mutual basis (Kimmig 1964: 270). Building on such arguments about the relationships between central Europe and the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age, several attempts were made during the 1990s to integrate the Urnfield Culture into a World System model. Within such approaches, the concept of the Urnfield Culture has neither been questioned nor examined, rather it has been summarised and used in a general way to explain long-term historical processes. The focus of World System

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theorists has been the Iron Age, but their observations often take their starting point in the Late Bronze Age. Susan and Andrew Sherratt, for example, argued for significant economic growth at the end of the second millennium BC due to new technologies and social-political changes, resulting in the emergence of different economic zones around 500 BC (Sherratt and Sherratt 1993). The world was described as a system of cores and peripheries, or nuclei and margins, with economic strength located in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and cultural impulses transmitted from there through central Europe with northern Europe at the margin of developments. Kristian Kristiansen has applied this interpretative model to the Nordic Bronze Age arguing that the manufacturing of bronze goods created dependencies in terms of metal supply and know-how (Kristiansen 1994: 7). In his model, a network of overlapping exchange cycles began linking groups and strengthening the bonds between local elites throughout Europe; the social development of any given Bronze Age society was argued to depend on its place within this world system (Kristiansen 1991: 24). Such ideas did not, however, generally engage with change in burial practices beyond the general notions of imitation and influences. Another aspect of Kristiansen’s work was his argument for the cyclical nature of certain phenomena in prehistory, such as changes in settlement structure, burial evidence, and hoarding. These changes were interpreted in terms of evolution and devolution within a long-term evolutionary trend (Kristiansen 1994: 14). Within this general, long-term history, he argued for waves of change in burial practices, seeing long term oscillating from communal burials to chiefly burials (Kristiansen 1994: 18), and the development of urnfield cemeteries would fit within this trend. To him, the urnfields represent an ideology of egalitarian village communities, although rich chiefly barrows, sometimes separated from the urnfields, might occur. He further argued that the change to cremation took place after the collapse of international exchange with the Mediterranean and the decline in the role of warrior elites as the dominant form of social organisation (Kristiansen 1994: 17). This focus on long-distance exchanges meant that, to him, it was easy to repeat the view that the Urnfield Culture expansion and re-organisation originated in the old core areas of the Otomani Culture – once again, the Carpathian basin is seen as the hotspot of cultural development. EXPLAINI NG U RNFIELD SYMBOLISM, BELIEFS, AND RELI GION

Any attempts at discussing the introduction of cremation must at least linger on the question of religion and beliefs. Apart from cremations per definition being concerned with beliefs about death, the Urnfield period is also associated with a distinct range of symbols widely shared throughout Europe. However, while both dimensions point to the exercise of beliefs, neither is explicit. As regards

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the symbols used, it is clear that their meanings and how they relate to certain practices are not well understood, and there may have been local variations as well as common tropes. This vagueness of evidence has meant that this aspect of the introduction of cremation has been subjected to a variety of personal ideas, at times somewhat idiosyncratic, about what was involved. Recently, Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas Larsson (2005) presented the Bronze Age as composed of chiefdom societies with theocratic rulers, in which poets, priests, artisans, and smiths played important roles in the transmission of symbols, beliefs, and religion and associated practices. Their attempt to integrate a spiritual and symbolic dimension into their otherwise economic and political World System view of the Bronze Age (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 43) opens up new lines of thought and yet follows closely a long tradition of speculations about Bronze Age religion. Their interpretation of shared Bronze Age religious practices throughout Europe might be helpful when discussing the scarce hints about Urnfield symbolism and religion. The general idea of a shared, almost pan-European urnfield religion and cosmology is, however, not new and the challenges are how we avoid simplifying complex past ontologies and assuming familiar motivations. Current positions on Bronze Age religion are deeply affected by earlier arguments and assumptions that have permeated the literature. These often take the form of unspoken assumptions, and there is still a strong tendency to project not only religiosity but also specific ontological concerns onto Bronze Age communities. Some of the building blocks of these views can be found already in Georg Kossack’s seminal work on the period. His volume ‘Studien zum Symbolgut der Urnenfelder- und Hallstattzeit Mitteleuropas’ (Kossack 1954) provided the first broad overview of the motifs of the Late Bronze Age Urnfield Cultures. Identifying a middle Danubian centre, Kossack aimed at investigating the adoption and rejection of single symbolic elements within individual regions. Upon his retirement, he returned to this material and arguments, and in 1999 Kossack published a monograph about the religious thinking behind material and figurative tradition in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Europe: ‘Religiöses Denken in dinglicher und bildlicher Überlieferung Alteuropas aus der Spätbronze- und frühen Eisenzeit’ (Kossack 1999). The volume covers a vast area from Greece to Italy, central Europe, and as far as Denmark, and is based on both wellknown artefacts and the huge amount of data that had been added since his 1954 study. He explored regional differences in terms of the symbolic record itself as well as finds contexts. Instead of simply explaining similarities by referring to the transmission of ideas, he pointed to the possibilities of regional, parallel developments from a common ground. He characterised the common traits of the religion as functional peasant’s beliefs (‘zweckorientierter Bauernglaube’, Kossack 1999: 109). Many of his interpretations of symbols

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and religion were, however, purely intuitive and, following his logic requires that one accepts his axioms (e.g. Eggert 2011: 226). Based largely on Kossack’s work, the argument for a change of cosmology and religious beliefs during the Middle Bronze Age has been widely accepted (e.g. Hofmann 2008). It is supported by the impression of an emerging iconography expressed through a strict range of symbols or signs, with the dominant motifs in the Urnfield Culture being the sun, the bird, and the boat, often combined in one image (the bird-sun-boat motif ). Their meaning has recently been discussed extensively with evidence from Scandinavia, especially the range of figurative scenes on rock art and bronze razors, used to argue that a narrative about cosmological movements (night and day) provided their underlying syntax (Bradley 2006, Kaul 1998, 2004). In these approaches, the motifs are interpreted as reflecting religion (focused on cosmology) and their occurrence over large parts of Europe is seen as evidence of wide-ranging contacts and transmission of religious ideas. These interpretations, in turn, are more or less explicitly connected with the assumption that change in burial rites is a reflection of changes in belief. This has, for instance, been argued by John Alexander, who made an explicit comparison between the spread of Islam in Africa and the spread of the Urnfield Culture (Alexander 1979). Sebastian Becker, based on an extensive study of the bird motif in central Europe, recently challenged how these motifs have been interpreted (Becker 2015). Rather than seeing them as reflecting the distribution of a new religion per se, he argued that the use of the bird motif, as one of the key motifs of the Urnfield period, should be understood as an expression of branding. Through this branding, ideas about a masculine warrior identity could be shared by diverse communities who may have interpreted the religious practices in different ways. Becker’s argument is extremely interesting and in subtle ways challenges how the ‘spread of the Urnfield culture’ has traditionally been approached as a coherent ideological package. In particular, his argument suggests that as shared symbols the meanings of the bird figure were ‘shallow’ and general rather than being associated with a nuanced and clearly articulated ideological or religious narrative. If a similar reading of the material culture is brought to the urnfield phenomenon more widely, then this opens up for a questioning of how much the changes in the form of practice was about ‘buying’ into cultural trends without this necessarily being followed by shared new interpretative narratives. There has also been a long tradition of interpretations focused on the fire element of cremation, either by stressing a link between the sun symbol and fire or by focussing on the transformative nature of fire. These explanations have been less concerned with tracing the origins and reasons for the change and have rather focused on revealing the inner logic and, therefore, people’s general understanding of cremation, its connection to ontological positions, or its phenomenological impacts.

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Within such approaches, the reasons for cremating the dead have been interpreted in two major ways: sacrifice and purification. Jacob Grimm, who was an avid collector of folklore and customs, argued in 1850 that cremation developed from sacrifices using fire and the important role fire played in religious ceremonies (Grimm 1850). He believed that the dead were sacrificed to the gods through fire. Various prehistorians responded to such arguments. A relationship between cremation and sacrifice, as well as their performative aspects as rituals of transformation, continue to be stressed by scholars of the Berlin school such as Louis D. Nebelsick (1995, 1997) and Carola MetznerNebelsick (2012). The thesis of cremation as an act of purification was also argued early. Sophus Müller, for instance, argued that the dead were considered unclean and the mortuary ritual, therefore, was an act of purification. This led him to reject Grimm’s thesis because if a dead person is considered unclean, he or she could hardly be fit to be sacrificed (Müller 1897). This theme was also picked up by Carl Schuchardt, who added the notion of cremation being a hygienic way of disposing of the dead (Schuchhardt 1928: 132). This argument may well have been influenced by contemporary discussions about cremation, as cremation was re-introduced at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century in Germany, causing heated discussions between supporters and opponents of this burial practice (Fischer 1996). A further component that may have influenced the popularity of this view is ethnographic studies of cremation along the Indus River, where complex ideas about which bodies are seen fit or unfit for cremation are played out in practice to this day (Bloch and Parry 1982, Parry 1994). One of the most frequently repeated arguments, however, has been that cremation took place to liberate the soul from the body. The basis of these arguments seems to be a common assumption that prehistoric people had a concept of soul and an associated idea of the afterlife as a place the soul moved to after death, or more particularly that such a belief developed by the Middle Bronze Age and was the cause of the change to cremation. The core of this argument was that such a belief would accept the decay of the physical remains but want to secure the liberation and continued existence, albeit in a different realm, of another aspect of the person: the soul. This interpretation was informed by classical authors, by the Christian view of life after death, which has made the existence of a soul a familiar concept, and by Old Norse literature with their detailed description of cremation burials. At a deeper psychological level, it was probably also influenced by our own reluctance to think about death as final and as the absolute end of the person. Arguments concerning the liberation of the soul were made early by Müller (1897) and were probably very familiar to most people at the time. Further confirmation of this motivation came from ethnographers, in particular from India (Carr 1995, Parry

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1994, Schlenther 1960). Robert Hertz argued in 1907, for example, that mortuary practises were determined in their structure and content by the relationships between three kinds of personae: the corpse of the deceased, the soul of the deceased, and the remaining society of mourners. According to Hertz, the corpse is a model of the state of the soul, and the soul can be manipulated through the handling of the corpse (Hertz 1960 [1907]). This kind of argument returns in the literature several times. In the 1990s Bo Gräslund, for example, made a clear association between the belief in an afterlife and in a soul (Gräslund 1994). He argued that most societies have such beliefs, and he saw them as part of our mental preconditions as Homo sapiens sapiens (Gräslund 1994: 17). He further proposed that the concept of a soul could be pluralistic, representing several spirits and spiritual entities. Using ethnographic evidence, he outlined the main kinds of spirits, suggesting their conceptual difference is crucial to how the body is treated during burial. One spirit is the breath or body soul, which is closely linked to the body and ‘it is thought to leave the body at the very moment of death’ (Gräslund 1994: 18), and the other is the free or dream soul, which can leave the body during, for example, trance or sleep (Gräslund 1994: 18). Since Bronze Age burials are equipment for an afterlife, Gräslund argued they must have believed in such a pluralistic soul. One part of this was the free soul, which did not leave the body immediately upon death but needed to be released through a transformation of the body. The cremation of the body is, therefore, needed for this release. He also assumed that the objects in the cremation urns ‘represent the true furnishing for the other side’ (Gräslund 1994: 16, our emphasis). He further assumed that the consistency in the handling of prestige objects in burials can be taken as evidence for there being coherent and shared beliefs guiding such behaviour (Gräslund 1994: 16). A similar argument was pursued by Václav Furmánek and Ladislav Veliacˇik, who, when confronted with the parallel evidence of inhumation and cremation in Slovakia, pointed out that when cremation was introduced as a general practice, there was little change in the selection of grave goods: both cremation and inhumation grave goods related to beliefs in an afterlife (Furmánek and Veliacˇik 1999). They argued that the transition from inhumation to cremation is based on a change in religious beliefs towards the existence of a soul that can be freed from the body through cremation to become united with the highest deity. These beliefs meant that there were two motives behind the burial of deceased members of society: the respectful burial of the dead and freeing the soul through the purifying fire to make it immortal and at the same time to separate it from the community of the living. Intangible as beliefs are, it is difficult to accept a single and straightforward change of beliefs as the motivation to change burial rites. Changing such beliefs is a process that goes beyond the mere acceptance of a dogma. Traditions, such

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as burial practises, have several non-discursive elements or elements of things that ‘one does’ without being able to explain them, except perhaps by referencing to ‘we have always done it this way’. In our view, simply assigning change to beliefs easily risks glossing over rather than exposing the nature of the changes we observed during the introduction of cremation in different parts of Europe. RECENT TRENDS

Some of the topics that were introduced early continue to intrigue and challenge us: is this about changes in beliefs, why were bodies cremated, how do we understand shared symbolic expressions? At the same time, the data we now work with has proliferated in many ways, providing not just more examples but also new kinds of knowledge. Amongst these, we point to experimental work that has aimed to understand cremation better. This, moreover, has focused both on the characteristics of different kinds of pyre constructions and on the effects of cremation on human bones (Becker et al. 2005, Leineweber 2002, Lemmers et al. 2020, Marshall 2011, Pany-Kucera et al. 2013, Schmidt and Symes 2008). The former, amongst others, has enhanced insights into cremations as a skilled practice that required technological knowledge, thus raising the important question of how such knowledge was practised when cremations only occur sporadically in the small-scale societies that characterised Middle Bronze Europe. How is detailed technological knowledge maintained and transferred? The latter has pushed us to engage in new ways with the cremations themselves. Rather than being reduced to a moment of transformation, we can now discuss cremations as a staged and choreographed event during which specific deliberate choices were made. Similarly, recent scientific advances in the study of human remains have brought new prospects to old questions, such as whether the itinerant movers of cultural mores that Childe assumed were the transmitters of cultural change, were actually the important ‘influencers’ in Middle Bronze Age Europe. For instance, demonstrating that calcined bone provides a reliable substrate for strontium isotope analyses (Cavazzuti et al. 2019b, Harvig et al. 2014, Snoeck et al. 2015) has made it possible to investigate who the people we find in the earliest cremation graves within a particular cemetery or in a region were. We can now answer, for example, whether they were local or outsiders, and we can expect future studies to be increasingly enriched by such details. The historiographical overview in this chapter provides a sense of the many approaches that have been explored so far and how the central questions about why and how are still not convincingly answered; the conversations are ongoing. In our approach, we are primarily interested in how the change

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from inhumation to cremation could take place over large parts of Europe and how it was intertwined with regional practices and local interpretations or responses to general trends. Before we analyse changing practises in detail (Chapters 5–8), we need to clarify that we do not believe our questions are best answered by following a strict cultural definition of the Urnfield Culture in terms of chronology or distribution of types of material culture, nor by singling out a moment in time in absolute terms. We aim at understanding the change of burial practice at the threshold from inhumation to cremation as locally articulated. For our purpose, the definitions and concepts of the ‘Urnfield Culture’ have become too rigid – they do not address all geographical areas that are affected by the phenomenon we are investigating, nor do they necessarily follow the timing of seminal changes. The package has become packed too tightly! The need for this chapter’s reflection on the history of ideas arose in part from the tension that exists between the different scales at which we are discussing and trying to refine our understandings of the nature of Middle to Late Bronze Age societies. At one level of academic discourse, the Urnfield Culture refers to a coherent phenomenon shared over larger parts of Europe, but at another level there are differences in how the term is interpreted. In some regions, Urnfield Culture is merely a double to ‘Late Bronze Age’, whereas in others a more distinct cultural phenomenon is meant. Thus, within the literature there is substantial variation in terms of whether the term is used to refer to a culture, a phenomenon, or a period, indicating a testing lack of clarity about the matter we are referring to (cf. Schauer 1995: IX). Ongoing discussions about whether or not a particular regional group is part of the Urnfield Culture or constitutes an independent complex are a consistent challenge to the overall concept. This has, for instance, given rise to attempts during the 1980s and 1990s of reintegrating the Lusatian Culture under the general Urnfield Culture umbrella and the referencing to Urnfield Cultures in the plural ‘Die Urnenfelder Kulturen’ (Plesl 1987). Meanwhile, despite this uncertainty about the overarching term, it has been little altered since the seminal works of the Marburger school. It is, therefore, especially important to recognise that the vast number of investigations conducted since then has taken place at the scale of regional groups or single sites and that generally have not been used to reconsider these broad terms and issues. The enormous increase in regional and development-led archaeology has so far added little to our understanding of the Urnfield Culture as a shared phenomenon, although some recent attempts are beginning to dent the taken-for-granted interpretations and terminology (e.g. Hofmann 2008). Recent discoveries, such as the Late Bronze Age inhumation cemetery of Neckarsulm, Germany (Knöpke and Wahl 2009), in which only male warriors were buried, or the deposition of human bodies in storage pits and caves

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during the Late Bronze Age (e.g. Flindt et al. 2013, Griebl and Hellerschmid 2013) have brought a more nuanced understanding of burial variability, but it is not clear whether and how this may inform our understanding of the change to cremation as a widespread phenomenon that affected most people. It is not surprising that our understanding of this formative change over time has been tied to changing interpretative frameworks; but it is important to recognise how these have not just engaged with the archaeological project but have also been influenced by politics and changing ideological attitudes to regions, nations, and the concept of Europe as a whole, as well as religion. It is equally significant to be aware of how such assumptions still shadow interpretations of changes in burial rites. However, improvements in archaeological fieldwork, big excavation projects, and the refinements of chronology have advanced our understanding of how people lived and buried their dead during the Bronze Age. We have a wider range of data, better techniques (including osteological and chemical study of cremated remains), and a rich literature to work with. Using past research both as a platform to work from and as a baggage to be diligently shed, it is possible to engage with the introduction of cremation from a broader front of concerns and richer data than ever before.

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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

I

n this chapter, we return to some of the theoretical issues briefly introduced in Chapter 1. Our primary aim is to explain the core theoretical premises that underwrite our analyses and to provide some reflection on the approach we shall unfold. Secondarily, we clarify our position regarding research on the body. We do not aim to use any specific theoretical school to provide directives for the research; we would find that counterproductive. We think of theory as thinking tools, as arguments and reflections that can help us to sharpen our attention, create new sensibilities, and encourage curiosity, but not as a means of dictating the direction of research or its outcome. Theory should be liberating and challenging, not censorious. We reject the notion that one has to follow a particular theoretical school and the attitude that there is a correct and faithful way of understanding theoretical arguments (see also Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2017). The relevance of theories, we believe, is tested by how they help insights and arguments to move forward; the selection of theoretical apparatus should be guided by needs arising from the interpretative engagement. Our interpretative approach is fundamentally hermeneutic. Hermeneutics, and in particular different works by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975a, 1975b) and Martin Heidegger (1962 [1927]), has been extensively explored and argued about within archaeology, providing, we find, some of the most helpful reflections about what constitutes knowledge and understanding (e.g. Hodder 1991, Thomas 1993, Tilley 1991, 1993), and in particular awareness of knowledge production as a process. A hermeneutically inspired approach provides us 36

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with a framework that reveals and celebrates interpretation as a dialectic process of interaction between data, propositions, and theory, and which stresses data analysis as simultaneously an interrogation and a reflection. This dialectic, often referred to as the hermeneutic circle, describes for us the core characteristic of the process of coming to understand. Such an approach pushes us to consider, and attempt to clarify, the conditions under which understanding takes place, including critical awareness of the role of our prejudices and pre-understanding (Latour 2005). Primarily, however, it emphasises that interpretations are part of productive processes. This, to us, means that the scientific process should be seen as a matter of discovery and exploration rather than solely of testing. While we trust that this characterises all scientific endeavours, the emphasis on understanding as an insight one arrives at through process is, perhaps, particularly pertinent for archaeologists due to the distance to the object of study. In archaeology, understanding never comes easy. Investigating prehistoric behaviour, such as the experience of death, may be considered a particularly strenuous task, as the object of study is elusive. The distance to the events does, however, also bring a certain edge to the interpretation as detachment can create its own kind of focus and clarity. The outsider gaze can help to isolate and identify aspects of what is going on which may have been less easy for the participants to distil. We are, however, deliberately avoiding propositions about the particularities of Bronze Age emotions (Tarlow 1999, 2012) including attempts at specifying how emotions may have motivated the makers of the burials: what they may have thought and felt. In this sense, we find the current so-called ontological turn unhelpful, while its emphasis on ontology in a general sense we find very informative. Trying to adapt our thinking to ‘other’ or foreign ways of thinking (Holbraad 2010: 184) is problematic when investigating communities far back in our past. Importing relative recent ethnographies, whether in the form of analogies or as means of ontological expansion, easily becomes an inappropriate appropriation of the ‘other’ (see also Fahlander 2017: 71, 79). Instead, we trace the range of practices through which burials were constructed and performed, acknowledging that they were informed by such thoughts, emotions, and indeed ontologies although they are beyond our reach in a meaningful manner, and also pointing to how they were simultaneously influenced by material conditions, established traditions, as well as ongoing interpretations and negotiations. Thus, whereas we believe that distance in time can act as a positive and productive lens for understanding (Gadamer 1975b: 264–265), it is also clear that we must be explicit about what we mean by understanding and what analytical engagements we find plausible. In terms of knowledge claims, we aim to reveal some of the underlying structural principles or logic (in the sense of cultural norms and conventions) that affected how burials were carried

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out and the more or less gradual transformation of these principles and ideas as cremation became dominant. The reasons why we posit that such structures exist are based on the observation of regularities in the data despite great variation and diversity. The burials and associated practices, although they were undergoing change, were not made in random and chaotic manners. On the contrary, they reflect different but distinct levels of regularity and shared concerns – cultural conventions. It is these regularities that are the key to making the burial practices intelligible. We, therefore, argue for a difference between meaning and intelligibility with the former referring to the motivations and specific insider reasoning that we rejected above as beyond our interpretative reach (apart from in its most shallow and generic forms) whereas the latter emerges as a possibility due to the regularities of practice. We are here drawing a slightly different distinction than the one sometimes made in anthropology between an emic and an etic perspective, which roughly refers to the difference between an insider and an outsider account or understanding (Headland, Pike, and Harris 1990). Our concern is not so much to juxtapose two different ways of understanding, often cast as one being culturally specific and the other neutral, as it is to acknowledge the different focus of the interpretative engagement. The themes considered in this volume – death, burial, beliefs – are substantial social issues; the reflections and analyses they give rise to need to be rooted in and find support from scholarships both within and outside archaeology. Within the scope of our specific concerns, there are two areas that we wish to contemplate further. One is the nature of dead bodies and the challenges they present, the other is materiality as a major issue to consider when analysing how burials are conducted and graves constructed. THE CORPSE IS A BODY, TOO

Before we begin the analysis and discussion of the dead body in Middle Bronze Age burial practices, it is useful to be reminded of the range and variation in cultural responses to death, and the kind of concerns and intentions that seem to inform such practices. Biological death introduces changes to the physical characteristics of a body including affecting its abilities, but the social responses to this observation vary. They are formed around views and understandings about what the body is, including reflections about its death and thus on death itself. They show death as a major part of cultural life. Such responses can take the form of denial or ignoring death so that the dead body is seen to still be engaged in its core social relations and even granted continuity in terms of social roles and responsibilities as well as being ascribed bodily needs or abilities. In such cases, efforts may be made to preserve the individual or individuality of the deceased, as famously illustrated by the

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Pharaohs or the Chinese Emperors, or the individual may in death be incorporated into the body of the community and preserved as part of a communal ancestral body. In some cases, such treatments are merely a matter of mimicry in terms of stressing resemblance to the living body, but in other examples certain deceased members of the community continue to have central roles, sometimes just for a while but in other cases for eternity. A particular version of the denial of death is found in efforts to preserve the body in perpetuity, preserving it in death as if the latter is a kind of continuation of life. Within this logic, burial practices aim to defeat the discontinuity or rupture inserted by death, and attention is lavished on performances that create an illusion of continuity – the living forever – or to ease the transition into the next (or other) life. The permanence of death is suspended by a notion of movement or transition. This may be done by presenting the body as going to sleep or travelling; through such practices, the body is taken away from the immediateness of death. Prehistory and history show several examples of such practices focused on preparing the body for its forthcoming presence in some other world or to enter a different form of existence. In extreme versions, the dead body is interpreted in terms of sameness to the living body – it still has the same needs, physically and socially, as it had in life, and many of the details of its burial can be interpreted as dictated by a concern with confirming and demonstrating its identity and ongoing roles. Conversely, the responses may fall at the opposite end of the spectra and death may be understood as the final and total end of the body. This may express itself as a concern with the transformation of the body into something else, whether by reducing it to its essence or through social re-integration through the body’s distributive qualities. The classic example of the former is the Hindu cremations (Parry 1994), which are done to release the spirit of the deceased. In Hinduism, the body is of limited duration; but the soul is indestructible, and the cremation ceremony is therefore directed towards returning the body to its constitutive elements (earth, fire, water, air and sky), so the soul can start a new journey (reincarnation). Compassionate cannibalism amongst the Wari’ in the Amazon is an example of the dead body’s distributive qualities being explored through mortuary rituals and shows a complex social understanding of death, which connects it to ideas of transformation. Beth Conklin’s detailed ethnographical account (2001) of this mortuary ritual shows how it revolves around a concern with removing the recognisable humanness of the dead body and with transforming it into a likeness to something else: food. She explains that the consumption of (parts of ) the body during the mortuary rituals matters for the living relatives because it means that the soul of the person is kept in their bodies, rather than being abandoned (Conklin 2001). Another attitude to death as final is to interpret the body as a biological matter, which upon death begins to decay; this position is now common amongst many people in Western Europe. Within

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such approaches, the disintegration of the body is unavoidable, maybe even considered proper, and in its extreme, the dead body may not be separated and differentiated from other kinds of debris, or only some bodies or parts thereof are being selected for post-mortem treatment or are given special attention. Within such variations are embedded the need and desire of any group or culture to understand the dead body, and the repercussions this has for understanding bodies as such. Cultural practices surrounding death are accordingly commonly concerned with the creation of definitions for the dead body, ascribing to it a status such as reincarnated, reintegrated, resurrected, or resting so that through this it can be recognised as a new kind of matter or be prepared for a continued presence in this world or a move to the next, or to be declared defunct and ready for recycling. Depending on the ontology, the response to death may require an acknowledgment of the transformation of the body including planning the processes through which the body will be able to change its status. Such variation, both in terms of interpretative schemes and the details of practice, confirms that the responses to the dead body are cultural rather than natural actions; burial practices are in their core formed and interpreted through culturally specific norms about what is needed in terms of the proper treatment of dead bodies. Burials are thus usually normative practices performed within community settings and according to prescribed rituals. Amongst community practices, death rituals are maybe the most common. They are integral to rites de passage practices (Van Gennep 1960 [1909]) as death introduces a major transition regarding both the individual and social life. Burials are thus excellent examples of performative citations (Butler 1990, Joyce 2004) through which reference is made to precedents which in turn provide the means of continuity as well as potential alterations. They may be thought of as carriers of tradition, as the enactors of core beliefs and expectations about what constitutes appropriate behaviour. Chronological studies of burial practices can therefore be used to investigate the unfolding of traditions and shifts in the interpretative schema underwriting formalised cultural practices including competitions for control over cultural norms. Whereas there is substantial literature from several disciplines about variations in burial practices and changing attitudes to death (e.g. Taylor 2002), it has been argued that the social sciences have failed to problematize death itself and that the nature of the dead body has not been fully explored (Hallam 2010, Sofaer 2006). Any attempt at understanding fundamental changes in burial rituals needs to be aware of the central importance of these issues. In acknowledgment of their importance, and responding to the observation of typical traits in the spread and adaptation of cremation during the Middle Bronze Age, our core questions became rephrased as: How did the practice of cremation affect the understanding of the nature of the dead body and existing norms for

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its proper treatment? Moreover, how may this have been influenced by, and in turn influenced, more broadly-based contemporary perceptions of the body? We need, therefore, to tune our investigation towards what is done to the body and to develop a framework for discussing variations shown by the case studies. There are two interconnected issues involved in the responses to death that interest us. One is the bodiness of death. By referring to the quality of bodiness rather than the corporeal body (cf. Sørensen 2010a) we aim to stress the physicality of the dead body, to make it clear that however abstractly we think about and conceptualise death it is also experienced through the physical impact on bodies and this has to be incorporated into any ontological understanding and response. The other issue is the death of individual bodies. This point stresses that it is particular individuals, members of one’s community, who died. Death is an individual event1 but it also has considerable social impact as it takes a particular person away from the community. These two sides of our understanding and experience of death are common to and underwrite variations in cultural behaviour; we shall accordingly use the dead body and death to refer to two different aspects of shared experiences. The former will be used to encapsulate the complex cognitive concepts needed to account for the ceasing of various bodily functions and qualities, whereas the latter is used to remind us of the body’s essential social status. The ontological implications of death have received varied attention in archaeological arguments. It used to be a relatively prominent element within interpretations and assumptions about prehistoric people’s actions, as discussed in Chapter 2. Such earlier work frequently made assumptions about prehistoric belief systems and often ascribed belief in the afterlife to the communities studied. Details in grave constructions or particular aspects of how the body was treated were interpreted in this light. For later periods, various data support such interpretations including the provision of food and drink for the deceased’s journey to the afterlife; there are also different textual sources that document such reasoning (Morris 1992: 104–108). Over recent decades this topic has gained renewed interest in archaeology, but many of the arguments rely heavily on ethnographic analogies and there is a risk that they impose meanings and views that are foreign not just to us but probably also to people in the European Bronze Age. While such interpretative attempts can be stimulating and raise debates, there is an unfruitful tendency of them becoming fixed as true accounts of the past (Kaliff and Østigård 2013, Oestigaard and Goldhahn 2006, see also Sørensen 2009). Opening up for other ontologies versus essentialising the ‘foreign’ as a passage into our exotic

1

Each death is the death of an individual corporeal entity, even if it happens as part of mass death.

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past is a fragile balance to maintain. We shall return to some of the challenges of interpreting past ontologies in the following chapters. In contrast, the social impact of death has seen substantial archaeological attention in recent decades. As a result, archaeological mortuary studies have been rejuvenated through new types of approaches (e.g. Parker Pearson 1999, Williams 2006) in which interest has shifted so that rather than arguing about beliefs or ideas about death the concern is the impact death has on communities. Although such arguments can also be found in earlier literature (e.g. Hertz 1960 [1907]), they are now bolstered by anthropological evidence. Mortuary studies have accordingly become even more focused on how the death of a member of the community will cause rupture of existing social relations. A consequence of this focus has, however, often been that attention has moved away from both the individual and death, as they are considered merely as background to an event provoking and providing the need to restructure social relations. In their specific formulation, these arguments were first mounted by scholars working on British prehistory (e.g. Barrett 1994, Brück 2006a, Last 1998, Mizoguchi 1993), but they have gradually come to influence how prehistoric burials in other areas are approached and interpreted (e.g. Gerritsen 2003, Hofmann 2008). These arguments, although providing a very constructive breakaway from the earlier neglect of the social context, can be criticised for the erasure of the importance of the individual and the neglect of the possible agency that the deceased may have in the mortuary context. This may not have been the intention of the original arguments, but this is how they are being interpreted and disseminated into archaeological interpretations as captured by the by now often uncritically repeated phrase ‘the dead do not bury themselves’ (e.g. Parker Pearson 1999: 3, for a critique see Sørensen 2004). In this context, it is thought-provoking that the discipline has been able to embrace arguments about the agency of objects (Gell 1998, Myers 2004) but appears to have problems with granting agency to the body ‘just’ because it is dead. We are not alone in this critique, as others have also begun to consider the agency of the dead body (Sofaer 2006, Williams 2004). The individual body needs to be included in mortuary studies. Analytical discussions that can help to include both the dead and the living bodies in the interpretation of burials may be looked for in the so-called body literature. Amongst recent approaches both phenomenology and embodiment theory have inspired archaeological studies (e.g. Boric´ and Robb 2008, Fowler 2004, Hamilakis, Pluciennik, and Tarlow 2002, Shilling 1993). From our point of interest, however, both approaches are limited due to their assumption of the ontological primacy of the experiencing individual. The bodies which these approaches focus on are acting, performing bodies that are always alive and internal. To us, there are three main problems with such approaches. One is

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that they ignore the changing configuration, including abilities, of any one body as it traverses its lifecycle. Each body has a biography that affects its manner of experiencing the world (Sørensen 2009), creating pre-experiences and pre-knowledge that are brought into play in any given situation. Bodies are affected not merely by their subjectivity; they are also influenced by their historicity. The second concern is the isolation of the individual as the approaches ignore both the important early stages of life during which the infant is entirely dependent on others as well as the continuity of social dependencies and relations. The individual embodied person may be projecting itself onto the social, but it does so in recognition of the other; the other person is in some ways a more familiar sight than oneself and it is subject to many forms of scrutiny. It is, therefore, necessary to develop an understanding of body perception that will allow and benefit from recognition of ongoing social dialogue and acknowledge the importance the ‘other’ play in the formation of the sense of self. The final major problem we have with these approaches relates to arguments about the embodied individual continuing looking out, imagining, and projecting itself and how this tends to ignore the presence of the dead body in these processes of identification with and against a range of others. Although the dead body provides a particular foil for the understanding of self and bodiness, this appears largely neglected in the major approaches to the body. In the emphasis on the acting and experiencing subject, these approaches seem unable to create a connection between the living and dead body – these bodies are severed, and the dead body becomes substantially a different kind of matter as well as a different topic. This neglects the potency of the dead body, its impact, and its potential and complex roles as documented by ethnographic, historic, and contemporary case studies, and it leaves hidden the continued links between living and dead bodies at the level of individuals as well as that of communities. There are, of course, different perspectives on the body shaped around different theoretical positions including competing epistemologies and political orientations. Under debate in these positions are, amongst others, the relationship between the individual and society as well as divergent views on how individuals constitute themselves. Current theoretical arguments, for instance post-humanism or symmetrical archaeology, have raised new concerns by introducing a notion of the co-existence of humans and other objects/subjects, and their co-creation of each other (e.g. Fahlander 2017, Witmore 2007). Whether these arguments can aid the archaeological project can be discussed, but it is immediately clear that the argument does not suit all questions equally well or smoothly. For instance, the concomitant argument that humans should be displaced as the point of departure sits very uneasily with a concern with mortuary behaviour. Mortuary studies have been explicitly human-centred, and the recent theoretical developments have so far offered little in terms of

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convincing arguments about prehistoric engagements with the dead body and in particular about the ontological challenges of death. Such concerns have largely been outside their gaze, and they have mainly been considered through specific case studies that discuss the entanglement of humans, animals, and objects within funerary contexts. Such case studies do, however, tend to stay as single cases, exemplars of variations in practices, but they have rarely been able to radically decenter humans from these burial practices. Our concern in this volume is therefore self-acknowledged and explicitly human-centred – how did Bronze Age people in different social and material settings engage with death and dead bodies and how did they develop a radically changing way of performing their burials? We believe that to engage with this question, the acting and performing individuals, communities, as well as the dead bodies must be the explicit foci. It is, however, important to engage with what we mean when referring to the body, as this is not an unambiguous statement. First, we should remember that the living body is always, at least, a twofold point of reference – it entails simultaneously the embodied experience and reflection of the self and the ‘mirrored’ experience and perception constructed by/with others. The body gives rise to the construction of the I/we as well as you/them. But the body is not merely experience and sensation, it is also in itself a material entity with qualities, in life as well as in death. It can, therefore, be manipulated and responded to physically, metaphorically, and socially. For instance, the head as a part of the body can in life be physically shaped and modified, it can be decorated through actions such as tattooing or scarification or attachments, and parts may be removed or added. In addition, it is often ascribed metaphorical qualities, as expressed through phrases such as ‘head of the family’, or used as a symbolic reference granting value and status, as when used in representations or on items such as coins. Such properties may be maintained in death, or new ones created. Moreover, in death the body can be physically partitioned and further transformed (Rebay-Salisbury, Sørensen, and Hughes 2010), as when the head is separated from the rest of the body but still seen to represent the whole. Detached parts may also acquire additional representational qualities being both part of and yet separate, as exemplified by heart burials in medieval and post-medieval Europe (Weiss-Krejci 2010). Moreover, a striking and challenging aspect of dead bodies, irrespective of whether and how they are perceived as dead, is the physical decay and fragmentation that death causes. The recognisable body will not last long after biological death, as its physical transformation will begin. Also, and in contrast to our contemporary experiences where death has been made almost invisible and hidden by metaphors (captured by D. Fuss as the death of death, Lutz 2015) in the small-scale society of the Bronze Age, death would have been encountered as part of the rhythm of life. With high child mortality and low

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average age, death would be a presence in society: a mother and/or child dying during or shortly after childbirth was probably not uncommon, and about half of infants would not reach the age of five. In addition to starving during the early spring or falling ill due to infected injuries, infectious diseases had begun to appear, including the plague (Damgaard et al. 2018, Rasmussen et al. 2015, Schultz 1997), and groups of people might die without any obvious cause. Death was part of life, and, we believe, probably significant in terms of forming and maintaining ways of understanding life with its vagaries of luck and misfortune. Within these communities, both death and dead bodies would be amongst the living, it was material and real, and it called for a response and removal/renegotiation. Despite decades of theoretical concerns about understanding our relationship to the body, we are still in need of more in-depth insights into the status and impact of the dead body, and how reacting to them affects peoples’ understanding of their own and others’ bodies as well as informing their world views. For this, it seems important to pay more attention to the body itself as material, a theme which generally has been little discussed. A significant exception is Joanna Sofaer’s discussion of the body as material culture, in which she argues “that the skeleton is a site for the articulation of the material and social” (Sofaer 2006: 87). In essence, Sofaer argues that the dead body is important for understanding bodies as such (Sofaer 2006: 68). Stressing this point helps our analysis to move beyond the limiting focus on the experiential individual. This, moreover, makes it possible to stress that this is not about using the responses to the dead body as some kind of proxy for beliefs and understandings of the body as such, rather the link between the two is based on the recognition of their ontological as well as material dependency – one does not exist without the other. Both death and dead bodies are part of the social experience of bodies; they are ontologically intertwined. Sofaer’s argument provides us with useful guidance for focussing on actions on the body rather than merely being concerned with those of the body, and it gives us the intellectual background for seeing the body not just as a I/we subject but also as a material substance. It also helps to articulate the centrality of the dead body in peoples’ and communities’ engagement with their world. It leads us to argue that it is the understanding of the dead body – as a physical and psychological presence in society demanding recognition and response – that is at stake in the change of burial practices discussed in this volume. The thoughts and meanings assigned to the dead body are formulated through, and as the responses to, the dead, and our investigation, therefore, benefits from making these responses our research focus. The presence of death and of dead bodies means that the concept of an abject (Kristeva 1982) may also be useful to think with. Julia Kristeva uses the term to discuss our complex psychological relationship to the ‘detachable’ parts

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of the body; its refuse, such as hair or nails, faeces, and blood. She argues that such parts transgress and threaten our sense of wholeness and cleanliness, and thus propriety. This, however, is an argument primarily focused on the bodies as lived in, and it may be limited by a modern western attitude to what constitutes abjects; nonetheless, it locates important concerns and helps us to recognise what may be universal psychological challenges. For our purpose, her argument may be extended to apply to dead bodies, seeing the cadaver itself (due to the decay and fragmentation of the dead body) as the most extreme form of bodily refuse, with the whole body becoming an abject and therefore in need of some kind of re-integration. Neither Kristeva nor others pursuing abject as a line of enquiry seem to have discussed the dead body (whether fleshed or skeletal) as a particular experience of abject. This is probably due to the focus on the experiencing individual, but it ignores that such individuals also have experiences of other’s dead bodies and are knowlegdeable about death’s inevitability with regard to their own bodies – it is the greatest threat of all. The neglect may also have been influenced by the prominence of ethnographic examples of bodily taboos focused on body fluids, such as blood or semen (e.g. Douglas 1966), and the tendency that such body taboos are being considered separate from discussions of the dead body (e.g. Sofaer 2006: 10). The idea of abject may, however, help us to appreciate at greater depth some of the fundamental issues that surround dead bodies, such as questions about their status and their need for interpretation, integration, or rejection. It may also help to stress the dead body as agent and thus emphasise its roles, including its impact on people’s understanding of their own and others’ bodies. The dead body is a kind of reject (abject), and as such it challenges our sense of wholeness and forces a sense of temporality onto all. It demands response. However, a focus on the material body also relates to the living body. It is not sufficient to pay attention to the experiencing body (the embodied subject), as the physical body also has social qualities. It is often exactly the ability to reflect on and machinate the physical body that underwrites it as a supreme symbol as well as a medium for meaning-making. We are not just bodies, we also see them, alter them, and are able to represent them. Thus, the body is both a ‘vessel’ or home for experiential sensations, a subject involved in various kinds of physical and social relationships (ranging from intercourse, socialisation, rituals, kinship, gender, work, etc.), and an object (e.g. Sofaer 2006). Moreover, in terms of the aims of this volume, it is most important to appreciate that it is not static. The body changes, but its changes are not simply linear – they are constituted through different rhythms of change: cyclical one’s during the day and night, and lineal ones through the lifecycle from birth to death and thereafter. Some of the changes are gradual, such as cell changes, but others, such as pregnancies, while dramatic and of substantial impact, are

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

short-lived, or they, such as the menopause, introduce radical changes to the body’s capabilities. Most challenging, however, the body will at some point die, and in its predictability, death impacts cognitive arguments as well as individual’s and groups’ perceptions of themselves and others. This involves both emotive affects and awareness of concrete social consequences, with the latter casting people’s relationships with each other through terms such as generations, successors, and mourners. MATERIALI TY: MAKING PEOPLE AND BURI ALS

Archaeology has recently become increasingly interested in materiality – in the different kinds of impact that material presences have and in the agential nature of things. This approach can be taken to different extremes and the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of materiality range widely from processualist approaches to post-modernism as part of the general material turn in the humanities (e.g. Graves-Brown 2000, Miller 2005). What we take from these arguments is that things matter, that through their material qualities things affect us, influencing our action and participating in the construction of meanings and associations. This materialist orientation will influence our analysis, and we will employ it when focussing on two core elements of burials: the dead body and the construction of burial places. In terms of the materialisation of bodies, it is worth briefly reflecting on the difference between an analysis focused on the socially constructed body and those concerned with embodiment, as both have been used widely within archaeology and since their difference has some repercussions for how arrangements within burials may be interpreted. The former refers to approaches that focus on how the social constructs what we experience as realities (Berger and Luckmann 1991, Leeds-Hurwitz 2009). This extends to bodies as it is argued that bodily behaviour is learnt rather than natural. A particular focus of this debate has been the construction of the female body and how society has conceptualised ideals and expectations about such bodies. In this approach, meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately within each individual, and this makes arguments fundamentally different from embodiment theories. The latter argues that bodily experiences are the basis for all interpretations of the world around us. Rooted in works by MerleauPonty (1962) and wider phenomenological arguments, these ideas have been widely explored in archaeology (Crossland 2010). We suggest that in archaeology this distinction has too often been drawn too sharply in archaeological interpretations, influenced by a desire for theoretical demarcations rather than emerging from exploring ways of engaging with the evidence of prehistoric societies. In particular, because studies of burials often seem occupied with the reducible qualities of a body, it can be argued that

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such studies ignore individual subjective experiences and present the body as a passive tool of social manipulation. To us, neither the tendency of reducing bodies to social instruments nor the overemphasis on the single individual seems helpful when confronting Middle Bronze Age burial practices. Firstly, both approaches downplay the complex manners in which bodies are always simultaneously individual and social in terms of impacts, even in death. Secondly, whereas the former ignores the range of variations, experimentations, and bottom-up reflective actions, the latter disregards the strong normative conventions that created coherence and thus traditions out of individual burials. Meanwhile, burials are performative events, and in most cases, they, as physical constructions, may have been designed around reducible qualities of bodies, such as normative age or gender categories, rather than their subjectivities. Thus, despite the importance of the individual dead body and the agency and influence of the induvial in terms of the burial, we suggest that in the burial record it is rarely only the individual experience of being, for example, aged and gendered, that were articulated but rather an agreed social statement about these aspects of persons. It is also important to stress that it is the physicality of the dead body that enables these articulations and that in these particular settings, the agency of the dead body may have replaced or paralleled notions of the embodied individual. Our main point, however, is that arguments about social construction or embodiments do not automatically lend themselves as suitable interpretative scaffolds for an engagement with dead bodies. For the Bronze Age, largely lacking depictions of the human form (RebaySalisbury 2016, Sørensen 2013) the cultural attention given to the dressed person has been used extensively as a way of discussing aspects of the Bronze Age body (e.g. Bergerbrant 2007, Grömer 2010, Sørensen 1997, 2010a). Critiques of such studies due to their neglect of subjectivity (e.g. Joyce 2005, 2008, Meskell 2000), while helpfully pointing to qualities of bodiness that the studies ignore, are of little help beyond that as their insistence on the experiential individual cannot easily be connected to data beyond shallow statements and also neglects the substantial evidence of social conformity during this period as revealed by the data. We suggest that bodies need to be understood both in terms of some form of embodiment, as materiality, and in terms of social relations. Concerning the latter, we maintain that it is indeed the case that the body in certain situations and as part of certain practices is reduced to its social essentials, whether these take the forms of coordinates (Sørensen 2010a, 2013), dividual qualities (Brück 2006b, Gell 1999, Strathern 1988), or fractions (Fowler 2008, Wagner 1991). This does not, however, mean that this is all that the body is and that it is so at all times. The focus on how the body is codified through social references can, however, provide some insights into past ontologies.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Burials are extremely interesting instances of materialisations; they are commonly intentional and strongly ritualised practices/places. They need to be considered both together with and separate from arguments about the dead body, as the latter may be treated in many ways, not all of them involving burial. We shall therefore use the word burial to refer to a set of distinct practices through which the body is treated as a dead body and provided with a special space for deposition in or on the ground.2 Burials understood like this are performed as separate, formal activities rather than happening informally, and they, therefore, have particular performative characteristics. Their aims are distinct and formalised, and they were often conducted with an awareness of effect and affect. The widespread regularity that we observe suggest that these were substantially prescriptive and choreographed activities – we would even argue that the point of the burial was to follow the expected procedures so that following the ‘correct’ procedure is what defines the activity as a burial for the participants, and it was this which gave it meaning, even if discrepancies occur due to faulty memories (Sørensen 2009) or deliberate departures. It is, therefore, a significant question why change takes place within such activities and, moreover, that these are not merely linear or following other kinds of inbuilt regularity. The change of burial practices that we observe with the introduction of cremation is far more complex, in part because local communities were experimenting with different formats and in part because pre-existing practices and ideas and new ones became co-mingled. The changes generated by the introduction of cremation are manifest in how the burial activities were orchestrated, including alternations in the form of and relationships between the different components of the burial. We, therefore, suggest that an analysis of how materiality is explicitly explored within burial construction can be a means of identifying some of the communities’ underlying concerns and supporting arguments. In particular, as objects are drawn into the drama of the burial they bring meaning (pre-understanding) to the formation of the new context both through dialogues with other elements there and through the associations that are attached to them from former or other contexts (for the importance of pre-understanding in burial choreography, see Arwill-Nordbladh 1998). Moreover, the citations made during a burial may engage several planes of action and meaning, and the significance of its performance may reach beyond the negotiation of specific social relations to include, for instance, confirmation of aspects of the wider

2

We do not claim this as a general definition of burials; rather this is a definition that helps to outline the characteristics of Middle to Late Bronze Age burial practices in central and northern Europe. We do, however, propose that it is useful for any analysis to be clear about which activities we deem to be burials and which we do not include as the manipulation of human bones take many forms and is governed by a range of motivations.

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social understanding and order. Such wider concerns are indicated, for instance, in the significance given to orientation and/or cosmology by many prehistoric burial traditions, and is also argued to underwrite many ethnographically documented burial practices, such as cremation in Benares, India (Parry 1994). Focusing on change in ‘the ways things are done’ and on apparent minutia rather than large scale changes also helps focus on how change happens, helping to clarify how peoples’ decisions are part of, and generate, changes, rather than them merely being subjected to change. However, we are not satisfied to just agree to this as a theoretical proposition; we aim to document how, during the Middle Bronze Age, people (in the form of the dead bodies, mourners, families, and communities) through their performances interacted with and interpreted prescribed activities, and how within this they emerge both as agents of some changes and as actors resisting others. Understanding burials as generally a normative practice governed by prescriptions and expectations helps us to understand changes as a result of a shift in or challenge to these procedures due to both deliberate alterations of procedures and ‘drifts’, slight misunderstandings, and ‘copying errors’. Within this approach, recent arguments about how citation works to maintain worldviews are helpful, insofar as they may indicate the channels through which alterations can occur without destabilising the overall meaning of the event. If the same basic references can be maintained, the change to other parts of the process may be more easily accepted without causing a need for a major reinterpretation and for restating basic assumptions. Such citations can provide a kind of anchoring of core aspects of the ontologies. In turn, they affect whether the changes were interpreted as a continuity of established practices or were seen to be disruptive and challenging. There are also other cultural ‘tools’ that can influence how such changes are interpreted and thus adopted: a familiar frame, use of metaphors, and in-keeping with core topoi.3 Such means may be used to create familiarity despite changes in outward appearance. BRIEFLY ON METHODOLO GY: INVESTIGATING HOW BURIALS ARE CONDUCTED AND GRAVES CONSTRUCTED

The archaeological data makes it obvious that contrasting inhumations and cremations does not suffice as an analytical framework. Inhumations and cremations cannot merely be understood as an opposing set of concepts and practices; the communities of Middle Bronze Age Europe did not just swap one type of burials for another. In essence, the change in burial practices

3

Topoi is here used in the sense of a narrative element that appears repeatedly.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

cannot be understood from a position that only acknowledges choice between opposites. We need to develop an approach that makes it possible to analyse the far more complex and interwoven choices that were made. Through such choices, change and continuity were laced together in distinctly different local manners, and it is only by detecting these that it will be possible to discern the meaningful overarching similarities in terms of what aspects of the burial rite were being replaced, transformed, changed, or maintained. Therefore, to understand what was at stake during the changes we need to discover differences as well as the overlap between contemporary inhumation and cremation graves, and also shifts as well as innovative practices. We are therefore particularly interested in something akin to the idea of synchronism. This refers to an early twentieth-century art movement that argued that colours can be orchestrated in the same way as notes in a symphony because colour and sound are similar phenomena. We introduce this idea to appreciate the underlying process that made it possible to approach the cremated bones through their similarities to the inhumed body. This helps to reveal how a sense of familiarity can be maintained despite a change in form. Synchromism is, for example, maintained when there is a fixed relationship among a group of repetitive events. This, as we shall see in Chapters 6 and 7, is a dominant theme in many areas and appears to have affected both the preparation of the body prior to the burial and the striving in many early cremation burials to re-achieve a sense of the body-whole after the cremation to make it appear similar to the body in inhumation graves. We shall also explore arguments relating to the cultural production of skeuomorphs4 as this can help to trace the indices through which the similarities and differences within these transformative processes can be identified and potentially understood (Rebay-Salisbury, Brysbaert, and Foxhall 2014, Vickers and Gill 1994). THE IMPOR TANCE OF TEMPOR ALITY: CHAÎNES OPÉRATOIRES AND BIOGRAPHIES

Changes in burial rituals take place over different time scales, but but among these, we have neglected the short time scale during which the construction of individual burials takes place and their differences from the scale needed for variation in the performance of burials to unfold within a single cemetery. To engage with these two levels of change, we explore the concepts of the chaîne

4

Skeuomorph refers to a derivative object, which retains elements in common with an original other, with the deliberate aim to make one thing look like another without actually being the other (Knappett 2002, Taylor 2008). The relevance to our analysis is that skeuomorphs make it easier for those familiar with the original to use and perform with the new forms.

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opératoire and of biography, as they each in their way focus on the temporal scale within which humans and communities act and can help to trace variations in a coherent manner that emphasises the link between different stages of practice. The chaîne opératoire is an analytical method developed to distil an object into the many single but logically successive and dependent actions that produced it. Important here is that one step in the operational sequence changes the set of affordances for the next. Thinking about it this way means that individual steps cannot be isolated from their context, which includes not only materials and technologies involved but also their social embedding (Dobres 1999, Schlanger 2005). For our purpose, the concept can be used to deconstruct a burial into the successive stages of actions and decisions that produced it. We also use this framework to identify at what stages distinctly different and novel practices were carried out regarding inhumation and cremation burials, and how subsequent practices may aim to make them coalesce to negate their differences or may aim to drive the practices further apart. This means that in the analysis the first set of practices that needs to be deduced are those surrounding the death itself and the preparation of the corpse. We shall reflect on what evidence there is for some of the decisions made during this phase in Chapter 6. The next set of distinct decisions is what kind of construction to make for the cremated body, as discussed in Chapter 7. An inhumation will involve decisions about dress and other elements of preparation, and it must be done within a limited time scale or otherwise the body must be preserved in some manner. For cremation, the decisions are about how the body should be prepared for the burning. For inhumation burials, the physical transformation of the body usually takes place after the grave is closed and thus as a process is out of sight, but for cremations, the transformation of the body is a distinct cultural event, and the subsequent practises are revealing of how the cremated remains are perceived. Cremations demand a reaction to the fragmented body, whether ignoring it and leaving it as part of the cremation pyre or treating it in different ways. Having lost their bodily integrity, the cremated bones may in different ways be treated as fragments or they may be interpreted and manipulated in ways that assign them new meanings or reconnect them to a new sense of bodiness. Finally, as introduced in Chapter 8, further interaction may take place either with the deceased or with their burial place more generally. Throughout these different decisions, cultural products and distinct actions are drawn upon and are used as props for the interpretation and direction of action. While we do not trust that it is possible to formulate a single question that alone could contain all that matters about the introduction of cremation, we believe that it is possible and indeed fruitful to ask a series of data specific questions to gain a better understanding of what cremations were about. We

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

can ask questions like ‘In which ways are a cremated body treated differently to a non-cremated one?’, ‘Could different body parts still be recognized after the cremation, and if so, were they treated as part of a body and as belonging to an individual?’, ‘How far are the body’s size and shape remembered and relevant for the construction of cremation graves?’ and ‘How did the living engage and interact with the remains of their cremated dead?’ Looking at sites widely distributed in time and space, we discover that there were some common topoi and shared narratives of how the body was understood during the introduction of cremation, we can follow some of the changes through similarities and differences between burials and we can follow the impact of these decisions during the duration of single cemeteries. Still, these observations will not explain why people adopted cremation and why it came to dominate over such a vast area, but then that question may be essentially unanswerable as it lacks resonance with how the changes took place. The details of what people did will, however, help to illuminate how change happened and how foundational attitudes and beliefs could change dramatically.

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FOUR

THE BRONZE AGE Setting the Scene

I

n this chapter we set out to provide a sense of the societies in which the change from inhumation to cremation took place; how they were they organised and how people lived. What were the primary characteristics of peoples’ understanding of their worlds, how did they organise relationships amongst themselves and engage with the outside – both other communities and the supernatural? What characterised their interactions with material things, new ideas, and people? Can we discern their attitudes towards their bodies, how it was presented and performed through manipulation and dressing, and how this might have influenced their understanding of the body in death? Most importantly, as burial practices are our focus, what were the characteristics of the already existing burial practices and rituals? First, let us spell out why this general background is needed. The introduction of cremation is often treated as a phenomenon that can be thought of either as a separate tradition, as a trend, or as part of a package. There is also a strong tendency to externalise the change in burial practices, presenting it as a phenomenon that spread like a virus or as something that was adopted. Causality is absent from the local, and the development of altered attitudes to the treatment of the body in death is not scrutinised, only the impact is being considered. In contrast, we find it necessary to pursue an approach that stresses how practices are embedded in social contexts. This does not just mean that the changes happened within a particular social milieu, rather it stresses that they are forged and formed within it. The changes we are investigating 54

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

caused transformation rather than rupture of existing practices. We, therefore, propose that the form of these transformations was shaped by how communities used their pre-existing cultural tropes, familiar material forms, as well as their established embodied knowledge – these were their point of orientation. It was through such references that the new forms were made comprehendible. Pre-existing understandings and practices were used to provide citations and metaphorical connections so that the forms that emerged were indeed transformations of previous ones rather than emerging from outside and existing locally in a cultural vacuum. This is why we need to acknowledge the cultural setting of the communities; it is here we must look for the concerns and cultural norms that affected the transformation of burial practices and rituals. In a way we aim to link the idea of change with the concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977, 1990), arguing that the latter is essential to how changes manifest themselves and become meaningfully integrated in people’s lives. Linking these two concerns also helps to ensure that the discussion is guided by questions about what is changing, and through that, stays focused on change rather than merely on its effects. Our brief outline of the Bronze Age aims to provide an appreciation of the contexts in which these decisions were being made and which in various ways affected how people acted – what resources, technologies, and prior knowledge as well as habitual practices they were drawing on. Our presentation of the period is, therefore, written with certain intentions in terms of aims and outcome. This chapter will be neither a review of the whole of the Bronze Age nor even of all aspects of the transitional period of the Middle Bronze Age during which burial practices changed. Instead, our concern is to provide enough information for a meaningful discussion of core aspects of the communities which might have framed their ideas about death, the dead body, and burials. All aspects of society were potentially significant and may have influenced perceptions of ‘how to bury correctly’; but we nonetheless believe that some activities, and of course burial practices themselves, are more relevant to our task than others. The following overview has, therefore, been shaped around two main questions: How were the communities organised and what do we know about beliefs and attitudes towards the body at the time when cremation began to be common? The focus throughout will be northern and central Europe (including the Carpathian Basin), and the Middle Bronze Age. CHRONOLOGY: EVENT OR PROCESS

Chronology is of importance since the phenomenon we study is commonly discussed as taking place in time or over time. This statement needs explanation. It reflects how, within literature on the beginning of the Urnfield Culture and the introduction of cremation, time is commonly used to mark

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out either an event or a process. This is significant as it influences what kinds of explanations are being sought. The former is reflected by a long tradition of using a relatively robust concept of the Urnfield Culture defined by the introduction of cremation, which by implication tends to treat the introduction as a relatively short-lived event. Meanwhile, neither the beginning of the culture nor the introduction of cremation was, of course, linked to a point in time – it was a matter of a transition from one dominant form to another. Ironically, although this approach developed due to the focus on change, it makes change as such almost invisible or conflates it with its effects. Reduced to its effect, time becomes secondary: Time and change become the same. In the other approach, change is more explicitly linked to process. A sense of temporality, in terms of the coming into being and unfolding of new practices, is evoked, but the cost is a blurring of the sense of the beginning of the Urnfield Culture and a challenge to a unified understanding of the adoption of cremation. Nonetheless, this is the time perspective that will be used in this volume. When we focus on the temporality of these changes, it becomes clear that there was a period of transition when burial practices underwent gradual, but seminal changes. As demonstrated later in this volume, it seems that it took a couple of generations before burial practices were fully changed from an inhumation ritual focused on the wholeness of the body to a treatment of the body that dealt with it as fragmented, containable, and contained in an urn. In general, the changes took place during a few centuries around the middle of the second millennium BC; in cultural terms, towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age. However, in reality the changes took place over different time spans and followed varied trajectories within different regions of Europe. This means that although there was a general shared trajectory of change, there was also local specificity. That level of variation, moreover, is not easily accommodated by the concept of the Urnfield Culture, as currently used. In addition, in some cases, close neighbouring groups changed different aspects of their burial practices or developed distinct innovative elements or variations on common forms that were distinct to them alone (e.g. Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008). Such variations add complexity and easily lead to confusion when specifying the time periods to be considered when comparing several regions. There is, however, possibly a pattern to this, as there is a sense of delay as we move from the Carpathian Basin into central and then northern Europe. This means that the analysis of change in burial practice cannot focus on the same absolute time period for all regions, rather it must aim to investigate the period during which the most seminal changes happened within any given region. As a consequence, the case studies that will scaffold our arguments are not contemporary in an absolute sense; rather they represent similar stages during the transition from inhumation to cremation, or they provide particular spotlights that help us to

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

better understand the nature of the changes. This, together with the differences between the chronologies used for the Carpathian Basin and those of central and northern Europe (Harding 2000: 6), makes a more detailed chronological overview and specification necessary. The detailed chronologies of the case studies are provided in Chapter 5. The various regional chronological systems for the Bronze Age have different histories and are embedded in different understandings of what constitutes cultures and cultural change. With time, they have become a combination of relative and absolute dates although dating based on finds combinations (from hoards and graves) is still a fundamental principle (for a more detailed discussion of the development of the Urnfield chronology see Sørensen and Rebay 2008). The cornerstone of the central European Bronze Age chronology is, of course, the chronological system developed by Paul Reinecke for southern Germany. Published in 1904–1911 (reprinted 1965), his periodization was based on the dating of representative objects found in association in closed contexts, such as graves and hoards. This contrasted with schemes that were based on ideas of cultures or people, and it enabled synchronisation between different chronological schemes through key objects, including synchronisation with Montelius’ chronology for northern Europe. Reinecke established a system with four divisions (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Hallstatt, and Latène Period) each of which further subdivided, thus introducing the Bronzezeit (BZ) A–D and Hallstatt (HA) A–D terminology. Within this scheme, the period from BZ D to HA B is generally seen to cover the Urnfield Culture, meaning that the main period of interest to us is BZ B–C (the Middle Bronze Age Tumulus Culture) when changes in the dominant burial practices became noticeable due to widespread experimentation with cremation burial practices. For northern Europe, the system developed by Oscar Montelius (1885) is consistently used. This was also based on the study of closed finds, and it consists of a division of the Bronze Age into six periods (I–VI), with Periods I–III labelled Early and Periods IV–VI Late Bronze Age. The change from Period III to IV or from the Early to the Late Bronze Age was traditionally held to correspond with a change from inhumation to cremation and dated to 1100 BC (Randsborg 2008: 297). It is now well known, however, that cremation already appeared during Period II, that it was relatively common in Period III, and became dominant from Period IV onwards. The use of urns rather than cremations buried in grave constructions was, however, a feature distinct to the Late Bronze Age with urn graves being unusual before Period IV. Periods II–III (app. 1500–1100 BC) will, therefore, here be considered as the period of change in burial practices since it was during this time that a changing attitude to the deceased body started to emerge and became common. Periods II–III correspond to the Tumulus Period (largely BZ C) in the central European chronology (Fig. 4.1).

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Carpathian Basin 2200–2100 BC

Early Bronze Age 3

2100–2000 BC 2000–1900 BC

Early Bronze Age

1500–1400 BC

Bz A2 Middle Bronze Age 2

Middle Bronze Age

Middle Bronze Age 3

Bz C1

Late Bronze Age 1

Late Bronze Age 2

1200–1100 BC

Bz D Late Bronze Age

800–700 BC

600–500 BC

Iron Age

Iron Age

Periode II

Late Bronze Age

Periode IV

Ha B1 – Ha B2

Periode IV – Periode V

Ha B2 – Ha B3

Periode V

Ha C Ha D

Early Bronze Age

Periode III

Ha A1 Ha A2 – Ha B1

Late Bronze Age 3

900–800 BC

700–600 BC

Middle Bronze Age

Bz C2

1100–1000 BC 1000–900 BC

Periode I

Bz B

1400–1300 BC 1300–1200 BC

Late Neolithic

Early Bronze Age

1700–1600 BC 1600–1500 BC

Northern Europe

Bz A1

Middle Bronze Age 1

1900–1800 BC 1800–1700 BC

Central Europe

Periode V – Periode VI Early Iron Age

Periode VI

4.1 Bronze Age chronology for the Carpathian Basin, central and northern Europe (Fischl et al. 2015, Meller 2004)

Late Bronze Age

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

The chronology for the Carpathian Basin is less agreed on. There are several alterative schemes as well as phases developed for particular practices, such as hoarding (Mozsolics 2000) and settlements (Bóna 1992, Raczky, Hertelendi, and Horváth 1992). The chronological scheme developed by Bernhard Hänsel (1968) introduced the term Danubian Bronze Age, with subdivisions FD I–III (frühe Danubische Bronzezeit), MD I–III (mittlere Danubische Bronzezeit) and SD I–II (späte Danubische Bronzezeit). In this scheme, FD corresponds roughly to BA A, MD to BA B–C1, and SD to BA C2–Ha A (Harding 2000: 10–14). Radiocarbon dates have verified a very early beginning of the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin (Fischl et al. 2015, Forenbaher 1993), and with radiocarbon dates becoming more common, the gaps of centuries that were difficult to bridge are now easier to integrate with chronological schemes in other regions. In Hungarian terminology, the term Middle Bronze Age confusingly refers to a much earlier period than the MBA in other areas of central Europe, with its beginning being roughly parallel with the Early Bronze Age further west (c. 2000/1900 to 1500/1450 BC, according to Fischl et al. 2015, Kiss et al. 2020). THE SOCIAL LANDSCAPES

Among the different aspects of Middle Bronze Age communities, we propose that the scale and organisation of the communities were particularly important for how practices were shaped. This would have impacted how the changes in burial rituals were introduced and what form they took: how they were enacted, conventions reformed, and conformity encouraged. It was within communities that decisions about how to bury deceased members were made and carried out (for a discussion of local decision making about burial within some Bronze Age communities, see Haughton 2018). To gain the necessary insight into this, we need to consider the different scales of social interaction that were embedded within such communities ranging from their wider social networks to the relationships amongst the individuals, who made up the communities. Although there are substantial gaps in our knowledge about social organisation, it is possible to outline a rough sketch of the structure of the relevant Bronze Age communities. Some of the changes we observe in settlement organisation during the second millennium BC relate to the degree of social and political differentiation and dependencies between and within communities (see also Harding 2000: 55–69). An important question is, therefore, what kinds of settlement hierarchies, organised around differentiation of sites in terms of their roles, importance, and influences within the local political landscape, had emerged by the time cremation was introduced, and whether this characterised all, most, or only some regions of temperate Europe.

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Although the uneven nature and quality of settlement data make it difficult to settle this question properly some characteristics can be identified. In some areas, such as the Carpathian Basin, it seems that a notable settlement hierarchy had developed with clear variation in settlement sizes, with some sites housing several hundreds of inhabitants and others just the extended family.1 For some of the large sites, such as the Bronze Age tells in the Carpathian Basin, it has been common to assume that they were the result of some kind of social hierarchies (Earle and Kristiansen 2010, Kienlin 2015, Kovács 1977) and some regions of central Europe, such as Alpine bronze production centres (Lippert 1992, Stöllner 2003) have been interpreted similarly. However, a substantial increase in data has increasingly questioned the arguments that an elite political economy was the basis for the Bronze Age tell, and such models are currently being replaced by arguments exploring different forms of community-based power (e.g. Kienlin 2015). In the Alpine area, we also find sizeable village-like settlements around the lakes (e.g. Hochuli, Niffeler, and Rychner 1998). These sites usually consist of rows of houses with associated smaller structures enclosed by a palisade. Their dates range from the eighteenth century to around 1500 BC with several having a second occupation horizon during the sixteenth century BC. This is, for example, the case for the well preserved Forschner settlement in the Federsee, Baden-Württemberg, Germany (Schlichtherle and Wahlster 1986). There were also some large fortified Middle Bronze Age settlements north of the Alps, such as Bernsdorf, dated to 1675 and 1510 BC (Gebhard and Krause 2017). With its 13 ha and 1.6 km timber-earth-wall fortification it rivals Mycenaean palaces, but the lack of direct evidence for contacts (Pernicka 2018) suggests that it must have emerged from a localised polity. A fundamental difference between regions was whether fortifications were part of the settlement system. Fortified settlements from this period are found in central Europe and the Carpathian Basin, but most of these constructions appear to have been started already in the Early Bronze Age and were not as such part of a transformation of settled life during the time we focus on. They do, however, signal a settlement system in which sites of different complexities co-existed, suggesting there were special social and economic relationships that tied these sites together in local hierarchies and dependencies. This would have influenced decision making and flows of information and gossip.

1

We use the word ‘family’ merely to indicate a cohabiting group without implying anything about the permanence or durability of this cohabitation or making assumptions about what range of social conventions, if any, were attached to it. Importantly, such cohabitants are not necessarily determined through biological links although this is commonly a main factor and we, therefore, assume that biological relations were an important part of the social glue of Bronze Age communities.

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

The different and potentially complementary roles of the individual sites that made up such social landscapes are not yet well understood, and we should show caution in interpreting them. For instance, rather than elite residencies and nodal points in social network, both lake villages and tell sites might in the main have been occupied by fisherwo/men and peasants respectively and may not necessarily be centres of regional socio-political power (we should recall how medieval manor houses in many parts of Europe often were spatially separated from their villages). Meanwhile, irrespective of the specific roles and the degree of interdependencies between individual settlements, it seems clear that the social organisation characterising these regions entailed a strong cohesive influence in terms of connecting communities in a manner that encouraged conformity – the architecture and material culture show little differentiation. It is likely that these social mechanisms also influenced ritual behaviour. Further north into central Germany and northern Europe, large, densely occupied sites and fortifications were absent from the settlement system, and the variations found amongst settlements were relatively modest, revealing little about their relationships to each other including potential dependencies. This may suggest different mechanisms of conformity as communities may explicitly strive at a degree of conformity and invest in maintaining their connectedness rather than having it imposed on them, but it may also easily fragment. It would have provided more possibilities of and need for alternative, locally formulated understandings of ways of doing things. We are not proposing, of course, that one social model induces conformity and the other does not, rather we suggest that the social mechanisms through which shared ideas about appropriate actions are developed may have varied as people were organised in different ways including ways that would have created different experiences of the bonds of obligations and solidarities both within and between nearby communities. There were thus substantial differences in the practical political organisation of the landscape in different parts of Middle Bronze Age Europe. Whether there was also distinct geographical differentiation in terms of when, and if, major changes to the settlement systems took place is more difficult to ascertain. For the tell sites in the Carpathian Basin, the Tumulus Culture (Br B–C) marked a widespread abandonment and break-up of the settlement system, but this took place after cremation had been adopted in various forms in most regions during the Carpathian Middle Bronze Age. So, in this case the fundamental changes to the settlement system post-date the change in burial practices. The reasons for this socio-political change are not as yet clear. Substantial changes in the settlement system are also witnessed in the Alpine regions, and there is a settlement hiatus along the lakes during the Middle Bronze Age (Menotti 2004). In this case, the reasons for the disruption are closely related to climate change and the risk of inundation of the settled areas.

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In other parts of northern Europe, systematic changes of the settlement system cannot be traced. In these regions, changes were expressed at the level of individual farmsteads and settlements, or at times small regions, and appear as part of ongoing developments influenced by the fluctuations of household choices, efficacies, and luck as well as external factors such as exhausted fields and regional environmental impacts. In most of northern and central Europe, the low level of settlement organisation during this time was, therefore, generally in line with existing traditions. There were also considerable regional variations in terms of the degree of permanence and structural organisation of sites. Each of these variables would have influenced how people lived together and what social engagements might have participated in forming their views about the world including appropriate behaviour regarding death and the deceased. The variation ranges from villages with several hundreds of people living together in a densely packed site to single farmsteads inhabited by extended families. The former is found in the Carpathian Basin in the form of tell sites, such as SzázhalombattaFöldvár, Hungary (Poroszlai 1992, 2003, Vicze and Sørensen 2022). These sites were generally founded during the Early Bronze Age and reached their peak in terms of size and complexity sometime during the Middle Bronze Age, lasting some 600 years. They are usually enclosed by ditches or ramparts with the interior having rows of similar-sized houses with paths between them. At the tell of Százhalombatta-Földvár, which was part of the Vatya Culture, the houses had interior pits, fireplaces, and ovens, and examples of porch-like arrangements, instances of interior divisions and also of alterations, such as extension during the lifetime of a single house, have been observed. There is also substantial evidence of a range of everyday domestic activities being carried out, such as food processing and bone and antler working (Vicze and Sørensen 2022). It does, however, remain extremely difficult to estimate the size of the population on these sites. For Százhalombatta-Földvár, the suggested population size ranges from 200 to 300 for the last Middle Bronze Age phase of the site (Vicze and Sørensen 2022). Timothy Earle has suggested that the nearby Benta Valley was home to an estimate of more than 1500 people during the Middle Bronze Age (Earle and Kolb 2010: 71). Moving further north, our knowledge about the characteristics of Middle Bronze Age settlements is uneven (Primas 2008: 27). Throughout northern Europe, decades of rescue excavation have resulted in a large number of settlements now known from the Middle and Late Bronze Age, c. 1500 BC onwards (Arnoldussen and Fokkens 2008, Brück and Fokkens 2013). The characteristics of settlements and houses were simple. There were generally no enclosure ditches, substantial fences, or other demarcations of the settlements, few if any communal structures, and the settlement tended to not last longer than a few generations. The longhouse was the norm, usually as a single unit or

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

just a few houses clustered together; in many areas, agglomeration of houses in village communities first appeared during the end of the Bronze Age or Early Iron Age. In northern Europe, from period II onwards the architecture became standardised in the form of large three-aisled longhouses (Assendorp 1997, Bech, Eriksen, and Kristiansen 2018, Ethelberg 1991, 2000). This was building on a tradition of longhouses stretched back into the Neolithic. The main differences from the earlier longhouses were the change from two ailed to three ailed constructions, increased sizes, and in some cases the presence of stalling. The latter reveals that in these large buildings humans and their animals sometimes lived under one roof. Evidence of stalling appears to be particularly common in the Low Countries (Arnoldussen and Fokkens 2008, Brück and Fokkens 2013). Otherwise, there was very little architectural elaboration of the interior space apart from sometimes fireplaces and occasional pits, although the buildings were probably subdivided by panels and similar slight structures. The variation in settlement forms between the Carpathian Basin, central, and northern Europe is not just a matter of size, it also entails different kinds of social relations between neighbours as the cohabiting population in the sizeable, densely occupied settlements must have been composed of several families and loosely connected individuals, whereas in the dispersed farmsteads it was probably focused on the extended ‘family’. The large, complex sites are also often characterised by a greater degree of settlement permanence than is otherwise observed during the period. Thus, the permanence of Middle Bronze Age settlements ranges from tell sites in Hungary, which were in continuous use for about six hundred years, to household compounds in northern Europe, which appear to have lasted merely for one or two generations before they moved, probably within the same general settlement area. Despite these differences, the settlements have in common that there is little evidence of social divisions within them and only modest evidence of labour divisions and specialised areas. Although this coarse characterisation may be due to a lack of sufficiently detailed excavation data, extensively investigated sites such as many of the lake settlements in Switzerland from different periods of the Bronze Age confirm this impression. The Middle Bronze Age villages, where they existed, probably only had a low level of social differentiation and a high degree of social cooperation within the community. It is equally true that the dispersed settlement system of northern Europe does not mean there was no cooperation between settlements. Communities needed each other for reproduction including of their livestock and plants, and probably also for various other social and psychological needs. New studies have begun to reveal the mobility and exchange of, for instance, cattle in some areas (Brusgaard, Fokkens, and Kootker 2019, Reitmaier et al. 2018), and there is increasing evidence to suggest that communities at times decided to cooperate, for example in the manufacture of specialised tools (such as flint sickles, Eriksen

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2018) or the performance of ritual activities, such as burials. The latter has been shown very elegantly through the Skelhøj barrow excavation in Denmark. The analysis of the construction of the barrow demonstrated how it was built by many different work-gangs working simultaneously but each on their separate ‘slice’ of the mound and using turf from several different environments (Holst and Rasmussen 2015). It is likely that within such variation there were different models for the relationship between households and the community. In northern Europe, the two probably merged in many situations, whereas in central Europe and the Carpathian Basin a much more complex relationship must have existed in many areas to orchestrate the co-existence of several households within densely organised spaces and over several generations. Over recent years we have gained more detailed data about the organisation of life within some settlements as their debris provide rich insights into the conditions and characteristics of the everyday, enabling us to sketch a humanscale understanding of these communities and how their lives were informed by daily needs, economic activities, and subsistence concerns (e.g. Sofaer, Sørensen, and Vicze 2020). The overarching impression is that the household was the core of decision making and that subsistence practices were the mainstay of community concerns; this is shared by all, irrespective of what kind of settlement organisation we observe (Sørensen 2010b). This may mean that the socio-political differences between different parts of Middle Bronze Age Europe may have been only skin-deep rather than based on fundamentally different social arrangements. Moreover, within each of these lifeways there would have been not only behavioural conventions but also deeply embedded familiarities with particular materials and construction techniques. For instance, some settlement traditions used pits as a common construction (for example the case of Middle Bronze Age Vatya tells in Hungary) and the quality of pottery in different parts of Europe varied widely suggesting that pots were valued in very different ways. As people’s practical actions commonly draw on familiar skills, this provided the community with ready and immediate templates and solutions, including for how to construct a grave (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008). THE BODY IN DOMESTIC CONTEXTS

Despite its rich details, settlement evidence, in general, tells us little about attitudes to the body and to death. The needs of the body, such as eating, are reflected through food refuse, some aspects of comfort may be suggested from the evidence of benches, and we may even discern a sense of the aesthetic in the making and use of beautiful objects and decorative elements within the built environment, but the body is nonetheless largely absent. There are few, if any, representations of the body within settlements, and such elements are

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

certainly not a normal fixture of a Bronze Age house/home. Human remains are sometimes found within settlement contexts, but in most of Middle Bronze Age temperate Europe, this did not take the form of a dominant formal burial practice. This is different from routine and formalised integration of burials within settlements seen, for example, in south-eastern Iberia during the Argaric period (Early Bronze Age), when graves were placed under the living area, with the body in small caves, cists, vessels, or simple pits (Lull et al. 2013). It also differs from the close physical integration of grave circles within settlements of the Mycenaean period in the Aegean (e.g. Castleden 2005). Such close physical connection between the living and the dead appears to make an explicit link between them – probably through notions that emphasised kin and granted ancestors roles amongst the living. One can, of course, question whether the absence of the human body within settlements from a certain period or region may just be a matter of preservation or recording since normally little attention is given to the odd human bone found amongst general settlement debris. Brück’s analysis of English Middle and Late Bronze Age settlements seems to show that bones were routinely employed in marking the limits of sites (Brück 1995). She further suggests that cremated bone fragments were used in activities of fragmentation and circulation and that, through this, links between the living and the dead were maintained (Brück 2019, Chapman 2000). There is, however, so far little reason to suggest that the same was the case in other parts of Europe. Furthermore, since many seminal aspects of settlements and burial practices differed between England and the Continent, there are no obvious reasons to expect the same attitude in terms of the dead body in each mega region. The presence of human remains on many Urnfield Culture settlements in central Europe should, however, provoke questions about whether these were distinct regional and temporal trends or whether it was a more widespread practice. It is also worth being aware that such practices might have been extremely varied, including in their reasonings. The Urnfield Culture examples suggest that at least within some communities there were diverse contemporary attitudes towards the remains of the dead body rather than just one dominant one. The wide-ranging treatments of the body within settlements were often radically different from not just how the body was treated in contemporary cremation burials but also from how these burials were performed in very standardised manners. The treatment of human bones within burials and their presence within some settlements appear to reveal very different reasons. During the Urnfield period the presence of human remains in settlement contexts is particularly prevalent in the Knovíz Culture, a cultural group found in Bohemia, Bavaria and part of Thuringia. On settlements of this culture, various forms of human deposits within pits are common, although

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not found in all settlements nor in all pits. On some sites, however, almost half of the pits contain human remains (Koutecký 1990: 180–181). The deposits range from the inclusion of informally dumped disarticulated body parts with evidence of violence to whole skeletons, some of which seemed to have been formally buried (based on the position of the body and the inclusion of objects) but others dumped. It is noteworthy that those bodies which may have been formally buried were done so in a manner distinctly different from the otherwise dominant cremation practices (for a detailed discussion, see Koutecký 1990, Unger and Pecinovská 2016). The variability is striking. It may suggest that a range of detailed, locally or regionally formulated motivations and reasons governed this behaviour. It should therefore be stressed that the Knovíz Culture is a regionally distinct phenomenon and that there were other parts of temperate Europe, such as northern Europe, where we so far have no evidence of human remains deposits in settlement contexts. The lack of systematic studies of the use and placement of human remains within Middle Bronze Age settlement contexts does, however, make any conclusions very preliminary. Recent studies in the Carpathian Basin have found that human bones were commonly present in settlement contexts during the Middle Bronze Age although not necessarily as a regular feature on every site or within all regions. An important difference from the pattern in England is also that these practices co-existed with regular formal burials in cemeteries at some distance to the settlements. In their review of human remains from Bronze Age tell sites in the Carpathian Basin, Raluca Burlacu-Timofte and Florin Gogâltan (2016: 106) found that human remains were present in 85 features across 22 tells. They suggested that four types of inclusions could be identified: regular burials consistent with the standard burial rites in the region, irregular burials which deviated from the usual customs, unusual depositions of human remains without any funerary connotation, and discharged human remains treated similar to regular waste. The distinction between the third and fourth types is due to examples such as “skulls deposited under house floors or skeletons placed beneath fire-hearths” (Burlacu-Timofte and Gogâltan 2016: 107), which suggest intentional manipulation of the remains that were not regulated by standard burial practices. Such studies, moreover, suggest that there was no selection of bodies based on age or sex. Children, including very young ones, were often present but there is not a sense of preferential treatment. The detailed excavation of the Bronze Age tell of Százhalombatta-Földvár, Hungary, can further finesse these findings. Within the first six levels of the site, which correspond to the Middle and Late Koszider period (Hungarian Middle Bronze Age) there were 58 fragmented and disarticulated human bones, as well as one articulated infant skeleton, making up about 0.1per cent of the bone assemblage (more than 50,000 pieces). The majority of the human

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

bones were small fragments, found in the debris and general refuse without any concentrations. It is unlikely that these were remains of skeletons that were given formal burial within the site. This is similar to Burlacu-Timofte and Gogâltan’s third or fourth type. However, the deposition of a skeleton of an infant aged 6–9 months suggests a different practice and motivation (Poroszlai and Vicze 2004). It was placed in a contracted position in a shallow depression within the general fill without any further marking or associated objects (Poroszlai and Vicze 2004: 292). The bones were tightly packed suggesting the body on deposition was wrapped in a material such as cloth or leather, but there were no remains of this (Vicze and Sørensen forthcoming). In this case, it seems that at a specific moment it was meaningful to deposit the child body within the site using a formal burial-like treatment but without employing the usual cremation rite. Equally clear, this was not part of a routine link between the settlement and the deceased. Increased data and systematic studies begin to suggest that practices that resulted in human remains being deposited within Middle Bronze Age settlements in temperate Europe were relatively informal and unstructured rather than revealing shared and standardised attitudes. Some practices appear to be concerned with providing some kind of funerary treatment to a body, and the challenging question in these cases is why these bodies were treated differently from others (see also Burlacu-Timofte and Gogâltan 2016). In other instances, it seems that the potential potency of the body (or parts such as the skull) were explored to add meaning to a construction; but it is interesting how relatively rare such instances are. Moreover, for such practices, other things, like pottery or animal bones, were also used and this suggests that in these instances human remains, while they may have been supreme objects, were ontologically considered objects and interchangeable with other kinds of things. Finally, we also have examples of remains that seem to have lost both humanness and thingness and were mere refuse; these remains were probably created through chains of events that gradually stripped the body of meanings. Overall, so far it seems that in Middle Bronze Age temperate Europe the engagement with human remains beyond routine burials was often fleeting, ranging from responding to and exploiting some of the strong emotive dimensions of death to ignoring their past humanness. It is noticeable that the introduction of cremation did not seem to affect the frequency of human bones found on settlements nor how they were treated in such contexts. Despite the occasional presence of human bones in settlements it is reasonable to suggest that in temperate Europe it was most common to link the dead body with the idea of burial outside and away from settlements and that this view did not alter with the adoption of cremation. Therefore, although the manipulation of human bones in contexts outside burial practices may have been closely linked to perceptions of how human beings are constituted and how

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parts of the body or a newborn child could be linked to, for instance, good fortune, on present evidence we do not learn much about attitudes towards death through these activities and their studies are often enmeshed with speculations about motivations. To discern more about Middle Bronze Age attitudes to the body we need to look at other practices. THE INDIVIDUAL, MOBILITY, AND LIFE EXPECTANCY

Although it is very difficult to gain a detailed impression of the conditions of life at the level of the individual – their family structure, mobility, life expectancies, and conditions – these facets of Bronze Age life are fundamental to any analysis of the Bronze Age dead. Who were the bodies we analyse, how had they been integrated within households and communities, what may have affected their treatment in death? Such questions underwrite our objectives, but can we even begin to consider how to frame their answers? A little has begun to emerge. For instance, extrapolating from the average size of houses and their interior organisation and combining this with mortuary studies, it is possible to suggest that the cohabiting group would have been family-like in its composition and usually would not have exceeded 8–10 people (Sørensen 2010b). Mortality patterns suggest that the people living together at any one point were probably members of extended families, such as uncles, aunts, and nieces and of different generations, rather than merely the core family. There is no evidence to suggest, however, that the household routinely included servants or other economically dependent members and that such relationships were integral to the structure of Bronze Age communities. Recently it has become fashionable to suggest that slavery was part of Bronze Age societies, but the basis for proposing such a specific institution is weak and largely based on inferences. It has, for instance, been a common trope that slaves were a commodity in the metal trade, and recently Martin Mikkelsen has argued that the longhouses in Denmark reveal the presence of a two-tiered community composed of the owner of the land and the unfree, or slaves (Mikkelsen 2020). There is also a tendency to use the new aDNA and isotope data to reach rather firm sociopolitical interpretations as biological diversity and wealth differentiation within communities are interpreted as straightforward reflections of social hierarchy and institutions (Mittnik et al. 2019). Servitude was probably present in the Aegean Bronze Age, and it has been convincingly argued for the Iron Age, even in northern Europe (e.g. Webley 2008), but in most of temperate Europe there is not at present obvious evidence to support such a specific interpretation of social differentiation, and other forms of differences shaped around kin, age, gender, and abilities and including both long term and more fleeting arrangements such as ‘farmhands’ and foster children seem far more likely.

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

In those parts of Europe where village formation had developed, households lived close to, and must in various ways have collaborated with, their neighbours, whereas in the north the household constituted the settlement. As was the case for the variables discussed above, these differences must have influenced how conventions were agreed upon and how changes were adopted and spread. Mobility and contact, in terms of people as well as animals, objects, and ideas, are additional factors that must have significantly influenced how communities responded to new ideas, and it is a topic that has been intensely discussed for the Bronze Age (e.g. Childe 1930, Jockenhövel 1991, Kristiansen and Larsson 2005, Shennan 2000). Isotope and aDNA analyses are now producing new data on this. The former has most spectacularly been used to outline the biography of Bronze Age individuals, such as the ‘Egtved girl’ from Denmark, with a story emerging of a young woman’s multiple long travels and dying away from her place of origin (Frei et al. 2015, 2017). Such accounts, provocative and striking as they are, still need to be connected to more broadbased analyses of population, or they remain single stories. Insights into varying degrees and forms of mobility are, however, emerging (e.g. Cavazzuti et al. 2019b), although as yet mobility pattern in the Middle Bronze Age remains somewhat obscure. The extent of mobility within communities, including questions about movement over short distances and multiple moves, remains difficult to assess at this point. It seems that women might often have had a higher level of mobility than men (Knipper et al. 2017, Mittnik et al. 2019), although it remains unclear how much we can generalise. Even the biggest Bronze Age communities were, however, of a size for which ‘marrying’ outside the group was necessary, and we must envisage a kinship landscape in which settlements were tied together through ‘family’ relations and associated economic links and social obligations. This, as in most periods, meant that there was a ‘natural’ level of mobility and through this a network of communication. The other, Bronze Age specific, cause of mobility is linked to the dominant role of bronze and the presumably considerable trade in other ‘commodities’ such as salt and wool (Harding 2013, Jørgensen, Sofaer, and Sørensen 2018). The movement of bronze, as raw materials, semi-processed metals, and as finished products does demonstrate considerable and complex levels of interaction (Roberts 2008). But to return to our specific concerns, the main point is that however mundanely people were tied to the tilling of the land or watching the herds, their lives would also be informed by external contacts. Whether they themselves met and talked with a traveller, a trader, or a wandering storyteller, or only heard about them from some family members or a neighbouring group, they would have been aware of such people and other places. Similarly, they would own, or have seen or heard about, materials and objects that were foreign, and considered odd

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or valuable, desirable, and prestigious (Helms 1988). Fundamental changes in other groups’ communal ritual practices would, we must imagine, have been talked about and subject to much curiosity. Through this the possibility, maybe even the desirability, of change was sown; but as in any Chinese whisper, it also introduced the potential for variations and deviation. These would be enhanced due to the inherent tendency of mutation during the process of copying or due to deliberate alterations and choices and the experimentation with the new. The cultural exchanges that paralleled the distribution and trade in bronze, and other materials, would, however, have had a substantial impact on many aspects of community behaviour. Conditions of life were harsh, as in all prehistoric communities. There was a low average life expectancy and a shortage of old people (i.e. more than 45–50 years of age). People were inadequately protected against both recurrent conditions, such as dampness or cold, and more sporadic ones, such as the spread of a virus or the consequences of a fall or a dirty wound. Anthony Harding expresses it as: ‘Disease, whether chronic such as arthritis, or epidemic, such as viral infections, must have been prevalent at all times and places.’ (Harding 2000: 377). Perinatal and infant mortality was very high, and high mortality rates characterised all age groups (Nikulka 2016, Teschler-Nicola and Prossinger 1997). Analyses of cemetery populations often show fluctuations in age at death, commonly including a peak in mortality for young women, presumable related to the age of giving birth, and often a peak for men at a slightly later age, possibly related to them participating in a range of age-related activities that induced stress and trauma to the body, including maybe raiding (Harding 2007). In addition, despite local variations in attitudes, young children were often seen to be differently treated to adults in some manners. At times this led them to be treated differently in death to other deceased members of societies including sometimes being buried somewhere else (Harding 2000: 379, Rega 1997). Bronze Age people would be familiar with death. The birth of a child could not have corresponded with a granted expectation of it surviving even its first years of childhood. Miscarriages and infant death would, however, have been inflicted on families differently, both due to genetic and external factors, with some families suffering death repeatedly and others seeing their children survive. Sometimes, when the cause of death was externally inflicted through aggression or mishap, it would be understandable, but at other times it must have seemed as if it just happened, as something inevitable or as something invisible going through the family or community. One can imagine that death was both familiar and expected and at the same time mysterious and frightening. Although it is difficult to find any unambiguous traces of their understanding of death as an idea, we must expect that it was a dominant feature of Bronze Age life. As death was an ongoing concern during life, a

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

certain degree of interaction between the living and the dead is not surprising, and we see this link in a number of ways including in some cases regular visits to cemeteries and subsequent engagement with graves (further discussed in Chapter 8). ASPECTS OF BELI EFS: HO ARDS AND ICONOGRAPHY

Despite their inscrutable nature, hoards are very informative about what we may call existentialistic elements of Bronze Age ways of being. During the period of transition in burial practices, hoarding activities were rife; and we can identify a growing emphasis on watery contexts as well as an increase in the number and size of hoards. There were also in many areas a trend towards change in the composition of the hoards with the inclusion of new objects and new compositional themes (such as paired objects or female ornament sets (Kristiansen 1998, Mozsolics 2000)). We also see the disappearance of what might be interpreted as primarily value hoards, such as the Barren- and Ösenhalsringe deposits of the Early Bronze Age (Brunn 1959, Krenn-Leeb and Neugebauer 1999). These hoards contribute to our understanding of the body in two ways. One is through how they suggest a system of beliefs that was strongly linked to the natural environment. Hoards do not provide any suggestions of the existence of personified deities but rather reveal an emphasis on places and certain landscape qualities. They also suggest a momentary ritualised performance, in other words, ritual as an event. The other contribution arises from what they contained, as the finds from hoards evidence the wide range of objects in use, including ornaments. Analysis of object compositions in hoards at times even demonstrates how certain objects were combined in ornament sets (Kristiansen 1998: 76–79). This is particularly important after the introduction of cremation as the hoards document the continued use of elaborate personal ornaments after they have disappeared from the grave assemblages. Whereas many hoards may be explained as scrap hoards or hidden storage, there can be no doubt that most of them were in some way meaningful ritual deposits (Fontijn 2020, Hänsel and Hänsel 1997). The shared essential characteristics of many of them – deposited in marginal areas, no marking of the spot, and no return activities – suggest they were events or acts acquiring meaning by being witnessed and being kept alive through the telling and retelling. Hoarding activities, we propose, were fundamentally social activities. Some hoards appear not to have shared this sense of community impact, such as the deposition of a single weapon or a set of ornaments, but these may have been intensely private versions of the communal ritual. Both, however, reveal the significance of the deposition itself. This contrasts strikingly with later cultural practices that focus on the possession of wealth or the display of power. Hoards

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suggest a concern with transaction in the form of gift-giving, but a transaction where the receiver takes an abstract form and is embedded within a wider understanding and engagement with the cultural and natural landscape, its borders and qualities. As suggested by many studies, it was in the liminal areas and along boundaries that these transactions leave their clearest signatures (Gerritsen 2003). Through these practices, we get a glimpse of a concern with what, lacking a better word, we shall call the supernatural or a pantheistic sympathy with the landscape, but one that was nonetheless thoroughly social in its intensions and which recognised and expressed the distinction between the domestic social world and that which bordered it. Although unambiguous articulations of religious belief cannot be found, towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age, around c. 1200 BC, a set of iconographic elements appeared at the same time as urn cremations became common – the two have often been intertwined in interpretations and seen as a package of ideas (see Chapter 2). If that connection is indeed correct, then the development and content of these iconographic elements are of interest here. The set consisted of the symbols of the bird, sun, and boat, often in combinations but also appearing each on their own (Kossack 1954). The bird appeared both incised on a range of different bronze types, including vessels, knives, shields, and ornaments, as three-dimensional figures in clay or metal, or in the form of bronze attachments for example on ornaments, cauldrons, and wagons (Fig. 4.2). The whole of the bird may be represented, or characteristic elements were used to indicate the bird, such as the beak and head, at times the S-shape is simply used as a signifier. This is especially the case when used as the terminal

4.2 Ritual object with bird and cart elements, ‘Kultwagen’ from Potsdam-Eiche, Germany (Foto: Wolfgang Sauber/CC BY-SA)

THE BRONZE AGE: SETTING THE SCENE

ends of objects or as decorative attachments, including both on routinely used objects, such as fibulae, and on extraordinary ones, such as the socketed triple wheel from Potsdam-Eiche, Brandenburg, Germany (Probst 1996: 368, 371). The three elements, on their own and in combinations, are interesting for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the extent of their distribution is striking as the motifs are found in an area reaching from northern Italy to Scandinavia and from Eastern Europe to France (Bouzek 1985, Iaia 2005, Wirth 2006). Secondly, the sharing of a particularistic semantic system was an innovative feature; prior to this, local forms of shared abstract ideas, such as fertility or cosmology, were shared but not articulated through a detailed iconography. Thirdly, the specificity of the bird figure is striking. It is not just any bird – the shape of the beak and the head mark this as a waterbird, usually identified as a duck or a swan (Wirth 2006: 561). The most elaborate pictorial use of these signs comes from Scandinavia; and in recent years a range of new studies have brought together the wide range of images on rock art, bronze razors, and other media (Bradley 2006, Kaul 1998, Zipf 2004) proposing interpretations that pertain to Bronze Age religion. According to these interpretations, the central focus of Bronze Age religion between 1700 BC and 700 BC in northern Europe was cosmology, especially the sun. Fleming Kaul has interpreted the Nordic iconography as a pictorial story of how the sun during the night was travelling through an underworld with the help of a boat and fish, and during the day pulled over the sky by a horse (Kaul 1998). This narrative motive appears in several contexts. The famous Trundholm Sun Chariot, Denmark, is particularly illustrative. This installation, showing a horse pulling the sun (both are wheeled), may be interpreted as a didactic presentation of the mechanism (the horse) through which the sun is pulled over the sky. The bronze disk has a plain and a gilded side, interpreted as representing night and day respectively. This interest in the cosmos is confirmed by the Nebra sky disk dating to c. 1600 BC (Fig. 4.3). This is a bronze disk c. 0.3 m in diameter depicting what has been interpreted as the Sun or full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars. It was deposited at the Mittelberg site in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, within an earlier prehistoric enclosure that encircled the top of a small mountain (Meller 2004). The disk appears to document a refined understanding of astronomy and cosmological observation of the sky. These extraordinary glimpses of Bronze Age cosmological awareness and causal narratives combined with the relatively modest routine expressions of religious behaviour (apart from burials) have left much to be conjured by the archaeologists. Some have interpreted the appearance of these iconographic elements as part of a religious transformation that heralded the Urnfield Culture. In such views the duck may be seen, for example, as a connection between earth, sky,

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4.3 The Nebra Sky disc, a bronze disc with representations of astronomical objects from Nebra, Germany (Foto: Dbachmann, Theway/CC BY-SA)

and water or the natural and supernatural (Jung 2005: 335). Other understandings of the mechanism behind such widely shared semantic signs have, however, recently been explored. Of these, Sebastian Becker’s (2018) argument that in its widespread distribution the bird motive is more insightfully interpreted as a branding expressing the underlying values of warrior masculinity is particularly challenging and innovative. Regarding the aims of this volume, the importance is that whereas neither the use of the symbol of the sun nor the importance of watery contexts were new, the codification of their representations (bird-sun-boat) does suggest a change. This, moreover, is a change that may be interpreted as revealing a standardisation and formalisation of ritual practices and the emergence of widely shared ritual semantics. This is of obvious importance for considering the increased standardisation of the cremation burial practices. REPRESENTATIONS AND TREATMENTS OF THE BODY

Bronze Age depictions of humans can provide some insight into attitudes towards the body, but there is little to be gained with regards to attitudes towards death from Bronze Age iconography. In contrast to later periods (e.g. Dobiat 1982, Frey 1962, Huth 2003, La Baume 1963, Rebay-Salisbury 2016) there are no unambiguous representations of death or the deceased, no allegory of sleep or passage to another world. The body appears as a central agent in many rock carvings (e.g. Coles 2005, Skoglund 2015), but their appearance as ‘stick-figures’ makes it difficult to link them explicitly to attitudes towards the body, and their messages seem most likely to be about wider issues such as fertility, landscapes, and cosmology (e.g. Bradley 2006, Kaul 2004) and concerns such as ships/sailing and hunting,

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4.4 Depiction of charioteers and a possible cremation pyre on the ceramic urn from Veľké Raškovce, Slovakia, c. 1400 BC (Vizdal 1972: 124)

rather than death. Furthermore, not all rock art traditions were similar. For instance, it seems that abstract ideas were more explicitly expressed within Scandinavian rock art whereas the rock art found in the Alpine area (e.g. Anati 1994, Bevan 2006) appear to be more focused on everyday community concerns and practices. The closest image of a death ritual may be the hooded figures on the stone slabs in the c. 1000 BC burial cist in the Kivik grave, Sweden (Goldhahn 2009a, Randsborg 1993), but as the depictions are so enigmatic and the interpretation of the figures so very speculative they can hardly be the basis of generalisations. The depiction of two chariots with drivers on a Middle Bronze Age (c. 1400 BC) urn from a cremation grave at Veľké Raškovce, Slovakia has been interpreted as showing funerary pyres (Fig. 4.4, Vizdal 1972). Again, this is a singular case, and its interpretation is based on several assumptions, making it problematic to use it for specific arguments about attitudes towards the dead. Some data reveal a concern with the status of the body in terms of health. This was not new to the Bronze Age, but it does give us insights into fundamental attitudes towards the body. In particular, the data suggests that the body is understood in such a way that interfering with it is seen as a potential way of healing. This is most well-known from instances of trepanation (Harding 2000: 380), a practice that is known from the Mesolithic onwards, and which may have been done for a range of reasons. It may, for instance, suggest that they thought that there was something that needed to be released, that opening up the skull in itself was beneficial, or that access had to be gained to what was underneath the cranium. The point, however, is that this suggests an attitude towards the body which saw it as a matter that could be interfered with and healed. Evidence for such attitudes is, however, rare.

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BURIAL PRACTICES

Most relevant to our concerns is the pre-existing burial practices. Burial practices changed in subtle but significant ways towards the end of the Early Bronze Age in central Europe with the corpse now generally presented extended on its back, adorned and accompanied by personal objects rather than on its side in a crouched position as was the rule earlier. For the Middle Bronze Age, the space containing the body became more elaborate, taking the form of a built construction and creating potential associations between the funerary chamber and the lived-in space of a house or its rooms. These constructions, rather than primarily being dug into the ground, as was characteristic of Early Bronze Age graves, were placed on the surface and were covered by a tumuli, usually made of turf or soil. The primary grave was usually at the centre of the mound, with additional burials often added either in the mound itself or around the periphery. Through the practices of secondary interments, the mound may be extended, and two or three phases of mound building were not unusual (e.g. Geschwinde and Görner 2002). Through these changes, the monuments, sometimes of sizable proportions, could cover several burials and be in use for some time. Such tumuli burials characterised the Middle Bronze Age burial landscape in both central and northern Europe. The focus of these burials is the body and its presentation both within the grave and within the larger cultural landscape. Whereas earlier, stretching back at least to the Neolithic Corded Ware Culture, the opposing positioning of male and female bodies was used to maintain and stress gender as a central social categorisation, bodies were now differentiated through several dimensions including gender and age and probably also through different aspects of kin and status. Multiple aspects of the individual’s social identities seem to be communicated through their burial, and funerary activities were used to cement and renegotiate people’s relationships within larger social networks. We must imagine burials as intense and important social events. In addition, the evidence suggests that the emphasis was on presenting the inhumed body as if it was still alive, or in a parallel state of existence, such as sleep. Whether the assemblage around the body was richer or poorer than what was associated with it in its daily life we do not know, but there are no suggestions that the types of objects used were exclusive to burials – rather, the objects are all familiar from other contexts such as settlements and hoards, and when found in graves they are frequently heavily worn, although there are examples of pottery produced specifically for burials (e.g. Sofaer and Budden 2012). Nor is there consistent evidence for special practices such as deliberate breakage or other signs of the objects being ‘killed’ to accompany the deceased. To all intents and purposes, it seems that the laying out of the corpse aimed to present it in a likeness to life – dressed and adorned as it would have been in life.

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There is, however, little evidence to suggest that the deceased was thought of as having bodily needs in death, such as hunger or thirst, or needs of companions or means of transport. What evidence there exist for the inclusions of food, for example, point to either locally developed traditions, such as the apparent presence of food offerings in graves of the Encrusted Urn Culture of western Hungary (Bóna 1975, Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008), or they are isolated examples that do not fit into any pattern. For instance, the bark beakers found in well preserved Danish Early Bronze Age oak coffin graves contained a range of different things. The grave from Egtved contained a mead-like drink in a bark container, but containers in other graves were used to hold bronze objects (Jensen 2002). There are also a few examples of flowers present in graves, providing a hint of an emotional gesture. This is well illustrated by some of the above-mentioned graves from Denmark. In the grave from Skrydstrup, for instance, there was a bouquet of grass and flowering plants underneath the cowhide that covered the base of the coffin (Frei et al. 2017), and in the grave at Egtved flowering Yarrow was placed on top of the ox-hide wrap (Felding 2015, Frei et al. 2015, Hvass 2000). Meadowsweet, which has a distinct fragrant scent and white flowers, has been found in Early Bronze Age graves in Scotland and Wales (Dickson 2000: 84) as well as southern Germany (Rösch 2009), and more thorough attention towards the pollen record within graves might demonstrate that these are not rare exceptions. Recent detailed studies of the pollen found inside and outside of the wrapped bodies in the Late Bronze Age funeral cave of Cova des Pas, Minorca, have shown in fascinating detail the deliberate use of flora with various flowering plants placed close to the face of women (Servera Vives et al. 2008). As part of the change in burial practices towards the late Early Bronze Age the burial constructions became more distinct and in various ways elaborated. The constructions took many forms from coffins made of tree trunks, planks, or stone slabs, to chambers or rooms built in wood or stone, or combinations of these. Their shared characteristics were the emphasis on a special room or container (so that the body could be placed within something), the tendency towards rectangular structures (emphasising the physicality of the body, its outline and proportions), and an exaggeration of size with the created space commonly exceeding what is needed to place the body within it. Usually, the architecture did not include any kind of entrance; it was a sealed space within the burial mound. Coffins had lids and chambers had roofs, and there was often some kind of floor including examples of well-laid stone paving. Further elaborations may be seen in terms of various kinds of ‘beddings’. Around the coffin, there may be a stone packing or other kinds of foundations, whereas the inside of the coffin may have had a hide or fur lining. Various organic materials might have been used to provide a further layer around the coffin and to close any gaps – for example, between the stones in stone cists. Amongst

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4.5 Oak coffin of Guldhøj, Denmark, during the excavation in 1891 (Foto: National Museum of Denmark)

well-preserved graves from Denmark, there are several examples of a thick layer of seaweed2 (Rasmussen and Holst 2004), and the famous period II grave from Trindhøj (Boye 1896) had a layer of moss between the oak coffin and the stone packing around it. Such examples suggest considerable care in the construction of at least some graves. It also suggests that the sealing of the grave mattered. The oak-coffin graves from Denmark, due to their superb preservation, also provide thought provoking insights into the different stages of the making of a burial with a Russian doll–like layering (Fig. 4.5). At the core of such burials, we find the dressed body including its personal objects. The body was placed in a coffin or similar construction. The inside of the coffin was lined with a 2

Graves with seaweed packing date to both Early and Late Bronze Age and are found in different parts of Denmark, not just coastal sites. Many of the recorded examples are from nineteenth century excavations and the species of seaweed is usually not identified. Eelgrass [Zosteraceae], which grows close to the coast, is, however, specified in a few instances (Goldhahn 2009a).

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large cowhide or similar, and the dressed body with its associated objects was placed on this. A few additional objects, such as bark vessels, grooming items, or additional pieces of clothing, were often placed at the head and the feet. The sides of the cowhide were then folded up effectively wrapping the body and its associated objects. In some male graves, the hide was replaced by a gown laid over the top of the body. Swords might be added on top of the wrapped body rather than being physically attached to the body like the other personal objects making an interesting distinction between objects linked to the body and others that had a more specific role and connotations. The coffin lid was then added. Organic material, such as seaweed and moss, may be placed around the coffin filling the space between it and the stone packing, and further layers of stone may be added to cover the coffin. This inner core is then covered by layers of turf or soil. The point of this detailed outline is to provide a sense of layering in the construction of the grave. This would have punctuated the funeral dividing it into several specific stages through which meaning was asserted and inscribed and different community relations enacted, with the inhumed body remaining central to it all.3 It is unclear whether all members of local communities received such formal burials or whether this was only given to certain social groups, such as dominant families. The variation in the demographic profile of the buried population (men and women as well as different age groups) and the different characteristics of the burials (ranging from very poor and simple to rich and elaborate) do, however, suggest that what we see is not a specific group within society, the selection appears rather random. This, however, seems unlikely and it might not have been social but other factors that determined who were given these formal burials or it might simply be because the archaeological record itself constitutes a random sample of the original burials (Broadbent 1983). There are, however, some common social trends in the data. There is, for instance, a tendency shared by many areas for the central primary grave to be that of a man, with the secondary graves, placed either in the periphery or in the barrow fill, being for women and children as well as men. In addition, and in contrast to the Early Bronze Age, the norm during the Middle Bronze Age 3

For some of the well-preserved graves it is possible to dissect these stages and the different potentials for social involvement they provide. The rich and well-preserved Early Bronze Age grave at Leubingen is one such example and has been analysed accordingly (Sørensen 2004). The Late Bronze Age grave at Lusehøj, Denmark, is another example, where the excavation strategy aimed to unravel the complexity and temporality of the events taking place although its analysis did not explicitly aim to dissect them (Thrane 1984). Whereas the richest insights have been dependent on very well preserved graves, sophisticated use of modern excavation techniques has begun to compensate for the lack of preservation. The excavation of the Skelhøj barrow is one example, where through the use of new recording methods minute details about the building phases could be traced (Holst and Rasmussen 2015, Holst, Rasmussen, and Breuning-Madsen 2004, Rasmussen and Holst 2003).

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is that bodies were placed extended on their backs, and there is, therefore, no gender differentiation based on the positioning of the body or the orientation of graves. Rather than being expressed through the body, gender is expressed through the placing (i.e. sequence) of the burial within the burial mound and the objects associated with the deceased. The nature of cemeteries changed as well. Central Europe saw the development of cemeteries with up to many hundreds of graves during the Early Bronze Age, probably corresponding to changes in its settlement system. In northern Europe, burial sites remained small throughout the third millennium with at most a few graves clustering together. In both areas, the appearance of large barrows introduced a new type of clustering and probably also a new means of differentiation. The kind of horizontal groupings that can be discerned within Early Bronze Age cemeteries in central Europe and interpreted as kinship groups and families (e.g. Heinrich and Teschler-Nicola 1991) disappear with the Middle Bronze Age and socially based clustering took on new forms. On one hand, we see the clustering of barrows within at times large barrow fields and, on the other hand, it is also common for several burials to be secondarily inserted into a single barrow. Both were ways of creating a community of the dead, and they were often used simultaneously within a given region. Barrows seem to have become a new way of marking social relations and social differentiation and of anchoring these within a landscape. A good example of this is provided by the burial mounds of the Marburg region (Dobiat 1994). Together these different characteristics of Middle Bronze Age inhumation burials make it reasonable to suggest that whatever death was thought to entail, it seems that in most of central and northern Europe it was customary at the time to dress the deceased well for the funeral, present the body in a state of rest with its personal possessions, and to draw on the community to erect a funerary monument and presumable to perform appropriate funerary rituals in connection with the burial. In our opinion, in these rituals, the physicality of the body was treated as meaningful, and objects were used to annotate the body. PEOPLE–OBJECTS RELATIONS

Material culture is a central medium for the expression of understandings of the world, including our self and relationships amongst people. Through material culture, ontologies can be externalised and reified, and it provides settings in which we can both reflect on and react to how things used to be done. It is an essential mediation of normative behaviour, setting the forms against which measures can be taken and providing means of following established norms as well as subversion (Sørensen 2006). Changes in established

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ways of performing central social events, therefore provide crucial insights into communities’ ability to change how they thought about and understood these events and how material culture was used to reflect that understanding. Earlier we outlined some of the characteristics of burials to provide a sense of the funerary practices that were changing. Here, we aim to briefly outline the characteristics of the objects used in burials and the meanings and connotations they may have brought to, or articulated within, the burials, as this also indicates something about how the body was understood and performed during the transitional period. Despite the harshness of Bronze Age life and its general short span, there was room for both the expression of beauty and for producing and using objects that aimed to decorate the body and demonstrate something about who that body was. Most of the evidence about this relationship comes from graves, and the careful and deliberate use of objects linked to the individual body is a central theme of Middle Bronze Age burials. The range of types and subtypes used increased with the Middle Bronze Age, as did also the size of many of the objects used to decorate the body. Objects were also increasingly elaborate in terms of both their shape and their intricate decoration; they became even more eye-catching than before. Within this development, we see a growing emphasis on objects with specialised functions. In particular, there is a growing differentiation between personal objects (such as ornaments and weapons) and tools. Weapons became far more specialised than before, with the introduction of swords, a type which cannot double up for a range of different activities, such as the axe or dagger can, but is purposely made for close face-to-face combat between people. During the Middle Bronze Age, body armours also developed (Mödlinger 2017), although it was properly only owned by a few individuals within any region. In this development of an object just for warfare, we probably also see the creation of a particular kind of social person even if we may doubt whether the warrior at this time was a permanent position rather than a temporary one linked to specific social events (Harding 2007, Sørensen 2013). Through this development, the meaning and connotation of some of the objects were probably becoming more explicit, and the relationship between people and objects more involved and complex. Another expression of this increased specialisation is found in the development of personal objects in various ways focused on the body. This included objects for ‘body beautification’ such as razors, tweezers, and awls (Treherne 1995), as well as ornaments for particular parts of the body (Sørensen 2010a). These objects have been intensely studied by archaeologists, especially as means of creating chronologies and establishing the extent of particular cultural groups and contacts between them. There are, however, also obvious social aspects expressed within the burial assemblages, and this was recognised early. The obvious difference between female and male associated objects was, for instance,

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used in descriptions already in the nineteenth century (Müller 1897), and differences in burial assemblages have routinely been interpreted as reflecting differences in the social position and wealth of individuals or even groups. This is an area in which substantial development has taken place over recent decades as attention has moved from characterising the individual in terms of general variables such as gender and status to discussions of the underlying social mechanisms that generate social categorisation and valorisation. Through such works, several themes have been rethought, in particular the generative significances of age and gender. Both age and gender were of principal importance during the Early Bronze Age and used in the expression of differences between people (e.g. Neugebauer 1991, Sofaer-Derevenski 2000, Sofaer 2004, Sørensen 2000, Wilson 2007), and both changed in their importance (or at least in their articulation) during the Middle Bronze Age. Sørensen has argued that this was part of a progression towards greater individualisation of people or at least a greater differentiation within groups. She argued that during the Early Bronze Age gender and, secondarily, age, were the means through which the categorical identity of the body was decided, whereas by the Middle Bronze Age, age and gender contribute to a more complex individualised understanding that included greater emphasis on kinship, social roles, and status (Sørensen 2013). One of the most interesting observations relates to regionalism. Through the analysis of regional compositions of female dress accessories, it has been possible to show that the same dress ‘blueprint’, in other words, the prescription for how objects were combined and placed on the body, was shared by large areas of central Europe, overwriting differences in the exact appearance of the objects used and the richness of the outfits. For women, each area used two different compositions of objects on the body suggesting there were two major modes of appearance, presumably related to their roles, for example, whether they have had children (Sørensen 1997, Wels-Weyrauch 1989). Although similar analyses have not been carried out for other areas of Europe, it is nonetheless clear that the same scheme was not in use in other regions. In Scandinavia, for example, female dress appears to follow a different compositional script with an emphasis on different body zones including the neck and the use of a single spectacle fibulae rather than the emphasis on pairs of large pins (Bergerbrant 2007, Sørensen 1997). Similarly, in the Lüneburg group there is an emphasis on the head which is absent from the central European compositions (Laux 1984). Despite these variations, the dress compositions used in central and northern Europe shared similar overarching concerns that may be characterised as reflecting an attitude to the body that emphasised and articulated its parts while simultaneously stressing it as an integral whole. The latter is achieved by stressing the symmetry of the body through the paring of objects (Sørensen 2010a: 58). A similar differentiation amongst men has not yet been demonstrated although there is also for them an underlying uniformity to how their appearance was

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constructed. It is, however, possible that their differences had more gradients, or that it was less focused on appearance and more concerned with the possession of objects, such as razors and weapons. In terms of the concerns of this volume, we may characterise this dress tradition as body conscious. It shows a manner of dressing the body that aims at its decoration/annotation, and which made statements about what kind of body it was. The dressed body participated both in statements about who a particular body is and in representations about how bodies are composed of parts. Both the material and social anatomy of the body was played out in its decoration. Given some of the changes that arise with the use of pottery as containers for the cremations, pottery manufacture and use are also worthy of brief consideration. In many regions, such as northern Europe, pottery became very plain at the beginning of the Bronze Age, which contrasts interestingly with the increased elaboration of bronzes. In contrast, in other areas, such as the Carpathian Basin, pottery continued to be highly elaborate products with much emphasis on decoration and the appearance of surfaces. One may even suggest that decoration techniques, which feature elements such as channelling, twisting, and polished dark surfaces, gained inspiration from metal shapes and appearances. Whereas pottery was a standard item in most burial practices during the third millennium BC, such as Bell Beaker and Corded Ware groups, it was much less routinely included in Early and Middle Bronze Age burials. In some areas, such as northern Europe, pots were rarely included in graves, whereas in central Europe they were sometimes used in Middle Bronze Age burial (Primas 2008: 113). In contrast, for most groups in the Carpathian Basin, pottery was commonly used (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008). There were, therefore, wide-ranging regional variations in terms of whether the use of pottery in graves was a substantial new addition to existing practices or was primarily a change in the function of pottery within the grave. Even where pottery was included in graves, there was considerable variation in whether just a single or a few vessels were included or whether the full range of domestic vessels seems to be present. The latter was, for instance, the case for the Encrusted Ware burials in the Carpathian Basin (Hajdu et al. 2016, Kiss 2012). The inclusion of pottery in burials often became a particularly strong hallmark of regional traditions (Hajdu et al. 2016, Kiss 2012). Comparison of the three major Middle Bronze Age burial traditions in Hungary shows, for instance, extreme variations in the use of pottery between groups that geographically were not very far from each other (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008). THE CHALLENGE OF CH ANGE

This chapter aimed to provide some insights into the nature of the societies in which we place the changes in burial practices – which were the pre-existing

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structures and ontological beliefs that would have affected behaviour and shaped how the different communities responded to new ideas and formed new ways of doing things? At some levels change is always ongoing, but at other levels we may see periods of more explicit experimentation, the resetting of existing practices, and the development of new forms. Change may be noted in terms of quantities and typological developments, but it may also be seen through altered functions and new ideas. Comparison between bronze and pottery shows that change may manifest itself differently in different media, or rather that not all aspects of material culture were equally used in the formulation of new practices or were used in radically different manners. We have proposed that the nature of social organisation mattered for how change occurred and in particular for how they manifested themselves, but we have also argued that the various modes of social organisation that we encounter for this period would each have had characteristics that made communities compare, imitate, and copy each other’s ways of doing things. The differences between various Middle Bronze Age communities may have been most profoundly seen in the need to develop local understandings of innovation and change and yet being subjected to various cultural flows and interactions. A continent-wide network existed as some communities were tied together through strong social and economic dependencies and involvement with trade and exchanges, whereas others were more isolated and with more sporadic and random interactions with the world beyond their nearest neighbours. Nonetheless, all these communities responded to trends and influences in at least superficially similar ways despite variability in settlement organisation, socio-political structures, and differences in terms of the relationship between households and the larger community. The differences between the communities analysed regarding their thoughts about the deceased and the proper treatment of the dead body, were therefore primarily, we propose, a matter of degree rather than kind. We further argue that processes of deliberate innovation and change, and in particular the adaptation of ideas and trends from outside the local milieu, were often linked to existing ways of doing things as they provided an essential understanding and a vocabulary that was used in formulating new versions. It created security through familiarity. Routine practices – how people organised their everyday, what routines, meanings, and metaphors they used to understand the world around them and act meaningfully within it – would be drawn on. Change in burial practices can accordingly, in our view, not be understood without detailed attention to this local level of decision making, at the same time as the similarity of trends calls for understandings that go beyond the local. With this in mind, the pre-existing burial traditions are especially important, and we can locate some of the ‘building blocks’ that were used in the shaping of cremation practices within their characteristics. These were the importance

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of individual burials, the emphasis on the physical body, and the construction of a place for the burial. The essential difference between inhumation and cremations was expressed in the treatment of the physical body itself. This means that any evidence of pre-existing attitudes towards the body is crucial for our attempt at tracking the changes in burial practices. There are three elements to this: the lived body, the idea of the body, and the treatment of the dead body. It is difficult to disentangle these differences through the archaeological record alone, but careful consideration of the evidence provides us with some insights. The conditions of the lived body are reflected by the burial remains themselves, especially aspects of the life lived but also through objects found in grave contexts, as they have traces related to their uses prior to their inclusion in the graves. We can, therefore, put together strong evidence for the importance of the decorated, adorned body, the body for show. We can similarly demonstrate the presence of clear indicators of several of its social identities, suggesting these mattered and were widely recognised. Evidence about abstract ideas about the body, and especially about death, are, on the other hand, largely absent. We, at the most, can propose that the body probably was understood as a part of a wider cosmology – a cosmology that we may see articulated through cosmological narratives and a pantheistic-like appreciation of the larger environment and liminal qualities of the landscape. This would make sense of the body as part of or embedded within the world and this may, if any ontological understanding was involved, have been what the body within the earthen mound represented; a being connected to the world. The building of the mound and its visual impact on the landscape at the same time also had clear social significance. These associations gradually disappeared, or lost relevance, as cremation became a dominant burial practice performed within its own logic and increasingly removed from its original roots in, and familiarity with, inhumations burials within earthen mounds.

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THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY Introduction of Case Studies

T

he case studies selected were aimed at a broad overview of the transitional period in a wide region stretching from central to northern Europe. They included individual graves and cemeteries, in which the change from inhumation to cremation and associated ideas of appropriate burial practices could be most directly observed (such as Pitten and Vollmarshausen), but also regional studies. The case studies provided us with the opportunity to analyse a number of specific places from different parts of Europe in depth (Fig. 5.1). They acted as our ‘thinking-pieces’, although other examples were also drawn on, when useful. The regions were selected for a variety of reasons. Hungary has often been described as a potential source for the development of the Urnfield Culture because cremation was in some areas already a well-established dominant burial ritual at the time when cremation began to spread more widely. As a case study, the aim of analysing examples from this region was to expose how inhumation and cremation could co-exist for an extended period without one becoming dominant over the other (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008). The Hungarian case studies also proved to be a good example of how everyday practices may inform burial rituals. We suggest this was because shared meanings and metaphors linked the spheres of life and death. We also focused on Bavaria as a region, in particular south of the Danube. This is one of the densest archaeological Bronze Age landscapes and it was a central region for the emerging Urnfield Culture. Cemeteries numbered in the hundreds and graves were rich in objects. Differences between graves have led 86

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5.1 Map and chronology of the case studies. Hungary, Middle Bronze Age (c. 1950–1650 BC) – Pitten, Bz B–C (c. 1600–1300 BC) – Zuchering, Grundfeld, Bz D–B3 (c. 1300–800 BC) – Marburg Region, Ha A–B3 (c. 1200–800 BC) – Vollmarshausen, Ha A2-D (c. 1100–575 BC) – Lüneburg Region, Periode III–IV (c. 1300–900 BC) – Denmark, Periode III–V (c. 1300–900 BC)

to speculations about status differences, including whether social identities may have influenced who were inhumed and who cremated, although there does not appear to be any consistent patterns. Case studies from this region also provoked questions about people–object relationships, and they demonstrated how these changed and, in some cases, became more complicated as proxies were used for the ‘body-whole’ with the introduction of cremation. This observation aided discussion of the progression towards (and thus potentially some of the reasons for) fewer objects in cremation burials. Also, whereas objects became more infrequently included as permanent elements of the burial, some of the cemeteries prove that objects were still part of people’s lives and partners to the burial rituals, but that they were removed sometime after burial. This was the case, for example, at the cemetery of Zuchering. The Grundfeld and Zuchering cemeteries also helped us to advance insights into changing perceptions of the cremated body during Bronze Age D. The Marburg Area in Hessen, a region that can be described as on the margin of the central area of the Urnfield Culture, provided another good case

87

Denmark

Lüneburg Area

Late Neolithic I

Vollmarshausen

Bronze Age A1

Marburg Area

Nordic Zone

Zuchering

Central Europe

Grundfeld

Absolute chronology

Pitten

DEATH AND THE BODY IN BRONZE AGE EUROPE

Hungary

88

2400/2300 to 2200 BC 2200 to 2100 BC 2100 to 2000 BC 2000 to 1900 BC Late Neolithic II 1900 to 1800 BC

Bronze Age A2

1800 to 1700 BC Period Ia 1700 to 1600 BC Bronze Age B 1600 to 1500 BC

Period Ib

1500 to 1400 BC

Bronze Age C1

1400 to 1300 BC

Bronze Age C2

1300 to 1200 BC

Bronze Age D

1200 to 1100 BC

Hallstatt A1

1100 to 1050/1020 BC

Hallstatt A2

1050/1020 to 950/920

Hallstatt B1

950/920 to 800 BC

Hallstatt B2/3

800 to 730/720 BC

Hallstatt C1a

730/720 to 660 BC

Hallstatt C1b

660 to 620 BC

Hallstatt C2

620 to 550/530 BC

Hallstatt D1

550/530 to 480/450 BC

Hallstatt D2/3

Period II

Period III

Period IV

Period V

Period VI

Iron Age Ia

5.1 (cont.)

study for the transition, or rather the transformation, of a Bronze Age practice focussed on burials under mounds to one using burials in urns. This case further demonstrated the central formative role local understandings had. The result of this was that although the coarse characteristics of the new burial practices were shared between different barrow fields, each barrow field nonetheless had district ways of performing their burial practices. The Lüneburg Area, in northwest Germany, was selected because it was particularly well suited to investigating changes in the role of dress and

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ornaments. In this area, during the Early Bronze Age objects attached to and connected with special parts of the body were used in a manner that explicitly marked out local social identities (Laux 1981, Laux 1984). As the burial practices changed, these relationships disappeared or were transformed, and this process provided us with powerful insights into how choices were made. At various stages during the burial ritual, decisions were made about whether and how to include objects, and through such these traditional manners were cast-off and new ways of articulating the person/deceased were tried out. Denmark is the regional study furthest north, but despite its relative remoteness it was chosen because it followed similar developments and trajectories to the other regions. It can, therefore, help to capture a sense of a zeitgeist affecting various burial traditions over a large part of Europe. Lacking large cemeteries, in this case it was the detailed accounts of individual burials, some of them from old excavations of very well-preserved graves that allowed us to trace some of both emerging and declining concerns as cremation became dominant. Whereas the case studies were not contemporary in an absolute sense, they, as cultural practices, represented similar stages during the transition from inhumation to cremation, or they provided particular spotlights that helped us to better engage with the nature of these changes. The selection of these areas does not mean that other regions could not have been included. There are, for instance, cemeteries from the Netherlands or western France that follow similar trajectories; but expanding the case studies in that direction was deemed to not add substantially to the analysis we had designed, although it could have been used to raise other questions. It is, however, also the case that not all regions of Europe fit the account we provide based on a particular, albeit large, area. It is, for example, clear that the transition to cremation practice unfolded very differently in England, where the changes were probably not similarly informed by an ontological concern with the body whole. In the following, each case study will be outlined briefly, before they will be utilised for comparison in the next chapters, in so doing we move roughly from the southeast towards the northwest of Europe. HU NGARY: EARLY CREMATIONS AND R EGIONAL VARIATIONS

Middle Bronze Age Hungary (c. 2000/1900 to 1500/1450 BC, Fischl et al. 2015) was characterised by cultural diversity, expressed, among other ways, through differences in burial practices and a diverse range and use of material culture. For instance, the contemporary and neighbouring groups of the Encrusted Ware, Vatya, and Füzesabony Cultures used scattered cremations, urn burials, and crouched inhumations respectively as their primary mode of burial. These differences in burial practice may have been connected to differences in lifestyles and subsistence practices (Sørensen and Rebay-

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Name: Hungary Type: regional study Date: Middle Bronze Age (c. 1900 to 1600 BC) Main characteristics: distinct regional groups, coexisting and independent burial traditions including urn burials, scattered cremations, and crouched inhumations

5.2 The relationship between pottery and the material body in Hungarian Middle Bronze Age graves. Encrusted Ware: scattered bones, large amount of pottery over the grave, body-sized; Vatya: enclosed bones, pottery as container, urns in pits; and Füzesabony: inhumation, sets of pottery annotating parts of the body, body-sized grave pits (after Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008b: 68, Fig. 9)

Salisbury 2008), although they are not solely ‘explainable’ by such wider contexts (Fig. 5.2). The Carpathian Basin has often been claimed as the origin of the Urnfield Culture due to the early practice of cremation in the area (Childe 1930: 194, Gedl 1991, Pfannenschmidt 2000), but the striking observation reached was not that cremation was used early, but rather that diverse burial traditions co-existed for an extended period. The main settlement form of the Encrusted Ware Culture, located in the hilly regions of the western part of Hungary, were impermanent settlements with few layers of occupation; in addition, small, fortified hilltop settlements are attributed to this culture. Agriculture may not have been reliable in this landscape, and evidence shows that herding and hunting made important contributions to the diet. Pottery production and decoration achieved a high standard with evenly fired and finished vessels. There was a large repertoire of forms and sizes of vessels, often decorated with incised patterns highlighted in white paste and covering much of the surface. Pottery is found in domestic contexts and was also used as a kind of building material in the construction and demarcation of graves. The settlements of the Vatya Culture (Bóna 1992, Kovács and Stanczik 1988) are found on the Great Hungarian Plain, often situated on hilltops and promontories next to the Danube or in the river

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

valleys. The settlement form included tells, sites with just a few layers (less than 1m of stratigraphy), and open-air sites. The tells have layers accumulated over several centuries; they were long-lived settlements with dense populations, whereas open sites were of much shorter duration, probably just one or two generations. A distinct and important architectural feature is the pits that characterise tells, and which were often located inside the houses, in other words, they were intimately connected to the arrangement of domestic life. Materials from tell sites confirm these were agricultural communities, possibly with an increased interest in sheep rearing for wool from around the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (Vretemark 2010). Evidence of trade and metal production vary between sites, but evidence of extensive long-distance networking related to metal production and working appears surprisingly limited (Găvan 2015). We should, maybe, think about this as an invert-looking, selfconfirming culture with its identity expressed through iconic elements, such as domestic arrangements and its very distinct high quality pottery. The shape and size variation of vessels was wide and the quality very high. Apart from being used in domestic contexts, vessels were used as urns, and there are strong suggestions of some pots being produced directly for that function (Budden 2008). Further east, in the foothills of the Carpathians in northeast Hungary, we find the landscape in which the Füzesabony Culture was found. In this region, most of the settlement data come from fortified sites or tell settlements, with the latter found on slight elevations along the loess banks of the river Tisza and its tributaries. Agriculture, in combination with animal husbandry and hunting, was the basis of subsistence. The bronze industry flourished and there is evidence of bronze casting on many sites, but not all (Găvan 2015). Large quantities of decorative bronzes have been found in hoards and graves. Pottery was high quality, with rich plastic ornamentation and often highly burnished. There was a wide range of vessel shapes and sizes. The pottery was used in graves, sometimes in high numbers, and placed next to the inhumed body. The size and structure of the cemeteries were comparable for all three groups; they were usually located separate from, but in close vicinity to, the settlements, with grave numbers ranging from 20 up to a couple of hundred graves. In their treatment of the body and the use of objects they did, however, differ substantially. In the inhumation graves of the Füzesabony Culture, the body was treated similarly to pre-existing Bronze Age traditions and also as practised further north. In the arrangement of the body, the focus was the social identity of the deceased, and this was expressed through grave depth and the choice and position of grave goods. The corporeal existence of the body was not disputed or altered within these rituals. Its bodily needs were provided for as indicated by the placing of pottery next to it, but there are also suggestions that the body was perceived as entering some kind of transitional period after death. This is

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suggested both by the wide variety of vessels (exemplifying the ‘household inventory’?) accompanying the body and by examples of grave goods being removed after being in the grave for a while. The key Füzesabony cemeteries explored in this volume are Hernádkak (Schalk 1992), Megyaszó (Schalk 1994), Mezőcsát (Hänsel and Kalicz 1986), Gelej (Kemenczei 1979), Streda nad Bodrogom (Polla 1960), and Dolný Peter (Dušek 1969). The cremation traditions of the Encrusted Ware and Vatya Cultures were different, and we are tempted to argue that this was due to different forms of discursive engagement with the body of the deceased. Together they demonstrate how the cremated remains, as a substance, required further attention and assistance beyond existing routine understandings of the corporeal body. This challenge was met in different ways by the two cultural complexes. We interpret the Encrusted Ware burials as aiming to reconstitute the remains as a corporeal body by confirming and emphasising its spatiality. This was done by scattering the cremated remains over the base of the burial pit and further articulating this as a special place through the placement of the pottery – in this act a whole household repertoire may be used. The vulnerable unrestrained body was confined and protected by covering it with pottery. The key cemeteries used in this volume are Királyszentistván (Bóna 1975), KörnyeFácánkert (Bándi and Nemeskéri 1971), Mosonszentmiklós (Uzsoki 1959, Uzsoki 1963), Esztergom (Torma 1976), and Bonyhád (Csalog 1942). In contrast, the Vatya Culture used large urns to enclose the body, giving it new boundaries and in some way (re)embodying the dead. The placing of these urns in pits within large cemeteries may have drawn on an obvious association with pits in the settlements, emphasising the notion of a ‘storage place for the dead’. The cemeteries that informed our interpretations were Dunaújváros-Dunadűlő (Vicze 2001, 2011), Szigetszentmiklós-Felsőtag (Zoffmann 1995), Százhalombatta-Alsó Szőlők (Poroszlai 1990), Csongrád (Szénászky 1977), and Kulc (Bóna 1960). This regional study differs from the others as it does not directly analyse changing burials during a transitional period, but rather compares contemporary expressions of burial practices during this period showing how each evolving tradition was informed by meanings and metaphors drawn from the world of the living. PITTEN: EXPERIMENTATION AND W ITHIN-CEMETERY VARIATION

The cemetery of Pitten in Lower Austria covers the transition from inhumation to cremation from the early Middle Bronze Age to the beginning of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1250 BC, Bronze Age B1 to C2, MD I to SD I). As one of the largest cemeteries of the period in central Europe, it provides a detailed data set that could be explored for indicators of change in burial practices within one site and thus likely one community or at least closely

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

Name: Pitten Type: Cemetery Date: c. 1550–1250 BC Inhumations: 75 Cremations: 154 Main characteristics: large variation in body treatment and grave constructions, in-situ cremations, multiple graves, burial mounds and flat graves, platforms

5.3 Map of burial forms at the cemetery of Pitten, Austria (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008b: 158, Fig. 3)

related ones (Fig. 5.3, Sørensen and Rebay 2008b). The cemetery is situated in Lower Austria in a hilly, fertile landscape, at the bottom of the valley between the Pitten stream and the low ranges of hills running along its western edge; the valley is connected to the Alps to the west and the Steinfeld region and further valleys and plains towards the east and north. The first graves were recorded in 1932, the middle part of the cemetery was destroyed in 1967, and thereafter systematic excavations followed and continued intermittently until 1973 (Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1991, Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981, 1985). Not only the burial mounds but also the areas between them have been excavated. The variety in treatments of the body as well as grave construction during this crucial transitional period provides exceptional insight into the chain of

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actions affecting funerary practices and shows them as distinct decisions. As relatively routine activities were played out, traditions and innovations comingled, and new ideas were implemented and experimented with. The analysis of this one cemetery, therefore, provides significant details about changing practices and ideas. The documented part of the cemetery included 235 burials from 195 Bronze Age grave structures, plus four platforms. The latter refers to solid architectural structures made of soil and stone, with a plastered top. Despite their labelling as ‘cremation platforms’ evidence for their use is ambiguous, and they seemed to have played a role in the display of bodies and other funerary rituals for only a short time. There were 75 inhumation graves, usually found in a stretched position in shaft graves or burial mounds, and they may include more than one interment. There were also 154 cremation burials. Of these more than 80 per cent were buried at the place of the cremation. The body was burned and left in situ, although further treatment of the bones, such as scraping them together, piling up, or deposition in a pit is observed. Most revealing is the tendency to treat the cremated remains similarly to, or with reference to, the inhumed body. Despite their physical differences, much of the burial rituals appear to have been aimed at reconstituting and confirming the cremated remains as a body in its full physicality. This was achieved, for example, by placing dress elements to match their position on the lived body, or by re-confirming or re-defining the body’s size and shape by building different kinds of body-sized and bodyshaped containers and chambers to enclose part of the pyre site. These practices reveal that the body was thought of as explicit, coherent, and corporeal. This differed from burial practices in which the remains from the pyre were relocated. We accordingly argue that the practices we observe at Pitten reveal the further steps towards a transformed body ideology. Moreover, this difference became especially clearly articulated when such practices involved the selection of body parts rather than the treatment of the remains as an integral ‘whole’. The few proper urn burials in this cemetery (there were eight), and thus examples of the remains moved and placed in a ceramic container, employed a practice that emphasised the enclosure of the remains rather than the body’s spatiality. The number of bones gathered for urn burials tends to be higher than for burials of cremations in pits. Concerns about age, gender, and status were, to a certain extent, expressed in this Middle Bronze Age cemetery, but we could not discern any straightforward correlation between such variables and the choice between inhumation and cremation. Males and females were both inhumed and cremated; there was only a slight tendency for older children and juveniles in their formative years to be inhumed rather than cremated. The site of Pitten shows a complex intermingling between two different approaches to the treatment of dead bodies (and stages in between), within one cemetery, and while cremation became more dominant in the later phases of

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

the cemetery, inhumation did not disappear until the last phase. The merging of ideas and the fusion of practices provide insight into how a local community negotiated the integration of the emerging inter-regional trend towards cremation, but they also reveal how cremation became integrated into an established local ‘burial technology’. Rather than a clear linear pattern of change through time, we found evidence for the explorative nature of these changes, and the cemetery of Pitten appears as an arena of experimentation. This case study strongly argues that the introduction of cremation did not come with a new understanding of the body as a cremated substance, rather this understanding had to be formulated and forged over a couple of generations. VOLLMARSHAUSEN: CONFORMITY AND POST-FUNERARY ENGAGEMENT

The cemetery of Vollmarshausen provides an interesting case study of local experimentation with the format of a burial rite based on cremation, so although slightly late in terms of our core interest it is a good case ‘to think’ with. The cemetery is situated in the Kassel basin, at the end of a small cross-valley and is surrounded by water courses. The location is embedded in a network of trading routes to the Hessen depression in the north and the Frankfurt basin in the south. The first finds were discovered in 1950 and a systematic excavation under the supervision of Joseph Bergmann in the 1960s revealed 254 graves and 45 ‘cult places’ as well as a large cremation area (Fig. 5.4, Bergmann 1982).1 The cemetery was in use between Ha A2 and Ha D, approximately between 1050 and 580 BC, although only a few graves belong to the latest phases. The biography of the cemetery is difficult to plot, there does not seem to be a consistent expansion in any direction, although it has been suggested that small variations in the funerary rituals reveal six groups that may reflect family groups (Bergmann 1982). All burials were cremations, but none of the recorded burials was cremated in situ.2 The cremation presumably took place in the cremation area that was situated at the western edge of the cemetery. There were different forms of burial arrangements. This included two cremations scattered in burnt wooden coffins, 31 cremations scattered in oblong pit graves with or without stone lining, 33 round pits with scattered cremations, and, the most popular form, 183 urn graves in pits. Cremations in oblong structures were the oldest, and the cremated bones were usually scattered over a third of the available space, with the western area or the centre preferred. Finds were placed on top of or directly 1

2

Nicole Taylor’s investigation of the cemetery that focussed on questions about identity, used a higher number of burials as she included ten destroyed features (2016: 55). Our study is based on Bergmann’s (1982) account. The examples of burnt coffins may indicate cremations in situ, although this has not been clearly established (Taylor 2016: 56).

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Name: Vollmarshausen Type: Cemetery Date: c. 1100 to 575 BC Inhumations: 0 Cremations: 254 Main characteristics: scattered cremations and urn burials, decrease of grave size, post funerary rites

5.4 Map of burial forms and grave types at the cemetery of Vollmarshausen, Germany (after Bergmann 1982)

next to the cremated bones. An intimate connection was clearly desired, and cremated bones were often also found within auxiliary vessels. Urn graves covered the whole chronological span of the cemetery and were usually placed in small individual pits. Forty per cent (78 urns) were covered with a stone, grave markers in the form of stelae were found on 11 graves, and only five urns were covered with bowls. Within the cemetery, the transformation of grave sizes and shapes from one closely linked to the dimensions of the body to one suited for the cremated remains can be followed. However, the data also shows that within this cemetery, and at this relatively late date in terms of the introduction of cremation generally, varied forms of cremation burials co-existed. It seems that the form used may have been as much dictated by personal/family choices as by (enforced) cultural conventions (see also Taylor 2016: 55). This suggests that the change from one burial form to the other was not simply a gradual linear process. There were eleven double burials in the cemetery, usually an adult (male or female) and a child. Grave 17, termed the ‘founder’s grave’, was thought to contain the bodies of a 40–50-year-old male mixed with those of a 20–30year-old female in an oblong pit grave (Bergmann 1982: 467). A later reanalysis suggests the grave contained the remains of a 60–70-year-old, probably female individual, with the addition of a petrous bone from another person (Hess 2013: 85).

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

Emphasis on close relationships was also suggested by examples of the comingling of bones within a single urn, two urns together in a pit, or urns placed close to each other. Grave goods were generally scarce and lost importance during the use of the cemetery. The usual equipment consisted of an urn and an average of two auxiliary vessels, usually cups or bowls. Bronzes, primarily dress elements and ornaments such as neck rings, arm rings, pins, or fibulae but also spears and knives, were found but only in about 10 per cent of the graves, primarily from the earlier phase. In addition to the graves, 45 so-called cult places/pits were excavated in Vollmarshausen. These structures are similar to graves with a homogeneous fill suggesting one depositional event. They may contain pottery and were distributed throughout the cemetery but especially in the most densely used areas, but they did not contain any human remains. Many of the cult places were from the later phases of the cemetery (Ha A2 to Ha D), and they may indicate a local trend towards the spatial separation of certain rituals and burials. The most striking feature of the cemetery is, however, the evidence of post-funerary treatment connected with reopenings of the urns. Fifty-six of the urns were found with an artificial opening/hole on the side. A hole was punched into the side of the urn with the broken off sherds sometimes found inside the vessel and in other cases refitted, sometimes with sherds from a different vessel. In some cases, the hole was closed by a stone. Bergmann proposes that this took place after the urn had been buried, as a separate event of accessing the urn or its content. The existence of one or several macroscopically visible thin layers inside the vessels suggests that fluids and food were repeatedly offered directly onto the cremated bones in the urns, possibly through the holes (Bergmann 1982: 163). This, however, does not explain the full scope of this practice. There seems to have been an importance given to a tangible interaction with the deceased that appears to be unique to this cemetery. It is noteworthy that Taylor’s subsequent analysis showed that there were no correlations between such urns and either their location within the cemetery (family groups), burial form, age, or sex (2016: 80). Vollmarshausen is an excellent example of how, through time, the connection to the body shape became altered and often insignificant and lost. For most of its duration, the cemetery saw a variety of burial forms, but towards its end, these were abandoned, and in their place a uniform burial ritual had developed. The decrease in the inclusion of finds that might have reflected status or been personal markers, erased the stress on individuality. Examples of the separation of individuals within double burials during the earlier stage, and the uniting or comingling of remains from different people in the later stages might be further hints at changes in how the body was perceived. Through time, the individual (body) lost its boundary and shape, and it rather became a significant substance. However, although body shape and boundedness seem

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to have disappeared as important measures, the bodily remains did not become meaningless. They were a central and integral part of various activities that involved repeated visits to the graves, and which frequently included direct contact with the deceased through the reopening of urns, making offerings as well as adding substances to the bones. Since the direct interaction with the remains was so important, we argue that the rituals exceed merely celebrating the memory of the deceased and must have perceived the remains as having some presence, as metaphorically still living. The enclosure of the body in urns and pits, many of them covered to enhance the confinement, was an essential element. Natural boundaries were replaced with cultural ones. Nevertheless, the new boundaries had to be broken to enable communication with the dead. What is most striking is that this practice was only found within this large cemetery, it was not shared by neighbouring groups. Here we have an example of a distinct localised understanding of the cremated body (or its remains) and what it needs; an understanding that remained active and affected local burial practices over some time. BAVARIA: O BJ ECTS AND PYRE DEBRIS (ZUCH ERING, GRU NDFELD)

The cemetery of Zuchering near Ingolstadt is one of the largest excavated cemeteries in southern Germany with 529 graves.3 It was discovered in the 1970s by aerial archaeology and excavated between 1983 and 2002 (Schütz 2003: 40). Situated south of the Danube and its adjacent water meadows, on a flood-proof terrace with limited available settlement space and agricultural resources, it has excellent access to trade routes (Riedel and Steinberger 2003). The cemetery was in use between Bronze Age D and Hallstatt C, in the thirteenth to eighth century BC, probably by 20 generations, which equals a population of 30–40 people living at any one time (Schütz 2003: 51). A surprising number of graves (150) were surrounded by ditches, and their infill suggests the cemetery of Zuchering was a cluster of low burial mounds rather than a flat cemetery. All 529 graves were cremation graves, typically individual cremations of males, females, or children, although the former were overrepresented, and the latter underrepresented and sometimes included in an adult’s burial. The majority of the graves fall into one of two distinct categories: 102 were scattered cremation graves and 341 were urn graves. Particularly interesting for understanding the transition from inhumation to cremation are the scattered cremations. They date to Bronze Age D and were found in large, rectangular pits with a clearly distinguishable rectangular centre (‘Einbau’). 3

A cemetery with 750 graves from the period Ba D to Ha A with similar scattered cremations has recently been excavated in Regensburg-Burgweinting (Zuber 2002) and it is currently studies in a PhD project by Joachim Zuber.

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

Name: Zuchering Date: c. 1300 to 800 BC Cemetery Size: 529 Inhumations: 0 Cremations: 102 scattered, 341 urns Main characteristics: two distinct burial forms, standardised and distinct burial rite for scattered cremations, grave size, ditches, things remain important

5.5 Grave 314 of Zuchering, Germany (after Schütz 2006: 223, Fig. 43.4). The scattered cremation of a 30–50-year-old male individual is deposited at the centre of the grave, sword fragments towards the south and a dress pin towards the east of the cremated body. Pottery is placed at the west end of the inner grave construction, the pyre remains are deposited west of the inner grave construction (Krapf and Wittwer-Backofen 2011)

Most were oriented west to east, parallel to the river Danube. The rectangular centres with their well-defined edges probably originally had wooden coffins. Between 0.7 and 3 m long and averaging 1.78 m, they generously reflected the size of a body in a coffin (Fig. 5.5). The size of the coffin seems to have correlated with the age and sex of the body that was cremated. This suggests that when constructing the graves, they were referring to the size of the body before its cremation; a strong indicator that the notion of the physical body remained important despite its fragmentation. In the coffin, the cremated remains were scattered or placed in a heap on one side, usually accompanied by several bronze artefacts, sometimes they had been in the fire and sometimes not. A set of vessels that had not been in the cremation fire was usually placed on one or both sides of the cremated remains. The pyre debris, a dark layer full of charcoal, ash, pieces of cremated artefacts (bronzes and pottery), and small

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fragments of cremated human bones, was usually deposited immediately outside the coffin after it was put into the ground. Charred beams were found around the coffin in several graves. According to the excavator, the cremation took place outside the grave pits but in close proximity, as discolouring or scorching have not been observed within the pits (Schütz 2006: 32). An exceptional grave is the double burial 348, which has been labelled the ‘founders’ grave’ (Schütz 2003: 46). It contained two parallel scattered cremations with male and female equipment and with pyre remains and charred beams surrounding the double structure. The anthropological analysis of the 17 kg of cremated remains identified a minimum number of 13 individuals, with seven adults – amongst them three male and three females – and five to six sub-adults (Krapf 2010, Krapf and Wittwer-Backofen 2011). Among the grave goods were 24 vessels, two swords, nine arrowheads, three different types of knives, a fragment of an axe, four pins, several arm- and neck-rings, pendants, and other adornments. The two parallel grave pits stress the likeness to the inhumed as well as the living body, including the body’s association with objects, yet challenge the assumption that the grave was linked to a particular person. The urn graves were simple round pits scarcely larger than the urns themselves. The cremated remains were placed in the urn, usually together with various bronzes and with accessory vessels placed on top. For most urn graves the top of the urns had been damaged by ploughing so it is hard to tell whether an emphasis was given to closing the urn; but there is little evidence to support this idea. There is a slight tendency of male individuals being more often buried in urns, with females buried more often in scattered cremations. Pottery in the scattered cremation graves falls into two distinct categories based on whether they were included in the fire or not. Overall, the scattered cremated remains were treated as a body with needs, placed in a coffin and accompanied by offerings of food and drink. In addition, the pyre refuse (evidence of the transformation of the body?) was placed nearby suggesting it was granted some connection with the space of the body while also clearly separated from it. In contrast to pottery, which was deliberately selected and carefully placed in the scattered cremation graves, bronzes seem to have been part of the individual body and ‘belong’ to it. Most of the bronzes were thus cremated with the body, and they remain with the cremated bones in the final deposition. The bronzes were, however, moved and placed in relationship to the remains so they correspond with the image of a body in the grave. However, during the use of the cemetery, objects gradually became less important within the display of the ‘body’ in the grave. This decline may be due to a change in beliefs and new ‘religious restrictions’, as suggested by the excavator (Schütz 2006: 49). One of the interesting points about the cemetery of Zuchering is

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table 5.1 Cemetery phasing and burial type at the cemetery of Grundfeld, Germany (data from Ullrich 2004) Inhumations in stone chambers Phase 1–2 (Bz D/Ha A1) Phase 2 (Ha A2/B1) Phase 3 (Ha C/D)

13 14

Cremations in stone chambers 2 1

Urns with stone lining

Urns without stone lining

0 9

that, despite the use of cremation, the remains of the body never became an entity without things. Even when things were spatially separated from the body, they played a role at the margins of the graves: four deposits within the confines of the cemetery contained remains of horse gear and wagons, objects that presumably were indicators of high status. What is interesting here is that such special objects were separated from the cremated remains but remained linked to the community of the deceased by their placement within the cemetery. The cemetery of Grundfeld/Reundorf (Ullrich 2004) is situated further north than Zuchering, in the Main valley in northern Bavaria at the foot of the Staffelberg, in a slightly elevated position. Graves have been discovered during farming and gravel quarrying since the end of the nineteenth century, but 40 graves located in the southern part of the cemetery were excavated systematically between 1983 and 1984. With 80 graves in total, Grundfeld/ Reundorf is the largest Urnfield cemetery in an area where the average cemetery size usually does not exceed app. 20 graves (Table 5.1). The cemetery was in use between BA D and Ha A2–B1 (c. 1300 to 950). Inhumations and cremations were equally used. Since the graves did not cut each other, small burial mounds are assumed to have been covering them. The interpretation of the history of the cemetery has suggested it developed and expanded from two clusters with inhumations in stone chambers at the centre, and urn burials distributed around them. Stretched inhumations in stone chambers were the most common grave type in this cemetery, with the size and dimensions of the stone chambers seemingly relating to the physical dimensions of the body, which in turn depended on the age and sex of the deceased. Three stone chambers contained scattered cremations rather than inhumations (Graves 26, 31, and Ra34). In these cases, it is clear that the size of the chambers corresponded to the size of the body in life, or upon death, rather than being adjusted to its size after cremation. They also contained grave goods. For instance, Grave 31, a bodysized stone construction with the scattered cremation of a 30–40-year-old male, had bronze spirals, five pots, three of them large, and one a bowl (Fig. 5.6, Ullrich 2004: 121, 219, Pl. 39).

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Name: Grundfeld Date: c. 1300 to 950 BC Cemetery Size: 80 Inhumations: 40 Cremations: 40 Main characteristics: grave size is a direct response to living body’s quality, trend against expressing status concerns via grave goods

5.6 Body-sized stone construction for the scattered cremation of a 30–40-year-old male individual at Grundfeld, Germany, Grave 31 (after Ullrich 2004: Pl. 39)

The 35 urn graves were deposited in small pits lined with stone plates at the base and side; simpler deposition of urns without elaborate stone constructions became more common during the course of the cemetery’s use (Ullrich 2004: 145). Bronze grave goods were rare in Grundfeld, but status still seemed to be a concern and was expressed through funerary equipment. The community who buried their dead in this cemetery was comparatively well off, it seems, as suggested by the inclusion of gold, glass, and amber in the graves. All members of society, including children, seemed to have access to high-status goods, and it is possible that rank was expressed in the mortuary sphere. The analysis of dress elements and grave goods indicates there was no correlation between the number and quality of grave gifts and the kind of grave construction; the change of burial rites was thus independent of status concerns. A trend towards the exclusion of bronze elements in the graves during the later phases of the cemetery does not directly correlate with a simplification of grave structures (Ullrich 2004: 159).

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

MARBURG: MOUNDS AND MEMORY SPACES

The Marburg burial mounds (Dobiat 1994) are situated in the Hessen depression, around the city of Marburg at the river Lahn. Most burial mounds were built at the slopes of the low hills surrounding the Amöneburg basin. Interment under mounds in small, loosely arranged groups of burials was typical; thirty such groups are known from the area, with settlements much rarer (Dobiat 1994: 142). About 200–250 individual burial mounds are found in the literature, whereas flat graves are less securely established, often arising from dubious circumstances and heavily farmed land. Between 1984 and 1986 excavations were set up to compliment antiquarian research and to include areas between the mounds in investigations. Three groups of burial mounds were tackled systematically: ‘Stempel’ (Fig. 5.7), ‘Lichter Küppel’, and ‘Botanischer Garten’, encompassing around a hundred mounds between them. The Marburg burial mounds started to be used at the end of the early Urnfield Period (Ha A1/2), with the peak of activity occurring during the Middle Urnfield Period (Ha A2/B1). All burial mounds were surrounded by Name: Marburg Type: three groups of burial mounds Date: c. 1200–900 BC Inhumations: 0 Cremations: 67 (46 analysed) Main characteristics: burial mounds and urns, group specific burial rites, post funerary rites

5.7 Excavation plan of Marburg-Stempel, Germany (after Dobiat 1994)

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round or rectangular enclosures made of low stone walls, built of two to four layers of boulders. Nine mound enclosures had monolithic stelae integrated within the outer stone line. The rectangular stone structures were more varied both in plan and in size; the largest, nicknamed ‘Tanzplatz’ (Dancing place), was 27 m long. They appear to have been associated with male individuals since seven graves contained male burials, one a male and a female, one a male with an additional female/child, and two could not be sexed. Each burial mound typically contained a single burial; exceptions include the double burials of a male and a female (grave U17 ‘Botanischer Garten’) and an example of a male and a child buried together (Burial Mound 10 ‘Lichter Küppel’). The second burial in U11 ‘Botanischer Garten’ was a later addition to the primary mound of a female and dated to the Urnfield period. The primary grave was rarely more than a pit big enough to contain the urn. Some grave pits were lined with stones, but they were rare. A chamber of 3.4 by 1.2 m was built for Grave 2 in burial mound U11 in the ‘Botanischer Garten’ group. The body-sized chamber did, however, surround a cremation in a pit. The excavator suggested that the pit was dug first, then pyre remains were dumped into the pit, thereafter the stone chamber was built, and lastly the urn with the cremation was deposited (Dobiat 1994: 80). All bodies were cremated apparently in their clothing, with the cremated remains sometimes scattered and sometimes buried in urns with associated pottery and animal remains. The cremation did not take place in situ, but the pyre remains were regularly deposited in the grave pit. The funerary pyres were placed near the burial monuments, as evidenced by layers of ashes and burnt materials, including pieces of pottery. Interestingly, the bottoms of six urns were scorched, and it seems possible that such urns were placed in the remains of the still hot pyre while the cremated bones were collected (Dobiat 1994: 69). The type of vessel chosen for the urn appears to have been dependent on the deceased’s gender: double conical vessels were used for females (seven out of nine individuals deposited in this vessel type were anthropologically sexed as female, one was not determined, and one has slight male tendencies) and males were buried with vessels of a different type with outwards-pointing rims. The accessory vessels also appear to have been gender specific although with some overlap (Dobiat 1994: 122–123). Bronze and other small items were very rare (30 per cent of graves), and often seem to have made their way into the urn accidentally as small fragments, whereas deliberate grave gifts were only included in a few cases. The Marburg burial mounds were located in the northern periphery of the south German Urnfield groups. Traditional Bronze Age burial practices used mounds whereas the new Urnfield elements were the use of cremation, and with that the collection of the cremated remains in an urn, to be placed in the ground. These characteristics were shared, but there were details of how the

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

burial practice was conducted that were specific to the individual barrow groups, giving an insight into the interplay of the regional and the local maybe even family-based decision making, and also a sense of the dynamic between that which was fixed and elements that were more easily modified. LÜNEBURG AREA: TRANSFORMATION OF PEOPLE–OBJECT RELATIONS

The Lüneburg group is situated in northern Germany (Lower Saxony and Holstein), and roughly covers the landscape of the Lüneburg Heath between the cities of Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover, and Lüneburg (Fig. 5.8). It is part of the north European lowland and is dominated by the coast and major waterways. In contrast to the marshlands, the dry, sandy soils of the Lüneburg area are not very fertile; pine and beech woods, as well as meadows and pastures, dominate the area (Meyer and Seedorf 1992). Between 1500 and 1200 BC the Lüneburg Bronze Age shared many characteristics with the central European Middle Bronze Age burial mound culture, although labelled Early Bronze Age as the Bronze Age begins later here (c. 1600–900 BC, Brozio and Hage 2013). Its cultural independence has been recognized since the 1930s (Holste 1939, Sprockhoff 1930), with influences from both north and south identified but also found to be changeable through time. The southern influence is most visible in Periode II (1500–1300 BC) when typical dress elements such as wheel-shaped pins appear. Independent development of metalwork and its decoration took place during Name: Lüneburg Type: regional study Date: c. 1500 to 1100 BC Main characteristics: located between the southern German Urnfield Culture and the Nordic Bronze age, regional developments, the body and material culture

5.8 Heathland of the Lüneburger Heide, Germany (CC-BY 4.0 Snoenky)

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Periode III (1300–1100 BC) (Willroth 1996). The area has seen much detailed research focussed upon grave goods and the reconstruction of distinct local costumes including widespread shared differences between male and female clothing (Bergerbrant 2007, Brozio and Hage 2013). The distinct material culture and its use in burials as grave goods or as part of grave assemblages provide the defining characteristics of the Lüneburg Bronze Age, as a local Bronze Age cultural group that lasted a few hundred years. Their use of elaborate sets of bronze ornaments as part of the female dress ‘code’ included in the graves, is particularly striking, although modern excavations have shown that poor graves also existed (Brozio and Hage 2013: 18). The ideal set consisted of ornaments worn directly on the body, such as neck-, arm- and leg-rings, and as applications on clothing or included in head-dressing, such as various kinds of pins. The importance of the headdress in the Early Bronze Age is evident, and it probably consisted of quite elaborate hats or veils with sewnon bronze applications. In time, the headdresses were succeeded by fibulae fastened at the back of the head (Laux 1971: 132–135). It has been argued (Laux 1971, Laux and Körner 1971: 133) that the objects worn directly on the body could not have been taken off regularly and that they were part of the body; this now seems disproven (Brozio and Hage 2013). Nonetheless, the object sets seem to reveal a specific body ideology, or technology, in which different body parts were stressed (Sørensen 2010a), even if the full costume may not have been used daily. And might not have been owned by all. Male individuals were typically buried with weapons, such as daggers and bow and arrows, and a few ornaments as well as items of personal grooming such as razors, tweezers, and awls (Laux 1971: 68). Due to poor bone preservation, little is known about the children in the Lüneburg Bronze Age, and they are often only identified when they are buried together with adults (Siemoneit 1996: 343). During the change from inhumation to cremation, decisions about the inclusion, exclusion, or addition of dress elements and grave goods at various stages of the burial rite provide interesting insight into attitudes towards the entanglement of the body and material culture. In inhumation graves, objects were placed in a manner that referenced the physical body displayed in the grave. Through cremation, the clear ‘map’ a body provides for the placing of objects lost its ‘matter of course-ness’. In response, cremation remains, and objects may be treated as if still connected through a shared reference to the living or they may divert; examples of both are found within the various areas of the Lüneburg region. In the Early Bronze Age, stretched inhumations in tree coffins under burial mounds were predominant, with stone cists also common in some areas. Burial mounds were often found in groups of about 5–15, and there may be several subsequent burials within a mound. These later insertions were, probably, formed around families and similar links, although whether this should be understood as a continuous family usage of a burial landscape (e.g. Brozio and

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

Hage 2013) or event-like references to past generations (e.g. Hofmann 2006) remains unresolved. Certainly, extensions of burial mounds and the addition of places for ritual activities may indicate a long-term commitment to the place as a ritual space (Geschwinde 2000). During the Middle Bronze Age, cremation became more common in this area until it was the only burial rite practised. The earliest cremations were particularly simple, often just depositions of cremated bones without any grave goods and without specific constructions (Geschwinde 2000). They can be the primary graves under burial mounds or secondary interments. When cremation became a more standard rite, the bones were often scattered in the kind of stone settings that used to surround tree coffins. The change from inhumation to cremation was a gradual, long-term transition, albeit overall dramatic in its effects on the body displayed. It was taken up at different speeds and with different details in the individual regions. In some areas, there may have been a gendered component to the changes since females were more often cremated in the early phases. In its beginning, it was probably linked to the southern German Urnfield Culture, as indicated by some imported finds (Laux 1996a). Of great interest, there are various suggestions of an experimental phase during the transition, such as in situ cremations, the use of ‘death houses’, and other evidence of the use of fire at funerals (Geschwinde and Görner 2002, Laux 1971, 1996b). At least twelve ‘death houses’ are known. These structures seem to be specifically built for funerary purposes. They, being 4.5–6.5 m long and 3 to 5.2 m wide, do not resemble houses known from settlements, and they mostly contain cremations resulting from the burning of the house with the bodies placed inside (Busch 1996, Piesker 1934). Urns were introduced as an additional component to the cremation graves during the Middle Bronze Age, but in this case the influences behind the implementation of cremation might come from the Lausitz area (urn types are similar between these regions and some bronze imported from that area has been found) rather than the south. The importance of this case study is thus the interplay of regional differences and outside influences in an area between two major players, the southern German Urnfield Culture and the Nordic Bronze Age. It is thus not the cremation rite itself, but the details of how cremation burials were carried out and changed that provide us with an additional piece of the mosaic of the European wide transition to cremation. DENMARK: COMPLEX CH OREOGRAPHIES IN BURIAL MOUNDS

In Denmark, the beginning of the Late Bronze Age has traditionally been described as corresponding with the introduction of cremation; this, however, only refers to the normative use of in-urn cremations. Various other forms of cremation burials were already used from Period II (1500–1300 BC), and they

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became common in Period III (1300–1100 BC). There are even already a few examples of urn cremation from northwestern Jutland in Period II (Olsen 1992: 150). The ways cremations were used and the extent to which it was a regulated and standardised practice do, however, mark the use of cremation in the Early and the Late Bronze Age as clearly different. The early cremations do not seem to have a strong regional focus but are found throughout the country, although the early use of urns may single out the region of Thy (northwest Jutland) as special. It has been argued (Olsen 1992: 150) that this was due to influences from North Frisia (northwest Germany). The same influences are argued to be behind the Lustrupholm Period III cemetery of 23 cremation graves under flat fields in southern Denmark (Feveile and Bennike 2002). The cemetery contained urn graves, pyre graves, and cremated bone deposits (Feveile and Bennike 2002), a combination of burial practices that usually would be seen later. All but one of the graves were for a single individual, with the exception being a burial of a mature woman and either a foetus or a newborn child. Eight graves contained bronzes, in some cases objects that had been affected by fire but in other cases not. Thirty-nine per cent of the graves contained some animal bones, but these were, unfortunately, too small and fragmented to be identified as to species (Feveile and Bennike 2002). This cemetery is particularly interesting because it used more ‘advanced’ practices of cremation rituals than was common at the time but also, importantly, that this was not readily copied by neighbouring groups. Further three Period III urn cremations are known from Zealand (Henriksen 2015), including the famous grave from Skallerup in which a bronze cauldron (a kettle-wagon) imported from central Europe was used as an urn (Aner and Kersten 1976: nr. 1269). The full details of the grave it was found in are not known as it was excavated in 1854 by local amateurs. It was probably from the central grave in a very large barrow which in turn was part of a large cluster of barrows. The central grave was a four-metre-long wood structure with several metal objects placed at its centre (including a sword, gold arm ring and toilet equipment) whereas the bronze cauldron with the cremated remains was found in the eastern end (Jensen 2013). The cremation placed in the cauldron is consistently interpreted as the primary interment. However, the objects from the centre of the grave match what one finds in rich graves from this period, so it could also be the case that the remains of the primary interred person had eroded and were not recorded or that the cremation in the cauldron was included in the chamber for other reasons, such as a secondary burial or a companion. This would resonate with the inclusion of the cremated remains of a child in a bag at the feet of the primary interment in the famous Egtved grave (Fig. 5.9, Frei et al. 2015, Hvass 2000). The point is that such inclusions may suggest a kind of reification of cremated remains, of their ability to create affective constructions.

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

Name: Denmark Type: regional study Date: c. 1500 to 1100 BC Main characteristics: burial mounds, coffin structures, layers, gravegoods

5.9 Oak coffin with the remains of a 16–18-year-old woman and a 5–6-year-old cremated child from Egtved, Denmark (CC-BY-SA Danish National Museum, Roberto Fortuna, Kira Ursem)

Overall cremation appears as a sporadic alternative to inhumations but with strong references to the existing burial practices. Thus, we may describe most Early Bronze Age cremation graves as ontologically similar, or striving to be similar, to inhumation burials in their attitudes to the cremated remains and yet these were produced through a very different processing of the dead. Harvig et al. expressed this as the early cremations being ‘symbolically similar to the inhumation burials’ (Harvig, Runge, and Lundø 2014: 2). The cremation was usually composed of materials selected from the pyre, mostly bones but also inclusions from the pyre itself, and deposited somewhere else as a burial. One of the differences between Early and Late Bronze Age graves may be found in the thoroughness of the selection with the earlier ones showing only rough selection and later ones having greater variability between using the pyre itself as the burial place to careful selection and redeposition of the human remains (see also Henriksen 2015). The tradition of inhumation burials in Early Bronze Age Denmark used body-sized grave chambers or containers of various forms to hold the body and this was then covered by layers of wrapping from the clothing to the embracing earth mantle. The barrows were commonly large, up to 30 m in diameter and 5-10 m high, and often placed prominently in the landscape. Clusters or lines of barrows were common. A barrow usually had a central grave and several secondary burials within the mound or along its periphery. Through time, later interments often resulted in enlargement of the barrow. The construction of the barrow may involve various features such as kerbstones and stone paving. The recent excavation of the barrow at Skelhøj, southern Jutland, made detailed observation of the construction sequence and the variation in the mound material possible, showing how the mound was made-up of slices using turf from different locations (Holst and Rasmussen

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2013). The excavators have convincingly argued that the barrow was built by groups of workers, with each group working on a slice of the whole and each bringing their own building material (Holst and Rasmussen 2013). These groups probably represented the wider social kin landscape, and the barrow building would have been an event consolidating social relations. It is worth stressing that cremation practices, while having their own distinct theatrical possibilities, would not have needed collaborative labour in the same manner. The grave constructions did not include any kind of entrance. The oak coffins made from tree trunks reveal the ideal of closures and layers, particularly well, but stone cists and other constructions share the basic emphasis on containment and wrapping. The oak coffin, itself a confined space with soft ‘beddings’ and lid, would rest on a foundation of stone packing that cradled it and, in some cases, entirely encased it. Gaps between the stones may be filled in with, for example, seaweed or moss; such material may even constitute a layer between the coffin and the stone packing. This inner core is then covered by layers of turf or soil. In various ways and using different materials the graves were sealed. This closure is strikingly different from the emphasis on access seen in some of the graves in, for instance, the Pitten cemetery in Austria. The grave chambers were coffin-like rather than rooms in terms of their spatiality and were made of oak trunks, stone cists, or various forms of stone packings/settings. Within this space the deceased was placed on a hide, laid out fully clothed and with his/her objects attached to the body – arm rings were on the arm, not placed next to it as grave goods. A few additional objects, grooming items or additional pieces of clothing, were often placed at the head and the feet. The sides of the cow hide were then folded up effectively wrapping the body and its associated objects, or a piece of textile was used to cover the body. Where preservation has allowed close observation, a distinction could be noticed between objects that were part of the body and those that were additive (such as swords). The former was kept physically close to the body whereas the latter would be added after the body had been wrapped. As discussed in Chapter 4, the emphasis was on presenting the inhumed body similar to its live state. Investigations of very well-preserved burials have provided unique insights into details of the burial performance and the content of graves. These elements provide a sense that ‘comfort’ in the form of a soft support (skin or hide) for the body, or the body being wrapped or shrouded, was a common concern. The sense of rightfulness, whether through sensory elements, such as the inclusion of flowers mentioned in Chapter 4, or expressed through a carrying for the body, are striking in their specificity. It is in this context of care that the limited suggestions of a shared emphasis on bodily needs, such as hunger or thirst, becomes interesting. One may posit that it was the aesthetic body, or the body beautiful (Treherne 1995), that was on display, not the needing one.

THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE BODY

The transformation of this detailed body-centred burial rite to cremation clearly would have posed considerable challenges in terms of attitudes to the body – what was the nature of the fragmentary cremated remains and what would be the proper treatment of them? During Period II and III cremation burials were placed under barrows or inserted within barrow fills, similar to contemporary inhumation graves. So, in their integration within the burial landscape cremation seems to have introduced no discernible differences. The coffins and cists were also comparable to those used for inhumation including being of comparable size; only with time did the size of the cist shrink and it is first with the Late Bronze Age that it was consistently adjusted to the changed physicality of the cremated body or entirely let go of. There is also evidence of wrapping of cremated remains within coffins and placing of objects, apparently expressing shared concerns with the practices that dictated inhumation burials. Some graves help us to detail the performance even further, allowing us to zoom in on the specificity of how these comparisons with, or allusions to, the body whole were made. One of these is the Hvidegård grave, on Zealand, excavated in 1846 (Goldhahn 2009b, 2012, Herbst 1848) and dated to Period III. The grave was the central grave in a 6 m wide and 2 m high barrow. It was a stone cist 2.15 m long and 0.5 m wide with a floor made from a layer of flint gravel. On top of this was the ox hide that the body rested on. The content of the burial was unusually well preserved, with several remarkable objects including a much-discussed bag that contained what appear to be magic items or the tools of a shaman. Here, however, our interest is the arrangement of the grave. This was a cremation grave in which the remains of three individuals (Goldhahn 2012: 245), together with some objects, were wrapped in a woollen textile and placed on the ox hide covering the base of the cist. In the west end of the coffin was a bark beaker and to the north of the wrapped remains a sword in a scabbard made of wood and leather – placed along the outlined body but outside the wrapping. The bag was attached to the scabbard. Apart from the cremated remains, this was in almost every regard like other contemporary inhuman graves. It is, therefore, interesting to emphasise how the remains were treated: they were placed in the centre of the cist, on the ox hide and wrapped in textiles and with objects associated. This was all as per established routine. So here the only outstanding issue was how to treat the bones themselves, and the solution was to bundle them within the textile, in effect dressing them or swaddling them and making them appear like an inhumation. The placement of the sword and bag outside the textile wrapping may be seen as a further confirmation of the essential bodiness of these remains. Cremation is thus apparently embraced as an acceptable practice for this particular burial, while at the same time its difference is suppressed. Most likely, moreover, this was not a unique construction as other barrows in the same group may have

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had a similar combination of cremation buried within what otherwise appears as a typical inhumation grave (Goldhahn 2012: 246). The burial at Damsgård in Thy (northwestern Jutland) is another example providing detailed insights into what kind of decisions were carried out – in this case especially, decisions about the cremation itself and the constitution of some of the selected remains as the grave. The excavation of the barrow at Damsgård (Olsen and Bech 1996) found that the mound covered both the place of the cremation (the pyre) and a small stone cist in which a selection of the bones, some objects (both from the pyre and unburnt), and some of the pyre remains had been deposited. The close connection between the two structures and the way the selection was carried out was also observable. Joining parts of the jaws were found from each structure and their warping suggested that the bones moved to the cist had been raked out of the embers while still hot to be placed in the cist and that therefore the different parts of the jaw cooled down in different ways. The sense of haste and expediency was also suggested by objects left in the pyre rather than moved to the burial. There are no reasons to think about this as a special grave, and its suggestion of a somewhat haphazard attitude towards the collection of the remains may be worth stressing – maybe it was through the construction of the grave and the adherence to various practices during the procedure that the body was remade rather than through a reassembling of all its remains.

SIX

THE TREATMENT OF THE BODY Compatibility and Divergence

C

ontrary to the expectation that cremation burials must be motivated by either the desire to reduce the body to some kind of essence or the wish to erase it, our investigation of the cremation burials that appeared and became common in different parts of Europe during the Middle Bronze Age suggests different motivations and reveals substantial variation. In particular, the range of activities that took place after the cremation shows clearly that the cremation was not usually the final stage of this ritual and the handling of the dead body. Rather, this stage was followed by different kinds of actions that involved manipulation of the remains, presumably as part of a long chain of articulations about what these remains were or were about. In the following, we shall outline some of the main practices observed and demonstrate their conspicuous concern with the physicality of the body. We show how cremations during the transitional period, when a normative understanding of cremation burials was being formed, implied a distinctly different internal logic and way of reasoning than that underwriting, for example, Hindu cremations or modern European ones. We argue that this was strongly influenced by contemporary perceptions of the body. Furthermore, we suggest that the wide-ranging variation and ‘experimentation’ show that beliefs or body ontologies when it came to cremation were not immediately fixed but for a couple of generations were in the process of becoming formulated. It was only after a while, something like the lifetime of a few generations, that a normative 113

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table 6 . 1 Stages, activities, and concerns of cremation burials Stages

Activities

Concerns

Stage 1: From death to cremation

Selecting burial form based on: tradition, the position of the deceased and attitudes of the wider community Preparing the body (manipulations, care)

Keeping time Following norms Explorign new ideas

Stage 2: Cremation

Collecting fuel, selecting a location, placing the body and other items

The right temperature, proper materials, duration, ensuring proper cremation

Stage 3: Treating the remains

Several possible scenarios from ignoring the remains to careful selection and treatment, movement, and redeposition

Deciding on the status of the remains and their proper treatment. Decisions about the status of the pyre

understanding of the status of the body in cremation burials had been established. It is this duration that we defined as the transitional period in Chapter 1. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to trace core characteristics in the performance of cremation burials with specific attention to practices linked to the body during this period of ontological transition from one to another kind of body. Through this, we aim to reveal the logic underwriting these practices, as they were being introduced to and developed by different communities. To do this we, as a heuristic devise, divide the practices that constituted a cremation burial (exploring the idea of chaîne opératoire as discussed in Chapter 3) into three stages, each with specific concerns and particular potentials for performative effects and alternations. The first is the temporal span between death1 and the cremation, the second is the cremation itself, and the third is the treatment of the fragmentary cremated remains (see Table 6.1). There are, of course, burial forms for which this division is not appropriate. The period from death to burial may, for example, not be divided into a separate stage or the different stages may be so densely interwoven and overlapping that they appear as one process. Similarly, the funeral may be conducted in a way that encompasses the entire time span from death to the last physical engagement with the body, or just engage with a particular stage within this span. The focus on temporality does, however, seem to suit the characteristics of Bronze Age cremation burials. Cremation breaks the mortuary activities down into several distinct activities or stages. The length of each of these, their rhythm, and the links between them are decided for each burial while simultaneously choreographed according to shared social needs, norms, and circumstances. Moreover, and most importantly, 1

We do not assume that death is either defined or experienced in a universal manner, so when referring to death we mean a specific community’s definition or demarcation of a stage of the lifecycle. That such demarcations were made can be appreciated and analysed without implying that we understand their interpretation of death.

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

the recognition of stages provides us with an analytical framework through which we can attempt to trace and deconstruct the different practices involved and locate changes within them as they reveal points for decision-making. This makes it possible to explore the funerary performance as composed of distinct components rather than reducing the activities to a simplistic concept of cremation that assumes it will always be performed in the same manner and with identical intentions and outcomes. THE FIRST STAGE: THE TEMPORAL SPAN BETWEEN DEATH AND CREMATION

The time between death and funeral is often an important period during which bereavement can be publicly expressed and the funeral with its various social and cultural implications is planned and organised. The decomposition of the body, unless artificially prevented, happens quickly. Within days, it undergoes various transformations that affect the appearance of the body, its colours, smells, and the impression of composure. The further degradation of the soft tissues takes around 20–30 days, but it can vary considerably due to environmental factors and taphonomic processes. Thereafter, the body is dry and further changes are in the form of skeletonization (Clark, Worrell, and Pless 1997, Ubelaker 1997). In different cultures, there is considerable variation in the length of time deemed appropriate between the time of death and burial. For instance, Jewish law requires that burial takes place as soon as possible, preferably within 24 hours of death. In this tradition, there are acceptable reasons for delaying the burial, for example, to allow close relatives to arrive or to avoid burial on the Shabbat or another holy day (Coward 1998). Such strong regulations about the time of burial may originally have been for practical reasons, even if they were conceptualised in non-functional terms. In hot climates the decay of the corpse happens particularly quickly, and some of the examples of extremely short time spans between death and burials, such as in Islam, originate in regions where this would be the case. In contrast, in areas where the ground remains frozen for long periods during the winter, it has been common to wait for the funeral for several weeks or even months after death. In Bavaria, for instance, it was customary to place the deceased on wooden boards to store the body until conditions allowed its transport to the church (Hartinger 1982). In other instances, the dead body circulates in society for a considerable time before it is formally buried or is deemed to have lost its status as a (living) body. The dead body of the Scythian king, for example, was sent on a year-long travel throughout the kingdom being fed and celebrated by each tribe as it passed through the land (Rolle 1989). As regards cremation rituals, it has been argued that it, in comparison to inhumation burials, prolongs the time between death and burial and that this

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stage was the focus of the range of social negotiation and networking that a death provoked through the removal of a member of the community. Such arguments are usually based on the assumption that cremations are less dependent on the physical form of the skeleton at the time of burning, and that therefore there can be a longer interval between the two stages allowing for more protracted and elaborate rituals. Archaeologically it is usually near impossible to provide detailed insights into the stage between death and burial. It is, however, sometimes possible to make limited arguments about the state of the body itself during this period. It is, for example, surprisingly often possible to tell whether the body was still articulated at the time of burial, even for cremation burials. In turn, this informs about the maximum length of time passed between biological death and cremation. The pattern of fissures on the cremated bones can also reveal whether the bones were fresh or dry at the time of cremation (McKinley 2000, Schmidt and Symes 2008, Weiss-Krejci 2005). In several cases, ranging from central Europe to Scandinavia, it has been possible to document that during the Bronze Age the body was still articulated when cremated. At Pitten, for example, bodies were most likely placed on the pyre in an extended position on their back (Teschler-Nicola 1985: 235–236). In addition, although comments on such observations are somewhat sparse, there appears to be no evidence to suggest that cremation of bones already dry was practised in the Bronze Age. It is exceedingly difficult to detect whether any kind of body modifications, such as the removal of parts of the body, took place or whether there was some kind of portioning up of the body, and it is impossible to tell whether the hair was cut, or soft parts removed. In some cases, it has, however, been documented that the whole body was probably present on the pyre and all parts were in their right anatomical position (Teschler-Nicola 1985: 235, Wahl and Wahl 1983). In addition, although cremation often contains less bone weight than would represent the whole body there is no evidence to suggest partial cremation of specific parts of the body. This is, however, a highly speculative area and there are many possible errors including the difficulty of distinguishing between features associated with cause of death, such as decapitation, from the severing of body parts shortly after death (Rebay-Salisbury 2015). Partial cremations are, however, known from later periods and the absence of evidence for this during the Middle Bronze Age may, therefore, be a good indicator that it was either very rare or not practised at all. Overall, there seem to be good reasons to suggest that the period between death and cremation usually was short and that the fully fleshed unaltered corpse was being cremated. Amongst the few constructions from this period that might have been connected to this stage between death and the cremation are the so-called death-houses although some of these may be part of the cremation or even

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

6.1 The mortuary house at Schutschur, Kr. Lüchow-Dannenberg, Germany, containing a cremation in a tree-coffin burnt down with the house (after Laux 1986: 74)

added afterwards and some, such as the Period IV Sandagergård house from Denmark, seem to have been part of a wider range of rituals suggesting it was not solely connected to burials (Goldhahn 2007a, Kaul 1987). Unambiguous death-house constructions are, therefore, rare. They were generally simple small buildings, smaller and slighter than contemporary domestic architecture; the presence of burial remains within them suggest special mortuary or ritual activities that involved human remains (Fig. 6.1). Most examples come from the Lüneburg area of northern Germany, where at least twelve death houses are known dating to the Early Bronze Age (Busch 1996, Piesker 1934). They were rectangular, usually east-west oriented buildings 4.5–6.5 m long and 3–5.2 m wide. In most cases, they housed cremations – apparently resulting from the burning of the house with the body in it, but death houses with inhumations are also known from the area. In all but one case, a burial mound was constructed over the site (Busch 1996, Laux 1971, Piesker 1934). In these cases, the death houses were integrated into the funeral sequence, and it is, therefore, difficult to ascertain to what extent they represented an in-between place between death and burial or whether in some ways they were part of the pyre construction. They may, however, suggest that the body was placed on display for a period before cremation, like some kind of lit-de parade, although probably for a very limited time, and evidently not universally done. It is not possible to trace what took place

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in or in connection with these structures, although the lack of material may suggest it was limited – both in time and in range. There are, for instance, no evidence of food consumption or general finds that could suggest feastings or other activities. The few personal items found were located immediately next to the body, and thus further the impression of a link to burials. There is no evidence to suggest that the constructions were used repeatedly, and it rather seems that they were one-offs and were themselves burned or destroyed and covered up after the funeral of the person they were built for. Similar constructions have been found in Silesia (Zotz 1936: 196–211), and at the site of Etteln in North Rhine-Westphalia where a hut-like construction was recorded on top of an east-west oriented cremation grave with scattered remains, although it seems unclear whether the structure was in preparation for the cremation or added afterwards (Bérenger 1996). Recently, a few houses which appear to have similar functions have been recorded in northern Jutland in Denmark although dated to the Late Bronze Age and not relevant to the period when cremation was first introduced (Nielsen and Bech 2004). It is therefore important to stress again that these structures were either rare or absent from most areas. In order to understand their sparse yet widespread occurrence, it is worth noting that some of the areas with death houses, such as the Lüneburg region and Northwestern Jutland appear to have been connected through long-distance trade and were partners in shared spheres of influence during the Early Bronze Age (Olsen 1992, Vandkilde 2007), and that death houses existed in the northern German region already in the Late Neolithic. The death houses in northern Europe may, therefore, relate to an older tradition that is being reintegrated in the local responses to the development of new rituals around the dead body. These activities were shared only between a few areas, and they did not influence the practices of other neighbouring groups. They were not integral to the formation of the new cremation ritual. Direct evidence for what happened to the body during this interval between death and cremation is overall scanty and limited. It is, therefore, often more revealing to investigate the effects of decision-making, which must have taken place during this stage. This would have included decisions shaped by social differences within the community and how they were played out in terms of differential treatments during burial. In other words, were the people who were cremated a particular sub-section of society? This is a central question because it has often been assumed that the introduction of cremation was linked to particular sectors or groups within society. In such interpretations, the change in burial practices is understood to be part of wider social processes of competition and differentiation. A few scholars have argued that formal burials were used only for selected sectors of society. Anders Kaliff, for

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

example, used analogies with the ancient Indian Vedic tradition, to argue that the burial evidence from Scandinavia only represents a sector of society. He proposed that inhumations as well as the deposition of cremated bones in pits might have been practices reserved for selected individuals, whereas most people would have been cremated and their cremations abandoned without formal treatment or the remains scattered (Kaliff 2005, Kaliff and Oestigaard 2004). Discussions of the representativity value of our data, its evidential qualities, are always important, and the question of how cemetery populations reflect the living population is relevant. We believe that the data, as known archaeologically, is affected by a range of random factors, but we do not see any reasons why most people would not gain some kind of formal burial during the Early and Middle Bronze Age. The underlying understanding of the body that comes through in burial practices (and material culture) during this period makes this unlikely. In addition, the settlement record for this period generally does not suggest a degree of social distinction within communities that would have resulted in such radically different treatments in death. Overall, the dominant argument has been about whether and what kind of social differentiation took place regarding who was selected for cremation. It is especially helpful to consider this question when we discuss bi-ritual cemeteries. Bi-ritual cemeteries were made by communities that used both cremation and inhumation burials. This in turn means that such sites make it possible to investigate whether a particular group or sector within a community was preferentially selected for cremation. Amongst the potential social distinctions, it has been common to suggest that there were explicit gender preferences or a selection of particular age groups. For example, in the Lüneburg group, cremation was practised from Periode II onwards (c. 1500 BC) but was mainly used for female individuals, and this apparently remained the case until the Middle Bronze Age (Geschwinde 2000: 135, Laux 1971: 130). However, assessing sex from fragmentary cremation remain has been challenging (although methods have continued to improve, see discussion in Cavazzuti et al. 2019a), as a result many assertions of gender-based differences have been based on grave goods and their assumed gender attributions. In effect, gender and sex have commonly been merged. This merger is always complex, but it is even more so for a period when the relationship between bodies and objects within graves were changing. Arguments for selection based on ethnicity are also found. Jobst Blischke, for example, explained the bi-ritual cemeteries in the middle Danube area in such terms (Blischke 2002). To investigate whether there is a relationship between certain groups and cremation we have looked at possible correlations between social variables and the decision to cremate in several cemeteries. Based on the evidence of

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differential treatment in burials during the Early Bronze Age we assume that the obvious social groupings and differentiations would fall along the lines of sex, age, gender, kin alliances, and social differences. The former two are most easy to use when investigating decisions taking place prior to the cremation insofar as their identification was and is largely independent of cultural factors; we can, therefore, investigate whether they were influential in selecting who was being cremated. The latter three only become visible if the funerary treatment itself articulated these variables, for example by associating distinctive assemblages or constructions with particular kinds or groups of people. The brief answer to the question of whether the uptake of cremation was linked to socially recognised groups is that practices were very diverse, and there was not a clear and shared relationship between the use of cremation as a new burial practice and particular sectors within society. There are numerous examples of no apparent preference with no particular group being selected for cremation. In addition, many of the cases used to argue that a particular group was being selected are not convincing. For instance, for the bi-ritual cemetery of Pitten, Austria, it had been proposed that females were preferentially selected for cremation burials (Urban 2000: 181); but scrutiny of the data suggests that there was no clear pattern and that no particular social group was preferentially selected. Comparing the ratio between inhumation (33%) and cremation (67%) over the whole cemetery with the ones for sex and age reveals only minor differences. Amongst the securely sexed cremated bodies five were females and four males, if including the ‘probable’ sexed skeletons the number becomes 26 females and 15 males. As regards age, the only group that differed significantly from the ratio overall were children between the age of 8 and 14 (infants II). In this group, only 32 per cent were cremated, less than expected. This age range may represent a group where special attention was given to marking their gender and social status, and inhumation would provide a more traditional as well as a less ambiguous way of presenting the body during funerary display (Sørensen and Rebay 2008b: 158). Similarly, in the Period III flat grave cemetery from Lustrupholm, southern Denmark, which seems to be a very early engagement with cremation burials affecting an entire community, both sexes and a range of age groups had received cremation burials (Feveile and Bennike 2002). Of the remains that could be securely sex determined six were women and three men. A difference that may suggest women were over selected for this cemetery or it could be random or due to error of sex identification (Feveile and Bennike 2002: 133). Age-wise, there were five burials for children less than one-year-old, one for a child less than six years old, one burial of an adult between 12 and 20 years, five burials of adults aged between 20 and 35, and 12 burials of people older than 20 (Feveile and Bennike 2002). Overall, the cemetery was not dedicated to a particular sector of society.

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

In some areas, there does, however, seem to be slight preferences for a particular social group, although the size of the data set often makes conclusions tentative at most. Male individuals seemed to have been chosen preferentially for burial in the burial mounds around Marburg (Dobiat 1994): of the 46 cremations analysed anthropologically, three male and 21 possible male individuals were found, but only one female and nine possible. The age groups were not represented evenly either. Children and juveniles were fewer than expected with only eight sub-adults in contrast to 27 adults and 10 mature individuals. Based on the conclusion that gender selection is at most a preference within a few areas but not an exclusive practice anywhere, it is interesting to note that later in the Iron Age, around 400 BC, cremation cemeteries that appear to have been used for either only women or men existed in northern Germany. This burial practice began as a regional phenomenon but over time it became more widespread and it remained a characteristic of the area until the Germanic Iron Age (Burmeister and Gebühr 2018, Gebühr 2007: 50). Overall, assuming that sex and age differences were important aspects of Middle Bronze Age social dynamics, there nonetheless seems to be no evidence to suggest that these variables played an influential role in deciding who should be cremated. How cremation was incorporated into and adopted by local communities was generally not determined by what kind of person they were used for, in other words, whereas the individual may have been central to the decision to use cremation, membership of sex or age groups were not central to these processes. Whereas preferential treatment according to sex and age can be assessed independently from the social messages constructed during funerals, insight into the importance of other dimensions of the person, such as gender, kinship, or status, is far more difficult to ascertain as these links are not visible on the body itself. It is, therefore, difficult to prove that people were selected for cremation because they belong to, for instance, a particular kin group. Nonetheless, there are examples of both poor and very rich cremation burials amongst the early cremations as well as later when cremation had become dominant. We cannot prove that such rich or special constructions were due to the social standing of the deceased, but this seems likely. For the earlier cremation graves the data is, however, complex. There are, for example, regions where we find a considerable number of objects in both cremation and inhumation graves, but also areas where there appears to be internal ‘wealth’ differentiation between burials within single cemeteries. For instance, in the Füzesabony group in Hungary (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008) there was distinct variation in the amount of pottery found in each grave although no suggestion of differences between inhumation and cremation in this regard. In contrast, there is no differentiation of graves based on pottery in the Marburg area of southern Germany and bronze and other small items were

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also generally rare with only 30 per cent of graves containing any objects at all. Moreover, it is suggested that many of these pieces were merely included because they were present amongst the cremated bones rather than included as grave goods. The objects seemingly used as grave goods in the barrow mounds studied by Claus Dobiat were simple: arm- and fingerings, a pin, a razor, and a bronze cup, two glass beads, and stone tools, whetstones, and other stone or flint objects (Dobiat 1994). Such data suggest that in these cemeteries social rank was not directly materialised within the graves. In the cemetery of Zuchering, and other Urnfield cemeteries in Germany south of the Danube, the inclusion of objects was more common. Grave 348, the multiple burial from Zuchering discussed in Chapter 5, is an excellent example of a wealthy cremation grave. The grave dates to the early phase of the cemetery and has been interpreted as the ‘founders’ grave’; although it actually contained multiple burials of at least 13 individuals (Krapf 2010, Schütz 2003: 46) and with its 24 vessels and many different types of weapons and ornaments it was among the best equipped in the whole cemetery. Grave 106 from Inzersdorf, Austria (Fritzl 2017, Lochner 2015), is a similar case. Here two parallel grave pits were documented amongst the earliest graves of the cemetery. They comprised the scattered cremated remains of an adult female and two children (c. 0–6 and 7–12 years old) and a rich selection of fire-affected bronze grave goods and pottery, including the unusual addition of a ceramic drum. The Zuchering cemetery also demonstrates how the richness of the graves declines over time: as scattered cremations were given up and urn burial became more common there was a clear trend towards fewer grave goods in each grave. The table below compares the percentages of scattered cremation burials and urn graves that contained objects made of different materials. It is difficult to discern how far social differentiation is reflected by such findings. The bronzes were often intimately linked to the body, but although table 6 . 2 Artefacts included in scattered cremation and urn graves at Zuchering, Germany

Gold Amber Glass Iron Bronze More than 5 bronze items Pottery average Decorated pottery

Scattered cremations

Urn graves

n = 102

n = 342

7 (6.9%) 8 (7.8%) 84 (82.4%) 36 (35.3%) 7 (6.9%) 40 (39.2%)

1 (0.3%) 10 (2.9%) 1 (0.3%) 133 (38.9%) 15 (4.4%) 4 (1.2%) 6 (1.8%)

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

they were used to accentuate the person in life, it is problematic to translate this directly into a concern with status in death. It becomes even more difficult to know what they represented, if anything, when scattered cremations were given up and urn burials became the norm as that may have caused the relationship between the body and objects to change. Another interesting aspect of the Zuchering cemetery is that although the grave goods declined in number, this does not necessarily mean that the body became an entity without relationships to things. As described in Chapter 5, as objects became increasingly separated from bodies, they were, at times, placed in other areas within the cemetery. However, this may have been an intermediate local practice before objects became greatly reduced in their roles within cremation burials. Our understanding of the importance of social status may be helped by the examples of some of the Late Bronze Age unusually rich cremation burials, such as the burials at Lusehøj at Voldtofte, Denmark (Thrane 1984), Seddin, Germany (Kunow 2003), and Čaka, Slovakia (Tocˇík and Paulík 1960). These graves are striking, and they differ from their contemporary burials in several ways. Noteworthy, although they were cremations (as was then common), the deceased was accompanied by a rich assemblage of finds whose spatial choreography within the grave setting hints at a complex narrative. These burials were placed in an elaborately constructed burial chamber and covered by a mound – in contrast to the by then absolute dominant use of urn burials placed under flat fields or secondarily in the mound of older barrows. These rich burials appear to be backward looking constructions, conservative. Exploiting the connotations of old tradition and deathways must have been deliberate, generating a particular value that differed from that of the then common simple cremation burials. Their wide distribution yet small numbers may show them as a shared burial trope, possibly one that had been maintained through long-distance elite connections (Kristiansen 1994, Kristiansen 1998) and one in which special members of society were buried in a non-normative fashion albeit one that explored connotations to traditions rather than novelties or conventions. These Late Bronze Age examples of rich cremation burials, with their mixture of older practices and current ones, suggest that cremation could be used for socially distinct individuals. Social status and distinctions were, probably, also relevant for the people making the Middle Bronze Age cremation burials but these aspects of sociability were usually left nonmaterialised – in general such dimensions were, apparently, not what was of the greatest importance for the construction of the body after cremation. However, there are a few cases where we can see preferential burial treatment for special groups at this time. One remarkable example is the so-called warrior cemetery from Neckarsulm, Germany (Knöpke 2009). The cemetery dates to Hallstatt A, a time when at least some cremations would be expected, but all of the 50 burials were inhumations of adult males

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including several double and multiple burials. Grave goods were scarce, but amongst them were weapons (including three swords). This cemetery contrasts with the burial customs in this region on many levels, and it seems to have been dedicated to a special sector of society, probably a kind of warrior group. However, rather than proving that cremation was systematically used for particular social groups, this example suggests that choices of burial practice could be used locally to consolidate the special position of a particular group. As in the previous example of the rich cremation burials, burial practices could be associated with the notion of old-style and explore this as a means of articulating distinctiveness. These practices did not, however, become norms. Such differences in whether there are indicators of special social groups or individuals being selected for cremation suggest that an emphasis on social status and/or kinship may have been important in some areas but not in others or that it could be drawn on for specific purposes. Overall, however, there is no clear evidence to suggest that social standing was a significant factor affecting who was selected for cremation versus inhumation. It is, therefore, worth considering why such a preference has so often been suggested. The basic interest underwriting arguments about preferential social use of cremation is the desire to explain how innovations and cultural transfer take place. Linking change to particular social groups provides a means of seeing change as a local strategic social response – whether this was formed as a response to external influences or took the form of locally generated changes. Change can then be studied as a result of negotiation between constitutive groups about cultural forms and agreements and views about ‘who does what and how’ (Sofaer and Sørensen 2004) rather than local groups being passive recipients of change. It also explores ideas about tensions within society in terms of power and strains between groups or people who respond differently, some act conservatively and others are more open for innovation (Blischke 2002). This kind of social dynamic is interesting as it may reveal aspects of the sociology of cultural change. The data does not, however, provide a basis for informed and detailed answers to this question although it does suggest that clear preferential selection did not take place in most regions. We, therefore, propose that during this time the introduction and take-up of the new burial forms must have been channelled through different local contexts of both resistance to and negotiation of changing cultural practices and that within these discourses everyone involved came with the baggage of age, sex, gender, kin, and status but none of these appears to have been singled out as a consistent prime concern about whether the deceased should be cremated or not. This, we suggest, means that the meaning of cremation was not tied to a specific social interpretation (such as: ‘mature women should be cremated because they are not clean anymore’); if there were any social discrimination about who to cremate then it would have been due to how the new rite was interpreted and appropriated within local politics.

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

Although it is extremely difficult to identify data that can provide meaningful insights into the first stage following the death of a person, we do think that there is little to suggest that there was a substantial shift in terms of concerns and practices between inhumation and cremation graves regarding this stage of the process. Data suggest that the body was still articulated when cremated and, therefore, that limited time passed between death and the burning. There are but a few examples of structures that may be linked to this stage, and the cemeteries generally show no traces that can be explicitly linked to a stage of preparation prior to the cremation. Nor is there convincing evidence to suggest that the early cremations were used by particular sectors within society. We must conclude that the reasons why some within the community were inhumed while others were cremated were in general shaped by small scale social decision-making processes such as family pressure and individual preferences rather than generative norms. THE SECOND STAGE: THE TECHNOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE OF CREMATION

The performance of the cremation itself is again a rather complex phenomenon, and our potential insight will often cover only very particular aspects of the procedure. Nonetheless, this is an important stage and what happens during it may provide hints about the intentions and beliefs that inspire this burial practice. It is worth emphasising that many of our assumptions about cremation burials in prehistory are derived from analogies with classical antiquity as well as cremation in modern India; both should, of course, be used with caution. Valuable data about the physical transformation of bones in relation to temperature, the expected amount and weight of bones from a cremated individual, and the degree of fragmentation have been estimated based on studies at modern crematoria and experimental cremations (McKinley 1989, McKinley 1994, McKinley 2000, Wahl 1982, Wahl and Wahl 1983, Wahl and Wahl 1984). Such data raise several questions about treatment, completeness, and representation of the cremated remains (RebaySalisbury 2010). In archaeological contexts, we can investigate this stage by focusing on the range of decisions and practices that in principle were involved in the cremations, their sequences and consequences: the chaîne opératoire. This includes questions about how the body was prepared, which in turn raise questions about how the place for the cremation was prepared, how the body was burnt, and whether there were subsequent activities, such as selection of remains for further manipulation and the consequential categorisation determining what remains were still part of the body. Below, we shall accordingly discuss potential evidence for these different dimensions of cremation.

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The body. The general view is that the body was articulated when burnt, which means the cremation took place soon after death or that the body in some way was kept intact, for example being tied up or wrapped. This view is based on the characteristics of the cremated remains. In addition, osteological studies often suggest that the body was placed on its back in the pyre, probably dressed or wrapped similar to what was customary in contemporary or preceding inhumation burials. An example confirming this is at the cemetery of Pitten. Here parts of the spinal column, the pelvis and the scapula were regularly better preserved than the ventral parts of the skeleton. This pattern was probably caused by draughts within the pyre, causing ventral parts of the body to be burnt more thoroughly (Teschler-Nicola 1985: 236). This suggests the body was placed stretched on the back, as was customary for the inhumations in the same cemetery. However, whereas placing the body extended on its back was probably the most common practice, it was not always followed. The cemetery of KörnyeFácánkert, an earlier Encrusted Ware cemetery near Tatabánya, Hungary (Bándi and Nemeskéri 1971), seems to reveal different practices. An anthropological study of 20 individuals from the cemetery found uneven burning suggesting they were cremated in a crouched position; a body position that corresponded with what was customary for contemporary inhumation burials in the area (Bóna 1975). The practice of cremating a body in crouched rather than extended body position is also known from this period outside our study area, such as at the Over barrowfield, Cambridgeshire, UK (Evans et al. 2016: 364, Fig 5.40). Overall, it seems likely that the primary influence on the position of the body during cremation was existing local practices of how the body was treated within inhumation graves. Location. Cremations are particular sensory experiences, as evidenced in the many vivid descriptions by onlookers to Hindu cremations (Bloch and Parry 1982, Parry 1994, Sørensen and Bille 2008, Williams 2008). It would have involved seeing the flames and smoke, the smell of the fuel and the burning corpse, and hearing the fire and the fragmentation of the body including the explosive sound when the cranium cracks. Witnessing a cremation is a striking and dramatic experience. It is, therefore, of interest whether the cremation itself was spatially segregated from the domestic sphere and even from the cemetery: did it take place at special locations and was it treated as a special kind of space, or was it incorporated within other funerary activities? There is no evidence to suggest that the cremation took place within settlements, but there are several examples of a close spatial connection between the location of pyres and cemeteries. This includes examples where the pyres were located next to the individual graves. This is, for example, the case for some of the graves at Zuchering, Germany, and Damsgård, Denmark. The location of pyres at liminal locations within the landscape, such as hilltops

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

or wet areas, which were typically used for contemporary hoards, was rare but have been testified although probably restricted to specific regions, such as the Alps (Steiner 2010, Weiss 1997). These dramatic elements of cremation were, therefore, probably usually experienced at the community’s burial ground. This suggests that cremation was considered a part of the funerary practices rather than as a burial in its own right or as a spatially segregated event. The pyre. Although evidence about the pyre itself is often not discussed, the characteristics of the pyre can often be deduced based on its remains. There is evidence for several different techniques and generally simple constructions. The simplest is the cases where fuel is placed on the ground surface without any further preparation; this was probably the dominant form in most of the regions studied, but as they left scant evidence they are often missed unless associated with other features. This means that only a few pyre sites have been securely identified. Amongst those identified are features within the Late Bronze Age cemeteries of Barbing and Plakofen, southern Germany, where two round (1.5 and 3 m in diameter) fire scorched features without any further markings were found (Mäder 2002: 126). A few times, more detailed evidence of the pyre have been preserved. The challenge for this kind of pyre would have been ensuring air circulation (a draught) as that is essential to keep the fire going. This was usually achieved by stacking wooden logs and resting these on, for example, large stones or beams. This is demonstrated, for instance at Pitten. Grave 155 contained well-preserved traces of the pyre, showing it had been an unusually large cremation pyre (3 by 2 m) with a base made of five parallel beams each lined on both sides by neat rows of stones (Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981: 92–93) (Fig. 6.2). A slightly less simple structure is the pyre-pits, a construction that includes a pit. Pyre-pits refer to features where the pyre was placed within some kind of pits with the shape ranging from simple scopes to larger pits, and where the documentation of the in-situ cremation comes from evidence of scorching of the sides of the pit and often also a layer of charcoal at the base. The shape and size of the pit varied considerably although they were never very deep as a steady oxygen supply had to be ensured for a successful cremation process. An interesting question is whether the shape of this type of pyre related to the shape and identity of the individual body or whether they were more haphazard constructions and also whether they were large enough to allow the body to be fully extended on its back,2 in the future they deserve more systematic 2

In East Anglia, England, circular pits with heavily scorched sides and charcoal layers and with a diameter of less than one metre have been found in recent excavations. They date to the early Middle Bronze Age and are found as secondary burials in burial mounds together with other

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6.2 Grave 155 (and 160) of Pitten, Austria (after Hampel, Kerchler, and BenkovskyPivovarová 1981: Pl. 74)

analyses. Pyre-pits are found extensively throughout central and northern Europe; an example is the pyre-pit at Damsgård, northern Denmark (Olsen and Bech 1996), discussed in Chapter 5.

burials in the form of cremations in collared urns (pers. comm. Christopher Evans). In comparison with the continental data the interesting point is that the body could not have been extended on its back in these pits; it must have been already partially portioned or placed in a tight crouched position within the pit – similar to the position of the body in the preceding Early Bronze Age/Beaker period.

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

6.3 Cremation platform with reconstructed pyre from the cemetery of Pitten, Austria, reconstructed in the open air museum Aparn/Zaya, Austria (Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981: Pl. 190)

Based on the scant evidence, it is generally assumed that pyres were constructed uniquely for each individual grave; in most cases, this was probably correct. There are, however, some examples of locations that were repeatedly used for the construction of pyres. At Vollmarshausen, Germany, for example, such a communal cremation place was found on the western edge of the cemetery. In an area of 11 by 4 m, a 30 cm thick layer of grey and white ash and sand with a few concentrations of charcoals was recorded (Bergmann 1982: 209). Only a few bone fragments and a single piece of pottery were found suggesting that the separation of the cremated bones from the pyre remains was done very carefully. At the Late Bronze Age cemetery at Inzersdorf, Austria (Lochner 2003), an ashy, charcoal-rich layer covering a surface of about 3  2.5 m has been interpreted as the central cremation place for the later part of the cemetery. At the Late Bronze Age cemetery of Vomp, Austria, the pyres were constructed in an area at the bank of the river Inn, with the contemporary settlement located across the river (Sölder 2015). More elaborate constructions are rare, but a few examples are known. At Pitten, there were four elaborate cremation structures in the shape of raised stone platforms between 50 and 80 cm high with a core of soil and stones (see description in Chapter 5) (Fig. 6.3). Considerable effort and planning were put into the making of these structures, and they were probably constructed as

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distinct features with distinct functions within the cemeteries. The stones used for the wall and platform show differences in colours, type, and textures and seemed to have been chosen deliberately and carefully for their visual effect (for further details see Sørensen and Rebay 2008b). The variation between the platforms in terms of size and shape at the same time suggest they were made without a clear blueprint. Noteworthy, whereas the platforms in principle could be used repeatedly, this was only evidenced for some of them. Apparently, the use of the platforms did not become a fixture within the local burial ritual, and they were not used by all cremations, nor consistently copied by other nearby communities. Similarly, at the Dunaújváros-Duna-dűlő Vatya cemetery in Hungary, amongst the more than 1600 burials was a slightly oval burnt surface (75  84 cm) that has been interpreted as a pyre platform (Vicze 2011: 56). Interestingly, it was prepared in the same way as contemporary hearths with a thin layer of carefully selected pebbles at its base and on top of that a plaster of clay tempered with lime; similar pyre places have been found on other contemporary cemeteries in Hungary Vicze 2011). The area around this location was cleaned and there was no additional evidence of its use. In terms of the question about whether the extended body could be presented for pitpyres, Magdolna Vicze points out that even in this example of a flat pyre place it would not have been possible for a grown body to be placed fully stretched on its back within its range, and she suggests the body prepared for cremation must have been placed in a crouched position (Vicze 2011). In contrast to the infrequent discovery of the pyres themselves, remains from the pyres were often included in burials. At Zuchering, Germany, for example, remains of charred beams and burnt clay fragments were found in several graves, notably graves 153 and 438. In this cemetery, it was also customary to deposit some of the pyre debris just outside the immediate burial within the grave pit, maybe as a kind of extra layering, and charred fragments of the pyre logs lined the inner grave chamber. The deposited pyre remains at times included pottery fragments, cremated bronze finds, and small amounts of cremated human remains. This suggests that the pyres were located in the near vicinity of the graves, probably right next to them (Schütz 2006: 32). This raises interesting questions about the existential status that the remains had or acquired after the cremation and what they were being categorised as. The reference to furnaces sometimes found in discussions of Bronze Age cremations is often a misnomer and based on expectations that overestimate the temperature needed for cremation rather than any physical evidence (e.g. Goldhahn and Oestigaard 2008). Overall, although no synthesis of the evidence of pyres exists and the information about this stage of the burial is often difficult to locate in site publications, there are no reasons to suppose that cremation structures, in

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

general, were more than relatively simple constructions with little prior preparation of the ground. They were not, it seems, important places in their own right. Fuel and Temperature. There have been several estimates of the amount of fuel used in an average cremation although it is not possible to know whether the idea of an ‘average cremation’ can be applied to the period. Mäder used around 250 kg of beech wood to achieve the temperature and duration of a fire similar in size to the expectations of Bronze Age cremation pyres (Mäder 2002). Ethnographic evidence from Japan, however, has shown that as little as 45–75 kg of wood is enough to burn a body sufficiently (Wahl and Wahl 1983: 518) and that additional fuel, such as fat or oil, often aid the cremation process. Moreover, when the fire ignites, the body will feed the fire, and its condition – age, fatness, muscle mass – contribute to the intensity of the burning process (e.g. Goldhahn and Oestigaard 2008). The remains of pyres show that the fuel used varied between regions with evidence of different kinds of fuel being used, including wood (seemingly in particular oak), bog peat (Sørensen and Bille 2008) and turf (Olsen and Bech 1996). It seems fuel was selected based on what was locally available, but it might also have been influenced by preferences due to fire qualities or for reasons such as aesthetics, magic association, or smell. The latter is suggested from Ireland, for example, where pomacenous fruitwood has been found as a supplementary fuel, possibly to add a decorative element (its white flowers) or due to its distinct smell when burning (O’Donnell 2016). Studies of pyre remains found in Bronze Age burials from East Anglia, England, has shown that hazel was used as a supplementary fuel. This is interesting because hazel burns as greenwood which means the fuel did not need to be seasoned (Evans et al. 2016: 388–392). It is also generally held that the necessary high temperature (around 800 C), which results in the typical white or beige colour of the remains, was easily reached during the Bronze Age as it is similar to the temperature routinely used in contemporary pottery production. Firing at this temperature would be consistent with the odd badly fired bones due to body extremities, such as arms or legs, settling in such a way that they stuck out of the pyre. This is, for example, argued to be the case for the remains in grave 155 at Pitten, where the whole right arm seemed to have stuck out of the main firing zone, as it is discoloured brownish-black and the bones have hardly shrunk (TeschlerNicola 1985: 235). The time and temperature needed to reduce a body, and the influence of variables such as the channelling of air, the body itself, and the weather conditions can relatively easily be reconstructed, but there may also have been cultural practices and expectations that would have affected how the cremation was conducted. For instance, if the sensuous experience was a core feature,

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then the burning may well have taken longer consuming more fuel than was strictly needed. These, however, are some of the aspects which we cannot readily access; suffice to say that data suggest the process was mostly conducted well and that the outcome was fully cremated corpses that had been reduced to white calcinated bone fragments. The cremated remains of the body. It is also clear that the bodily remains acquired a new status after the cremation. During the transition period, this generally meant that the remains became matters deserving or needing further treatment through subsequent handling and burial. Modern cremations show that a cremation always results in a considerable amount of burnt bones; the bones never totally disappear, and the cremated body becomes fragments, not ash. Specific bones like the axis or the pars petrosa almost always remain intact. The weight of the cremated bones depends on the sex, age, robusticity, and health status of the individual as well as the thoroughness of the cremation, but at least between 1227 and 3001g can be expected for adult individuals (McKinley 1989, McKinley 2000). These weights are, however, rarely recovered from prehistoric burials, and, apart from various selection biases, taphonomical processes must have affected the weight. There is currently much discussion of these processes (Rebay-Salisbury 2010). It is, however, clearly also a matter of cultural attitude. Wahl has, for instance, recently documented a steady increase of average weights of cremated remains in Germany from the Urnfield, the Hallstatt/La Tene, till the Imperial Roman period, with the weights for males being 562, 572, and 638g; for females 438, 401, and 479g; and for subadults 87, 94, and 106g (Wahl 2008: 152). Change in body size through time is probably not sufficient to explain this and the pattern may suggest a change in attitude in terms of how thoroughly the bones were picked out from the mixed remains of charcoal and bones. If the remains were moved from the pyre to another location for final burial, as was the common practice during the Middle Bronze Age, then selection will be involved. In principle, this can range from collecting all of the pyre remains to picking out particular parts to a random selection of the pyre remains. Decisions made about whether the remains of the pyre ‘need’ further handling and treatments are, therefore, of significance as they indicate different understandings of the cremation and its products: was cremation itself the burial or merely a stage within a burial process? Similarly, if some of the pyre remains were given subsequent treatment, decisions about which pieces to select can be informative about how the cremated body was perceived. The data shows considerable variations with regard to these decisions. Many anatomical parts, such as pieces of the skull, the vertebral column, the teeth, and the long bones would be easily identifiable after the cremation, and it would be possible to select them out from the remains of the pyre. The picking out of the remains was aided by the colour contrast between the white

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

6.4 The colour contrast between bones and wooden remains before and after rain. Experimental cremations conducted in Hallstatt, Austria (courtesy of Doris Pany-Kucera and Matthias Kucera)

bones and the dark wood ashes, which unfolds particularly clearly if the pyre had been rained on or extinguished by water (Pany-Kucera et al. 2013) (Fig. 6.4). Whether the bones were separated from the charcoal, and how thoroughly this was done, was, therefore, a matter of choice; and we see variations in terms of individual graves, regional trends, and also changes through time. Many cemeteries also show considerable variations between individual graves in terms of the weight of the bones; this was partly due to different body sizes in life but probably also affected by minor decisions influencing the rate of recovery of the cremated bones during a mortuary event. Overall, various burial data suggest that during the transitional period it was most common that part of the pyre remains received some subsequent treatment. The bones were often given particular attention, but there was considerable variation in what was selected, how thoroughly this was done, and the further treatment of the bones. The different attitudes to the pyre remains that we have discerned can coarsely be characterised as: i. The majority of the bones were carefully selected and separated from the rest of the remains of the pyre and placed in a grave. Cremation leaves bones clean and no further treatment, such as washing, was needed. This type of treatment is common in many cemeteries, and among our case studies are found at Zuchering and at Vollmarshausen, both in Germany, and in Vatya burials from Hungary. ii. Only a few bones were selected. This can be difficult to document aside from the cases of unusually well-preserved sites. However, if the bones are large and well preserved but in low numbers or if only particular anatomical parts are present in a grave then it is likely that this was the result of deliberate selection of only some of the bones available after the cremation. iii. A mixture of bones and other remains (including often both charcoal and scorched soil) was taken from the pyre and placed somewhere else, including

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in pits, grave constructions, or urns. This is common for many Middle Bronze Age cremation burials. Among our case studies, this is exemplified by the grave at Damsgård, northern Denmark (Olsen and Bech 1996) and the Vatya urns from Hungary (Vicze 2011).

There is, however, probably no Middle Bronze Age cemetery where a single normative practice was followed rigidly, and it is common to see variations and differences between individual graves. Objects on the pyre. It can be difficult to determine whether objects found in the cremation burials have been in the pyre with the body or not, but there are nonetheless clear examples of both practices. The similar treatment of objects and bodies was common and resulted in both being cremated and then buried together, but there are also cases where unburnt objects were added to the cremated remains during the subsequent burial of the ‘body’ after the cremation. These variations have interesting potentials for illuminating the ontological status of both the body and objects and for revealing whether cremated remains were treated as bodies (or persons) or something else. This also provides insights into how the two kinds of matter were linked and actions were planned. These links can take various forms and be based on a range of reasons, the main ones can be summarised as: i. Bodies and objects were physically linked on the pyre (this was typically the case for dress items) and remained linked in the subsequent burial. This suggests their similar treatment was important, or that their different character was not a reason for separation. It seems such objects were bodily-incorporated.3 ii. Bodies and objects were both placed on the pyre (e.g. pottery and food remains), but as separate things and not closely linked in the subsequent burial. This suggests their separate status was emphasised although shared treatment was still desired. This may suggest that things can be cremated in their own right. iii. Body and objects were separated before the cremation and treated in different ways but reassembled after cremation suggesting they had separate status, but their linkages were valued. iv. Some objects were burnt with the body and others were not, but both kinds of objects were united with the cremated bones during the burial. This suggests that the relationship between the body and objects was varied or that it could be negotiated. v. Body and objects were separated before the pyre and not reassembled after cremation suggesting their links were severed, or that they were never strongly linked.

3

As is the case for a modern wedding ring for many people.

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

vi. Objects were used during the funeral (such as pottery or food) and added to the fill around the grave.

The first two links were common throughout all the areas studied. When fragments of bronze or glass beads are found melted onto cremated bones, it can, for example, be taken as direct evidence that bodies and objects were burnt together (Großkopf 2004, Teschler-Nicola 1985: 137). The grave at Damsgård, Denmark, is a clear example of the body and objects not being differentiated during either the cremation or the subsequent burial (Olsen and Bech 1996). The cases where objects were separated from the body before the cremation and subsequently reassembled with it are, however, particularly noteworthy as they are suggestive of a discursive relationship: the two were not the same but they had a kind of dependency. Such practices appear to be especially applied to objects attached to the person, such as weapons and ornaments. For instance, in the Lüneburg area, the human remains in two of the early cremation graves, Bleckmar (Laux 1996b: 182) and Ripdorf (Geschwinde 2000: 155), were both deposited with a ‘Lüneburger Flügelhaube’ and which also had not been on the pyre. In both cases, the Flügelhaube was deposited above the wooden container that held the human remains and had not been cremated with the body. These ornaments were part of very elaborate and distinct headdresses worn by females in the area, and their separate treatment during the cremation may be due to their object-specific status. This practice of separation and subsequent integration continued into the Late Bronze Age, and it is well documented in some regions. In northern Germany, for example, Jens-Peter Schmidt has shown how the razors found in the cremation urns were consistently undamaged by fire whereas other bronze items were burnt suggesting that the relationship between the body/person and razors was distinct causing razors to be added to the cremation as the remains were placed in the urn (Schmidt 1993). At the cemetery of Zuchering (Schütz 2006), the scattered cremation is usually accompanied by several bronze artefacts (both unburned and burned), but the pottery, usually placed on one or both sides of the cremation, had not been included in the pyre. In this case, materials were clearly treated in a manner that discriminated between them based on their ‘closeness’ to the body and/or their functions, either generally or specifically, and this discrimination was articulated in the layout of the remains. Practices in which all or some objects are kept away from the cremation only to be linked with the remains afterwards suggest that there is a perception of a bodily entity arising out of or re-emerging after the cremation, and this is an entity that can or needs to be reconnected with (its) objects/belongings. This entity, moreover, was seemingly ascribed bodily associations, and the objects reunited with it may have been treated as inalienable aspects of the

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person; they needed to be reunited. The person, not just the physical remains of the body, seems to be recognised and acknowledged in such practices. At the same time, this practice may reveal that the ontological status of the body and its relationship to objects had become insecure. Whereas it had been established practice to associate the dead body with ornaments and other objects, it now became unclear at what point in the funeral this association should be made. Some people were placed on the pyre with all their fittings, whereas others were stripped of these to be united with them again after cremation. In terms of the narrative of the funerals, we may see the presentation of the corpse as a dressed and socially enabled body as a central topos, an element that is recognised again and again and which helped to provide the same understanding of funerals despite their different settings. And it is at this level that changes were emerging as some people were not presented like that on the pyre; for them it was only after the physical transformation of their bodily matters, that the identifiers of the person were stressed. This seems to imply two things. One, it suggests that cremation was primarily about the transformation of the body and not about the negation of the person, and two, that there was an emerging trend towards a disentanglement of the relationship between the intact physical body and its objects. The outcome of this was the increased standardisation of burials that characterised the Late Bronze Age in which no or very few objects were included. THE THIRD STAGE: TREATMENT OF THE FR AGMENTAR Y CREMATED REMAINS – CATEGORIES FOR SEPARATING AND REMAKING BODIES

The variations discussed earlier already suggest that cremation rarely constituted the final stage of the funeral and thus of the body. Evidence of how the separation between the pyre and the material to be buried was conducted is extremely significant for our attempt at analysing how communities could so radically change their understanding of the human body and its status in death. The data show, as with most other characteristics of cremations from the transition period, that there was considerable variation both in terms of differences between regions and in terms of differences within regions and even within cemeteries. This shows the transitional period as a distinct sequence in terms of transformation and changes in beliefs about and attitudes towards the (dead) body. Despite the increased use of cremation, there was seemingly still a sense of person or personhood attached to cremated remains. This perception, moreover, appears to be influential from the start of a funeral with the subsequent practices orchestrated accordingly. It seems that the cremated remains were commonly seen to be in need of additional actions to confirm or remake their ontologies. The logic and apparent intentions

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

underwriting these ‘following-up’ activities are clearly of great importance for reaching any insight into how cremation was understood during this period and what was at stake in terms of formulating new normative beliefs about the body and its status in death. Pursuing some of these concerns we shall discuss the practices through which a reconstitution of the physical body after it was cremated seems to have been achieved. There is little data about the temporal span between the second and the third stage, basically how much time passed after the cremation before the remains were further handled and treated. A particularly quick succession is demonstrated at a few sites. For instance, in the Marburg area, six urns were found with fire scorched bases, and it has been suggested that they had been placed on the remains of the pyre while it was still hot and as the cremated bones were gathered (Dobiat 1994: 69). Another example is from Damsgård, Denmark (Olsen and Bech 1996), where warped joining parts of the jaws found in the pyre and the burial cists respectively suggest some bones had been raked out of the pyre while still hot and then placed in the cist (for details see Chapter 5). The pyre and the burial were commonly separated and treated as two different events or stages. Basically, after the cremation, some or all of the remains were deemed to need a burial. One of the distinct changes we see as cremation became the norm was a change in this relationship between the pyres and the burials. In northern Europe, two forms came to dominate: the pyre pit was used as the grave or urns were used. In central Europe, the urn grave dominated. In either case, the body was no longer moved from the pyre to be remade in the shape of the physical body. However, prior to the consolidation of these practices, we see several different relationships between the cremated remains and the place of burial being experimented with. Within this, the following two categories capture the main patterns. In situ cremation burials. These are burials where the burial and pyre were at the same location, but where the remains of the body were manipulated and various constructions added to transform the spot into a burial. This is, for example, the case for the majority of cremation graves in Pitten, where 130 cremations were left in situ, and only 23 cases had all or some of the remains moved to a different location (Sørensen and Rebay 2008b: 168). Such in situ cremations are found widely, including in the Lüneburg area. In this format, the elaboration of post-cremations practices shrinks in significance – maybe suggesting an increased notion of finality affecting the performance of burials. Re-location burials. These are burials in which the remains of the body were moved and relocated either close to the pyre or in a separate location. This type is illustrated by the scattered cremation graves in Zuchering, Germany, where most of the cremated remains were arranged inside coffins together

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with grave goods and general pyre debris deposited outside around the coffin, this included charcoal, ash, pieces of fire-affected objects, and small fragments of cremated bones (Schütz 2006: 32). Re-location burials are also common in northern Europe, where the physical pyres are rarely found but where cremated remains were routinely picked up and given a formal burial. The different types of relocation burials share an apparent need to create or present the burial and construct a ‘resting place’ for the bones as a stage separate from the event of the cremation. They reveal an allowance for, and the importance of, additional handling and manipulation of the bones. Through this the cremation itself and the remains of the body are confirmed as separate: they are categorically different from each other. The former possibly constituted a transformative event but was not treated as a substantive matter per se, but the latter held on to the substance of body and bodiness and needed reintegration into a cognitive and categorical framework: the remains needed to be remade as or like a body. These evocative practices do, however, raise further questions about the status of the cremation remains: what was the relationship between the burnt remains of the body and the rest of the pyre, were they considered as entirely separate categories or was it the secondary handling rather than the physical separation of different materials that reconstitutes the body out of the cremation remains? Furthermore, was it the principle of bodiness or the specific characteristics of the person that were being reestablished: how much of the body was needed for the body to be remade and were certain bones preferentially selected or manipulated? Based on the data we have studied, we find that the practices during the transitional period were primarily governed by concerns with the need to reconfirm and remake the body. Overarching the many local variations and nuances, these activities can be characterised as concerned with: i. The manipulation of bodily anatomy ii. The spatiality of the body iii. Articulating bodiness and stressing body parts through the use of objects

The manipulation of bodily anatomy. The practice of re-ordering the bones to resemble the physical anatomy of the body is found in a number of cases. Typically, this is seen through the selection and emphasis on recognisable anatomical parts, such as pieces of the cranium or long bones, or the emphasis on the obvious body regions by placing small piles of bones at places such as the head and torso. For Pitten, Austria, it was possible to argue that “Another way of re-forming the body is seen in the frequent practice of pushing and sweeping the burnt bones together and even shaping parts of the remains; through such action fragmented and disjointed remains were reconnected and the body regained a resemblance of corporality” (Sørensen and Rebay 2008b: 168). In grave 192 of this cemetery, the attempt to reform the body was very

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6.5 Grave 192 of Pitten, Austria (after Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981: Pl. 97)

explicit (Fig. 6.5). At the far end of the burial chamber, opposite the entrance, was a vessel filled with cremated bones. Further cremated bones, mixed with soil and charcoal, were spread over the floor of the chamber but concentrated in a linear arrangement of three heaps: one in the centre, one next to the entrance, and one at the far end. In this case, the cremated bones were used to suggest the presence of a body with a head, torso and feet on the floor of the chamber (Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981: 115). This principle can even be observed in the arrangement within some of the cremation urns hinting at its perseverance as a core ontological frame for thinking about the body. In the cemetery of Cottbus-Alvensleben, Germany, for example, the bones were ordered within the urns: some long bones were placed in parallel, some vertebrae were placed in anatomical order and pieces of the skull were often placed on top of other bones (Großkopf 2004: 148–149). Similar observations have been made in many regions. For instance, for the Dunáujváros-Kosziderpadlás cemetery in Hungary, Magdolna Vicze argues that the bones were carefully gathered and arranged with skull pieces on the top (Vicze 2001). The same practice was observed at the cemetery of DunaújvárosDuna-dűlő, for which Vicze notes that the 1909 excavation diary described that “first the long bones of the legs were put in, then the remains of the mid-section of the body, and the skull remains were on top” (Vicze 2011: 54).

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Borum Eshøj

Hvidegård

Barrow construction

Barrow construction

Coffin closure

Cist closure

Wrapping in hide

Sword deposition

Sword hilt/ dagger, beaker and comb deposition

Wrapping in cape

Wrapping in cape Body deposition in coffin

Cape lining of coffin Hide lining of coffin Coffin construction

Deposition of clothes and belt equipment

Deposition of bones in coffin

Cape lining of cist

Cremation

Cist construction

Body preparation

Body preparation

6.6 Oak coffins with inhumation burial of Borum Eshøj and cremation burial of Hvidegård, both Denmark (courtesy of Mads Kähler Holst (2013, Figure 6.1), after Boye 1896 and Herbst 1848)

The spatiality of the body. In addition to or instead of anatomy, the spatiality of the body can be the focus. This was typically expressed through the marking of the space/size of the body or its outlines. This concern with the body’s physicality is particularly clearly documented in northern Europe. For example, in the Lüneburg area several graves show the cremated remains spread out so that they constitute a roughly rectangular or elongated surface, which appears evenly spread and homogeneous, for example, the Adendorf burial (Krüger 1937: 222). Similarly, in Denmark several graves have the cremated remains spread out in a roughly body-size shape. At Hvidegård, Denmark (Goldhahn 2009b, Herbst 1848), cremated bones had even been collected and wrapped in textile before they were laid out in an elongated shape in a stone cist (Fig. 6.6). This made it appear as if the cremated body was dressed and equipped with weapons and tools in the traditional manner of an inhumation burial; the cremated remains were treated as if constituting a similar kind of body to the inhumed one.

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

In many cases, the emphasis on the spatiality of the body became intertwined with the architecture of the grave. A particularly intriguing example of the ambiguity between body space and grave construction is provided by the Encrusted Ware burials as exemplified by the cemetery of Királyszentistván Hungary (Bóna 1975). These graves appear to have limited formal grave architecture but pottery, including fragments of large storage vessels, was used to cover and outline the area where the cremation remains were spread. The body size, that had been dissolved through cremation, was in these cases reconstituted through the outline provided by the spread of pottery. Articulating bodiness through objects. In addition to the selection of objects and their treatment during the cremation itself, there is also the question of how they were employed in the re-imagining of the body. Here we find it particularly revealing how objects were frequently used to annotate, to ‘explain’ and categorise, the body and its different parts. In Pitten, Austria, in several of the cremation graves dress elements were found placed in exactly the place where they would have been on the living body, suggesting they were placed to mark these body parts. Grave 110 for example, contained two pins placed at the shoulder region, a finger ring in the middle body region, where the hands would rest, and pottery towards the head and at the side of the body (Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981: Table 48). Another example from the same cemetery is Grave 189, which included two pins in body position, as well as pottery placed towards the head and feet (Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981: Table 96). There are also examples of such compositions amongst the scattered cremation graves of the cemetery of Zuchering, Germany (Schütz 2006). In Graves 198, 261, 342, and 379 pins were placed parallel to each other beside the cremated bones. In Grave 292 and 379 the pins ‘framed’ the pile of cremated bones as if they marked the upper body of a living person. In grave 265 two pins and two carefully arranged arm rings were placed parallel to the pile of cremated bones. Moreover, all eleven swords from the cemetery stem from scattered cremation graves and their relationships to the body are very striking. Most of the swords were affected by fire and/or fragmented; they were then placed south of the cremation within the confines of the coffin and therefore on the left side of the body (Fig. 6.7).4 In one grave (Grave 438) the fragments were mixed with the cremated bones, and in the double burial 348, fragments of two swords were heaped in the northeastern corner of one of the coffins, with other fragments scattered throughout both burials. The only exception is Grave 144, where the sword was bent and deposited outside the coffin. This grave is also the only one that contained only the remains of one

4

Graves 136, 142, 314, 342, 352, 470, and 537

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6.7 Grave 537 of Zuchering, Germany, demonstrating the relationship between the cremated body deposited in the centre, and the sword placed alongside the body. Bronze objects are placed near the body, and pottery is placed along the northern chamber wall (Schütz 2006: Fig. 60)

individual, a 20–60-year-old male. All other graves with swords were found to contain the remains of more than one individual, if only in small amounts. It is, therefore, unclear whether the remains of the swords represent double or multiple burials or token addition (Krapf and Wittwer-Backofen 2011). Such uses of objects can be found throughout our area of studies, although the details vary and none of these practices consolidated into standardised and dominant practices. DIFFERENT OR SIMILAR: CR EMATED BODIES AND OTHER HU MAN BODIES

The continued importance of linking the cremated remains to the idea of the deceased person is further revealed by how different burials may be physically linked to each other. This can be achieved through spatial arrangement within the cemetery, as discussed in Chapter 7, but it is also seen in the physical associations that may be made between individual bodies. As individual graves were dominant throughout Europe at this time, one would not expect to see many multiple burials, but there are examples and increased osteological analysis will probably produce more and also wider variation. No comprehensive data set exists for the occurrence of multiple burials in the Middle Bronze

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Age and whether these were inhumations, cremations, or a mixture, but the examples observed during our analysis gave rise to several observations. Firstly, when multiple burials are found they can be composed of inhumed bodies, inhumed and cremated bodies together, or several cremations. The possibility of closely linking different bodies in death was, therefore, not something that was immediately challenged by the introduction of cremation. Secondly, it seems that double burials although not frequent were the most common alternative to individual burials and that a larger number of individuals buried together usually were due to practices or events beyond normal funerary activities, such as victims of a raid or a complex burial practice. Thirdly, the double burials are often of an adult and a child, but they can also include two adults including burials with people of the same or opposite sex. These characteristics suggest that the linking of bodies was commonly due to close social ties, such as family, but also, therefore, that within the family or other closely knit social group it was feasible that the deceased were treated differently (i.e. inhumed or cremated) and despite this were nonetheless conceived as being the same kinds of remains and connected. Connections were drawn between people in several different ways, and burial form was just one possible connector. Some of the main forms through which bodies were connected were: i. Addition: One typical composition arises from one body being added to another individual. For example, under burial mound 17 from Deutsch-Evern, in the Lüneburg area, an inhumation burial of a woman, adorned with a rich and complete set of female ornaments, was found. At the woman’s shoulder, a cremated child was buried wrapped in a cloth that probably was part of the woman’s upper dress, fastened with the characteristic fibula of women in the area (Körner 1959: 3, Laux and Körner 1971: 49, 103). This is one of the early instances of cremation in the Lüneburg area. This is very similar to some of the Danish graves, such as the Egtved burial, where the remains of a cremated child were found partly within a bundle of textiles at the feet of an inhumed young woman and partly in the bark container at her head (Frei et al. 2015, Hvass 2000). The impression here is of the cremated remains being an added presence, rather than an equal burial. ii. Sharing a grave. Interestingly, the oldest and best equipped graves of some cemeteries often contain double or multiple burials, sometimes termed ‘founders’ graves’. The double burial 348 from Zuchering (Schütz 2003: 46) contained two parallel, body-shaped graves with multiple cremations scattered over the body-sized areas (Hess 2013, Krapf 2010), which were surrounded by pyre remains and charred beams (Fig. 6.8). Large numbers of pottery and bronze objects accompanied these graves, including male-typical and femaletypical objects.

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6.8 Grave 348 of Zuchering, Germany, featuring two parallel graves, body-sized grave chambers with scattered cremations, and fragmented bronze artefacts. Pottery is placed at the western end of the graves, pyre material is deposited outside the inner construction, but within the grave pit (Schütz 2006: Fig. 45)

Similarly, grave 17 from the cemetery of Vollmarshausen, Germany, contained the bodies of a 40–50-year-old male and a 20–30-year-old female in an oblong chamber grave. Again, this is also considered a ‘founders’ grave’ (Bergmann 1982: 126). Grave 127 from the same cemetery is a double grave of two urns in one pit, which in itself indicates a close relationship, but in this case, this was further confirmed by sherds from each urn having been exchanged (Bergmann 1982: 314). Probably the most common form of double cremation burials was, however, urns shared by more than one individual. Whereas small amounts from different bodies can be explained through a communal pyre place and insufficient care when collecting the cremated

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remains, secure cases of double or multiple burials within an urn have been found in most cemeteries when anthropological analyses have been systematically employed (e.g. Zuchering, Grundfeld, Vollmarshausen). The temporal sequence of these burials – whether the individuals died together, were cremated together, deposited in the urn together, or one was added, is, unfortunately, impossible to reconstruct. However, they provide a clear sense of each burial being meaningful both in its own right and through social relationships. DIFFERENT OR SIMI LAR: ENTAN GLEMENT O F CREMATED BODIES, ANIMALS, AND THINGS

Recent ethnography and archaeological studies have demonstrated the complex and often permeable relationship that can exist between humans and animals, understanding them as different yet related or interchangeable bodies. Such arguments have in particular explored accounts that reveal an understanding of identity as fluid and multifaceted and where borders between not only the ‘I’ and others but also between humans and other beings are experienced as leaky and permeable (Boric´ and Robb 2008, Willerslev 2007). Some have attempted to explore these accounts as a means of penetrating the Bronze Age world more deeply. It has led to proposals of shamanistic beliefs, exploring the trope of the shaman as the principal shape shifter and finding supportive evidence in figures on rock carvings or unusual representations, such as the cloaked figures drawn on the stone slabs in the Kivik grave, from southern Sweden and dating to the Early Bronze Age period III (Goldhahn 2009a, Randsborg 1993). Such images are, however, subject to many widely different interpretations and they on their own can hardly support the notion that the Bronze Age had a shamanistic religion. Other evidence to suggest human and animal hybrid or merger is rare and their interpretation difficult.5 The question of hybridity may also be considered from the point of view of anthropomorphic objects. The Middle Bronze Age was, however, also impoverished in this regard. Throughout the Bronze Age, anthropomorphic pottery was a rare phenomenon, and it is absent from other materials. The addition of small, humanizing features such as hands and feet that hint at the corporeality that the urn resembles, was a trait apparently distinct to the Carpathian region. Examples include a vessel from the Vatya cemetery of Dunaújváros, Hungary (Kovács 1992b: 80), with an arm and dagger over the belly of the pot’s body, 5

Outside our area of analysis comingling of human and animal remains in cremation burials have been found on a few occasions. One case from Bronze Age Europe is from Glennan, Kilmartin, in Argyll, Scotland, where an urn was found to contain the cremated remains of a male aged between 25 and 40 together with those of a sheep/goat, with their remains clearly mixed within the urn. The remains were dated to 2030–1910 BC. http://www.theherald.co .uk/news/12462-print.shtml, consulted 18.08.2010.

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6.9 Vessel with breasts and arms from Százhalombatta, Hungary (Poroszlai 1992: 155)

and a vessel from Százhalombatta, Hungary (Poroszlai 1992: 155), with two breasts and two arms on the upper body of the vessel (Fig. 6.9). It has also been argued that the Vatya urns increasingly referenced body proportions and took on some of its properties (Vicze 2001); but this association may be regionally specific. Bowls with pedestals shaped like feet or boots continued in the Late Bronze Age in this area, with a particularly high number from the Ha A2 to B2/3 cemetery of Budapest-Békásmegyer, where 22 bowls with anthropomorphic pedestals were found (Kalicz-Schreiber 2010). Nona Palincaş has recently argued that the ceramics with white incrustation from the first half of the Late Bronze Age in the Lower Danube region (ca. 1550–1350 BC) reveal insight into the ontology of these societies. She suggests that people, animals, and things were composed of interchangeable elements (Palincaş 2010). This pottery was, however, distinct to the Lower Danube region and may represent an isolated development. There might have been fundamental differences in some aspects of ontologies between this and other parts of Europe at this time. Later, in the Late Bronze Age and Urnfield period, anthropomorphic vessels became more widespread, although never common. This included the so-called face-urns, which refers to urns with indications of eyes and sometimes eyebrows and noses. They are not very frequent but have a wide spatial and chronological distribution ranging from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age. They are particularly common in Scandinavia during the eighth to sixth centuries, northern Poland between the seventh and second centuries BC, and in northern Italy (Kneisel and Sabatini 2016, Sabatini 2007). Despite the scarce and ambiguous evidence, it is relevant to consider whether there is a suggestion that human and animal bodies (or objects or

TREATMENT OF BODY: COMPATIBILITY AND DIVERGENCE

natural materials such as stones, sticks, or branches) were interchangeable or inter-mixable in death. From other areas, such as the Neolithic in the Levant or South East Europe (Chapman 2010, Croucher 2010), there is evidence of practices that included replacing certain body parts, such as the head in inhumation graves, with stones, pots, or animal body parts. However, in our investigation of Middle Bronze Age cremation, we have not seen any evidence of such co-mixture or entanglements; if it happened, it was certainly not a consistent part of the developing cremation rituals. In the instances where (cremated) animal remains are found, which is common in many of the cremation cemeteries, it seems highly likely that the animal bones were included in the graves as part of food, rather than being entangled with the body. Variables such as the lack of specific placement or treatment within the grave, as well as the choice of body parts and the size of portions suggest this. This interpretation is further supported by the sometime presence of non-cremated animal bones amongst grave pottery, in particular serving vessels (e.g. in Királyszentistván, Hungary, or Kelheim, Germany, Bóna 1975, Müller-Karpe 1952). Even when parts of animals are cremated on the pyre, as was the case in about a fourth of the graves from Zuchering, Germany, the bones were from selected cuts of meat, which makes it likely the animal parts were included as food (Kunter 2006). The inclusion of cremated extremities of animals may also be due to these bones being attached to the skins and hides that were used as bedding or cover for the body (Rebay 2005). Likewise, there are very few documented instances from this period of animals treated like humans in the sense that they were given burials, either within the settlements or in cemeteries (Rittershofer 1997), despite this being observed for later cremation burials. Caroline Arcini’s study of the cremation from the Late Bronze Age cemetery of Gualöv, Scania, Sweden, is insightful about this distinction between humans and animals. In this cemetery, the human remains had been very carefully collected from the pyre site whereas the entire remains of a cremated dog were left behind on the pyre (Arcini 2005: 67). In this case, the remains of the human and the dog were categorically separated after the cremation, they may have been entangled during the cremation itself, but they did not remain so. During the transitional period, the cremated remains appear to have been unambiguously treated as the remains of a person. The (re)categorisation of the remains as being a human body as well as the social identification of person were major factors affecting how the remains of the pyre were managed. With time, the categorisation of the body as separate from the other pyre remains becomes less rigidly maintained. This, however, does not seem to have been related to ideas of ‘hybridity’ but was rather a collapsing of the category of body with that of the remains of the pyre.

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SUMMATIVE REFLECTIONS

This chapter aimed to unravel the treatment of the body itself during cremation funerals and to identify shifts in how it was perceived. Using the idea of the chaîne opératoire we divided the funeral into three distinct stages based on the kind of practices involved and the decisions to be made. We were, in particular, interested in identifying special nodal points where different pathways could be chosen and engaging with the question of how new ways of doing things were formulated. Contemporary and preceding inhumation practices were also used to identify change and thus to consider the relationship between tradition and innovations. The analysis has made it clear that there is little material culture or remains of activities associated with the first stage, that is the temporal span between death and the cremation itself. In general, no particular group seems to have been preferentially selected for cremation, and thus the introduction of cremation is extremely unlikely to have been led by particularly constituted groups. The second stage, the cremation itself, represents a dramatic departure from previous practices, but many components nonetheless show how the performance of the burials remained embedded within local traditions. In particular, the emphasis on the presentation of the body extended and probably fully dressed was a feature with strong links to traditional inhumation graves. Cremations introduced many more stages through which the links between the body and objects could be asserted, and we propose that there was emerging ontological insecurity about this relationship resulting in much variation. The third stage is characterised by the re-focusing on the body as a physical entity. As with the other stages, the analyses show the substantial concern with remaking the body and in that process making it appear familiar and similar to the body within traditional inhuman burials. It is also clear that a range of local practices developed, and that similar overarching ideas were materialised in different ways. This stage is the one in which we observe the most radical transformations over time as the various practices, such as the use of objects to reemphasise anatomical coherence, faded out. The range of local variation reveals an experimental quality to the introduction of cremation and what should or could be done at the different stages of the funeral.

SEVEN

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRAVES Coherence and Variations

T

here are several reasons why we decided to discuss the construction of the grave separately from the treatment of the body per se, while simultaneously maintaining an approach that sees them as interconnected. The main reason is that the two events are not necessarily done consecutively – they are not automatically linear in a temporal sense. The construction of the grave can begin independently of the cremation – it may be started before, during, or after the cremation and thus may imply difference and differentiation in terms of planning and involvement. The decisions made will reveal perceptions of the needs of the body, including views about, for example, ‘the afterlife’ of the deceased and what stages this involved, and they were also affected by various social needs. The second main reason is that there is an architectural and material aspect to the construction of the grave, which affected both its links to tradition and created possibilities for symbolism and metaphorical connotations (see also Harding 2000: 113). In addition, drawing on architectural similarities with other constructions, such as houses, pits, or earlier graves, was not only one of the main ways of creating an understanding of the grave as a resting place, it was also a way of using the vocabulary of the familiar in the construction of (new) meanings: similes and similarities were probably some of the main means of creating shared meanings and ontological security around grave constructions. These links helped to assure that the changes in practices and forms were done in a manner that retained a sense of familiarity, benefitting from a notion of being knowledgeable of cultural practices. We suggest 149

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this as a core mechanism that enabled the rapid and wide uptake of cremation. This is especially of importance because the change from inhumation to cremation challenged and altered established fundamental beliefs – cremation introduced a change to the treatment of the body and its subsequent appearance that was dramatic and absolute. As discussed in Chapter 6, during the transition phase various activities were carried out to counteract the impression of the cremated remains being substantively different to the body whole, but a cremated body is nonetheless radically different from an un-cremated one. In comparison, the grave constructions themselves did not necessarily constitute a similar radical choice, and the choices made were more open-ended. This point becomes illuminated when applying the idea of chaîne opératoire to the decision-making processes (Fig. 7.1). In terms of the treatment of the body itself, deciding to cremate resulted in a nodal point, or a bottleneck, which dramatically affected subsequent activities: the remains may be treated ‘as-if’ or ‘similar-to’ a body, but they had nonetheless lost the physical integrity which makes the body whole. This meant that various activities were explored to deal with, and often to disguise, the body’s fragmentation and to re-imagine it. For the construction of the grave itself, there was not a nodal point of the same magnitude, and the decisions were in principle more fluid, and the different elements could be merged and recombined in various ways. The important point is that the process did not involve a similar absolute decision about whether the burial should be different or similar to traditional ones, such distinctions could be more subtle, and similarities could be created in many ways. In the following, we shall aim to contemplate this element of how cremation burials were constructed as a means of gaining a fuller understanding of how changed forms emerged during the transition phase. The changes can be considered from two different points of view, both of which will be pursued together below. One is to approach the question of change by investigating the range and variations of forms: how were graves constructed, which of the pre-existing elements were changed, and what range of variations exists? This kind of approach aims to understand the form itself, and to consider the possible links between form and meaning. The other approach is to reconstruct the temporal trend, focussing on the transformation from inhumation to cremation in terms of its overall tendencies and characteristics and attempting to reveal whether there were distinct stages in this transformation. It is helpful to be aware of these two different aspects because although overall we can identify a transition from one form to another, within single cemeteries we often find different forms being in use simultaneously and there was often a degree of experimenting with the format of the grave. Being aware of the two dimensions – practices and trends – helped us to investigate how change appeared at a level of detail that does not become apparent if we simply investigate the change in terms of its results.

Inhumation – the body is prepared for burial The body is laid out and interred in a particular body position. Dress elements and grave goods are arranged on and around the body. The body may be placed in a container (coffin, textiles), is displayed within and bounded by the grave construction. The body remains contained, limited, and discrete. The contained body is given a resting place. This settled structure may be covered by different layers, marking it as a place. The place may be on its own, such as a grave chamber, or an addition to an existing structure such as a barrow. The body and the soil remain separate entities. The integrity and boundedness of the body remains and is reinforced through these additional practices, even if the burial is incorporated into existing funerary structures. e. Grave goods remain with the body (marking identity).

i. Covering to create distance between the dead and the living.

Death Cremation – the body is prepared for cremation The body is displayed as a body (extended, dressed, articulate, and fleshed). Using fire, the presented body is transformed and fragmented. The unbound fragmented body reassumes status as a new kind of body. Limits, entity, and substance are reassigned. The ‘place’ or locus of meaning becomes reassigned through the reconstitution of the body. This takes different forms: a, b, c, and d.

a. The body and the place of its transformation becomes one entity, and soil and bones are not separated. The cremated remains are left in-situ.

b. The remains stay on the cremation site but are gathered or swept together in a pile or placed in a depression or pit on the cremation site.

Left without any further intervention.

f. Grave goods (dress elements) are taken away (erasing identity). j. Architectural structures may enable interaction.

g. Grave goods may be added, or have been included in the cremation. k. Location looses meaning.

c. The remains are collected and moved to a new location (grave); the body may be ‘put together again’ and treated like a physical body. The body is reimagined.

d. The remains are collected, possibly further treated, and then contained within an urn. The urn reasserts the body as limited and discrete.

Covered by various kinds of structures and thus given new bounds and distinction. h. Grave goods are rare and if present are without connection to body parts.

l. The dead is ontologically removed from its likeness to the living.

7. 1 The chaîne opératoire of inhumation and cremation graves in the Bronze Age. Processes focussed upon the treatment of the body, its preparation for the status of being a member of the deceased, and for the creation of the grave for the deceased.

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7.1 (cont.) VAR IATION IN GRAVES: FORM AND SHAPE

In this section, we are concerned to identify aspects that reveal the influence of existing architectural forms, both domestic and funerary, and to use this as a basis for discussing the variations and changes in the forms and shapes of the early cremation burials. Form and building material. During the transition phase, burial forms varied widely, ranging from simple pyre graves to elaborate coffin constructions. There was also considerable variation in the dimensions and shapes of graves

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRAVES

7.2 Reconstruction of the funerary space at Marburg-Botanischer Garten, U18, Germany (Dobiat 1994: 60, Fig. 16)

with rectangular, round, oval, and square constructions known as well as both simple graves under flat field and graves covered by barrows. There were also differences in the use of building materials, with stone or wood constructions being common in most areas of central and northern Europe, but with some regional groups using different techniques. For instance, in the Encrusted Ware culture in western Hungary, see Chapter 5, pottery rather than stone was used to outline or line the individual graves (Sørensen and RebaySalisbury 2008: 63, Fig. 5). At times, the building material seems carefully chosen with attention paid to size, colour, and regularity in the shape of the constitutive elements, with an apparent concern with creating a visually pleasing structure. We have already noticed aesthetic considerations regarding the construction of the pyre platforms at Pitten (Chapter 6), but similar attention to effect is also illustrated by, for example, the careful construction of rectangular and circular stone enclosures around the barrows in the Marburg groups (Fig. 7.2, Dobiat 1994). There are also many examples of stone paving and other forms of arrangements under barrows in northern Europe, similar to what was at times used for inhumation graves. Within these variations, it is nonetheless possible to distil a few dominant forms through which we may identify the driving concerns in the change of grave constructions. A major distinction was between graves located on the place of cremation with little if any elaboration (such as in situ pyre burials and pyre pits) and those that took the form of separate structures, often including various ‘layers’ around the remains. In other words, there was a distinction between graves which were constructed as a resting place at the location of the cremation, as if marking the event, and the more elaborate constructions made separate from the location of the pyre and which took the form of, for

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example, stone structures or pits with space for a coffin. These structures often provided means of displaying ‘the body’ and other materials. We interpret this distinction as significant for whether there was at most only an interest in marking or covering the remains after the cremation or whether stages and spaces were involved to express other concerns. This seems a revealing distinction regarding potential different understandings of the character and nature of the body that existed after the cremation, and also about whether and how stressing similarities with inhumation graves was a basic objective. Although there is no European-wide systematic data on the relationship between the pyre and the final burial place, it seems to be most common for burials to be constructed apart and away from the location of the cremation during this period, although in many instances the distance was not substantial. As discussed in Chapter 6, whether the places of cremation and burial were differentiated seems to reveal different ontological understandings of the cremated body. If these places were not separated, it suggests that the cremated remains had no special needs, often just a bit of tidying up and covering was all that was done. However, if separated then the cremated remains were perceived to require further treatment suggesting that humanness/bodiness was still attached to them, or there was a cultural need to re-incorporate the dead in some manner. In the instances of complex cremation burial constructions, we posit that the cremation ritual progressed through stages of transformations in which the deceased moved from being a subject to objects and then back to being a subject again. The characteristics of in-situ pyre burials vary substantially from cremation spots without any traces of subsequent interferences to various forms of closure, such as stone slabs covering the cremation. At the Encrusted Ware cemetery of Bonyhád, Hungary (Hajdu et al. 2016) there were two cremations without any other traces than cremated remains recovered in anatomical order on scorched soil. In this case, it was suggested that the bodies had been placed in supine position with the legs slightly pulled up and flexed, and the pyre constructed on top of them. The Pitten cemetery, with its 130 pyre graves, provides an example of extensive use of in-situ pyre burials but also showed how even these simple burials may vary within a single cemetery (Sørensen and Rebay 2008b: 154). Some in-situ pyres appeared as no more than a fire-affected patch of soil with traces of charcoal and cremated remains. There were, however, also instances where the in-situ pyre burials saw further post-cremation elaboration as structures, such as stone or wooden posts being erected over the pyre and thus transforming it into a more formal grave construction. This was also the case for some of the graves in the Marburg group. In one case, at about 80 cm from the pyre remains there was an irregular circle of posts placed slanting towards the centre as if originally from a tipi-like structure (Dobiat 1994: 42). Conceptually, this seems to reveal a concern framed around the humanness of the cremated remains, or at least a concern with their protection.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRAVES

Burials of the cremated bones away from the pyre takes many different forms, some very simple and others more complex. The use of urns will be discussed separately as a distinct practice, and the possibility that cremation remains were widely dispersed in the landscape will not be considered here as this leaves no archaeological traces. The simplest burials of cremated bones were those for which pits were dug and the remains placed within them without any further construction or layering. These pits were not at the location of the cremation but made specifically for the placing, and thus burial, of the remains. Variations exist in terms of the exact shape of such pits, and they range from surface depressions to small pits, although they have in common that they are usually just big enough to contain the bones. There were also variations in terms of how much of the pyre debris was included. Such graves were common in the Late Bronze Age in some areas, such as Scandinavia, but appears to be less frequently securely dated to the Middle Bronze Age although some exist. Among our case studies, Zuchering exemplifies this practice. There were also examples of pyre debris (more or less sorted) deposited in simple small stone cists and other constructions, without further architectural elaborations. These were often inserted into existing barrows, covered by a new barrow, or found under flat field. This was, for example, the case at Damsgaard, Denmark. As with other simple grave constructions, such practices became more common in the Late Bronze Age. During the transition phase, more complex structures were, however, still common and experimented with. This included what we refer to as ‘layered graves’ – graves in which there were several distinct features or various structures erected around the body. Moving from the body outwards, such graves often consisted of first a layer immediately around the bones themselves, then a form of bedding, and thereafter subsequent structures, such as a coffin or cist, over which there was often a cairn which was followed by a barrow covering the entire structure. The barrows could vary considerably in size, from large ones in Denmark, some 30 metres in diameter and 5–6 metres high, similar to previous mortuary structures (Thrane 2013: 752), to smaller ones, such as at Pitten where many of the burial mounds were less than 1 metre in diameter. There were often several graves within the larger barrows, and barrows or tumuli would often cluster in cemeteries. The barrow burials from Denmark are examples of the former and the cemetery at Pitten is an example of the use of smaller tumuli. Often there was a clear temporal sequence to the layers of these constructions creating a sense of a choreographed theatricality, but at times they appear muddled and slightly disjointed combinations of different practices. It is important to acknowledge this to avoid the tendency of presenting these burial practices as necessarily coherent and strongly structured. Grave 2 in burial mound U11 in the group ‘Botanischer Garten’ in the Marburg group of barrows is one such example. Whereas most of the graves were pits of a size necessary to

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contain the urns, this grave (and a few others) contained a sizeable wooden chamber of 3.4 by 1.2 m built on top of the pit in which the pyre remains were deposited. However, an urn with cremated remains was then placed within the wooden chamber (Dobiat 1994: 80), making it ambiguous whether it was the pit or the urn that constituted the grave. Such layered constructions are important for our enquiry; they reveal central decisions surrounding the perceived needs of the cremated remains; they echoed or referenced previous burial practices while also gradually moving away from these. Through time, these layers were literately shed as simpler versions took over. The first layer of elaborate cremation burials. The first layer around the cremated remains can take the form of various structures such as coffins, cists, or urns to ‘contain’ the bones and may have included a shroud, a bag, or other kinds of wrapping to keep the remains together. Textiles, wood, stones, and ceramics and probably also hides and fur, were all used in the making of this first layer, with each material, of course, lending itself to specific forms and probably also introducing particular associations. Textiles: There are examples of textiles used to wrap the cremated bones, possibly as a kind of shroud, but they may also be referencing the use of textiles in inhumation graves, at times even used to create the illusion of clothing. Usually, the wrapped remains were then subsequently placed in a coffin or stone cist. One of the best-known examples of textile in a stone cist is the Period III Hvidegård burial from eastern Denmark (Goldhahn 2012, Goldhahn 2019: 71–94, Herbst 1848). In this case, the cremated remains of three individuals1 had been wrapped in a cloak-like woven textile and then placed on the ox hide lining the floor of the 2.15  0.5 m stone cist. The wrapped remains were arranged to appear as a rectangular shape (body-like) taking up most of the length of the cist (see Fig. 6.6). Roughly at the ‘waist’ was a bronze sword in a wood and leather scabbard (Goldhahn 2012), at the place where the sword would usually be found in an inhumation grave. Although this grave is unusually well preserved, there are several graves from this period in Scandinavia with remains that similarly suggest the presence of textile together with cremated bones in cists, presumably in most cases from a kind of wrapping. As with other parts of cremation practices, there were different ways of achieving a combination of the novelty of cremation and the familiarity of inhumation burial 1

This burial has traditionally been interpreted as that of an adult male, but a recent analysis of the remains by Caroline Arcini (presented in Goldhahn 2012: 245) showed they were from at least three individuals – an adult male (20–40 years), a young adult (17–19 years), and a child (3–4 years). The remains were all wrapped up together and Arcini suggests they had been cremated together and only some bones selected for the burial (Arcini 2005). A fragment of a bronze tube, normally used as part of female dress, suggests that either the young adult or the child may have been female.

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practices. For instance, in Egtved, western Denmark, the 16–18-year-old woman in an inhumation grave was ‘accompanied’ by the cremated bones of a 5–6-year-old child. Most of the cremated remains were found in a bundle of clothing at the feet of the older woman, but a few pieces were found in a small bark box next to her head (Frei et al. 2015, Hvass 2000, Thomsen 1929). While it is not possible to know the specific meaning behind this use of the cremated remains, it certainly hints at a choreography in which cremated remains were used to make distinct associations. Such wrapped cremations seem to make metaphorical links to either the dressed person (including both the living person and the dressed inhumed body) or to the use of textiles to wrap the deceased, a practice which indirectly may reference the clothed or covered body. Despite the problems of preservation, there is plenty of evidence of clothing in inhumation graves beyond the well-preserved examples from Denmark (Grömer 2009), and it is reasonable to assume that being dressed in textiles was the norm for Middle Bronze Age inhumed bodies. In central Europe, there is also indirect evidence for the use of shrouds in some areas (Grömer 2016: 296–301). For instance, in several flexed inhumation graves of the Füzesabony culture, Hungary, such as in the cemeteries of Tiszafüred (Kovács 1992a), Megyaszó (Schalk 1994), and Mezőcsát (Hänsel and Kalicz 1986), pins are found in the upper body area, sometimes in front of or near the face (Fig. 7.3). It has been argued that the presence of a specific type of pin with a wire loop at the end could suggest shrouds, as they might have been used as needles to sew the shroud together (Kovács 1992a: 97). Although it cannot be proven that the sewing took place in the graves, the fact that they were left with the bodies may indicate temporal proximity to the act of placing the body, or that the needles could not be taken back into use for the living. The use of textiles in cremation graves was, therefore, in many areas not an innovative element but rather a continuation or adaptation of existing practices of employing pieces of clothing to dress the deceased, using it as gifts in the graves, or as linings and covers. It would also have provided a practical solution to the need for bundling the remains together. However, in many instances, it seems that the ways the textiles were used reveal a kind of an oxymoron, or a conceit: the presence of textiles and the emphasis on wrapping/clothing when there was no actual body to be dressed. Wood: The use of wooden coffins appears like a straightforward continuation of an established tradition in many areas. The coffins themselves were made in different ways ranging from the use of tree trunks to plank constructions. Tree trunk coffins were mainly found in northern Germany and Denmark. Plank built coffins are less well known, probably in part due to preservation. The cremated remains may be spread over or organised

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7.3 Grave 88 of Mezőcsát, Hungary, a crouched inhumation with pin in front of the face to hold the shroud together (after Hänsel and Kalicz 1986: 39, Fig. 33)

at particular points within the coffins, placed directly on its base or placed on textile, fur, or hides lining the coffin and wrapped around the remains. Both these burial forms were already familiar. A systematic comparison between the dimensions of wood coffins used for inhumations versus those from cremation does not exist. However, our impression is that the size of tree trunk coffins did not relate to what burial form they were used for, whereas the size of plank-built coffins was more varied, although this was not necessarily only a response to cremation as it may also have related to the age of the deceased. The wooden structures were usually encased in additional layers before being covered by earth, as discussed in the section on secondary layers of construction. The cemetery of Zuchering (Schütz 2006) provides good examples of the use of wooden structures for scattered cremations. As discussed in Chapter 5, several of the cremation burials were found placed in large, rectangular pits, with a clearly distinguishable, rectangular centre (‘Einbau’) that has been interpreted as the traces of wooden coffins. These were on average 1.78 m long (sizes from 0.7 to 3 m have been documented), the size of an adult body. The size of the coffins, rather than the whole grave structure, apparently reflected the sex and age of the buried person. This suggests they were constructed for an individual body and in response to the (memory of the) whole body rather than the fractured cremated one (Tab. 7.1).

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table 7.1 Grave and coffin dimensions in relation to age and sex of buried individuals at Zuchering (data from Schütz 2003)

Grave

All Scattered cremations Urn burials Females Males Sub-adults Adults Mature individuals

Coffin

Depth

Length

Area

Length

Area

0.27 m 0.41 m

2.43 m

3.43 m²

1.79 m

1.19 m²

0.22 m 0.35 m 0.28 m 0.25 m 0.33 m 0.29 m

2.61 m 2.62 m 2.22 m 2.63 m 2.58 m

3.83 m² 4.28 m² 2.90 m² 4.02 m² 4.15 m²

1.73 m 1.91 m 1.45 m 1.84 m 1.76 m

1.00 m² 1.33 m² 0.78 m² 1.12 m² 1.18 m²

7.4 Grave 153 of Zuchering, Germany, with preserved parts of the wooden grave construction (Schütz 2006: Fig. 33)

Charred logs from the funerary pyre were used as a construction element in several of the graves at Zuchering, suggesting that the cremation had taken place very close to the grave. Grave 153 (Fig. 7.4), with its 21 documented charred logs included in the grave construction is particularly impressive (Schütz 2006: 136, Fig. 33). Some of the burials in the Lüneburg area provide interesting insights into how wood was both used to contain the bones and to mediate the

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relationship between body and objects, as the layering created multiple stages of proximity and distance that could be utilized in socially meaningful ways during the burial practice. Weapons were usually placed within the wooden coffin together with the body, but there are exceptions. The sword and dagger found in Grave 2 of Mound 4 at Wiepenkathen, Lower Saxony had, for example, been placed on top of the twigs covering a scattered cremation before the mound was heaped over the context (Laux 1996b: 191). This special emphasis on the weapons is reminiscent of the placing of the sword in the Hvidegård burial, discussed earlier. In both cases, we gain a hint of a choreographed sequence in which the associations of different kinds of objects were articulated and explored. The appearance of the cremated bones can at times indicate that they were originally held together by a later decayed organic container, such as a wooden box. In a few cases, cremated bones have been found in such containers, as in the case of the cremated remains within the Egtved burial, discussed previously. In some of these cases, it seems this was a matter of secondary burial or a ‘companion’ grave, but there are also a few cases where the wooden container was the primary burial. The wooden chest from a grave in the BleckmarWittenberggruppe, Lower Saxony, mentioned in Chapter 6, contained the cremated remains of a female individual. The chest measured 0.5  0.3 m and was at least 0.15 m high; a fibula had been placed on top of the chest rather than together with the cremated remains inside it (Laux 1996b: 182, Piesker 1958: 12). Another wooden chest from the cemetery of Ripdorf, Lower Saxony, appears to have been used to hold elaborate bronze ornaments, whilst the cremated remains of a woman and a child were found next to rather than inside it (Geschwinde 2000: 155). Both cases are early instances of cremation burial in the region (Periode II, c. 1500–1300 BC), and whereas the bodies were cremated, the bronze objects were not. This separation between the body and objects was maintained in the decisions about what to place in the wooden chest. In these examples, it seems that ideas about the body versus its objects were being explored in new ways and that the container was used to confirm these as different entities. Noteworthy, therefore, as it is tempting to interpret such containers as enclosures that metaphorically bound a fragmented body (acted as its skin), the divergent use illustrated by the two cases warn us that what constituted the body/person may have been deeply unsettled and varied. Stone: Various forms of stone cists were also used to house the cremated bones. In contrast to the wooden containers, they vary considerably in size ranging from long rectangular structures, over-proportional in terms of the size of the body, to small square box-like cists made up of three or four stone slabs with a flat stone cover, and sometimes a base. The variation in size is usually related to temporal changes, as small cists became more common through time.

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The larger structures were similar to those used for inhumation, but the smaller ones were distinct to and adjusted to what was needed for a cremation. Moreover, whereas the earlier larger constructions were used similarly to the wooden structures with cremations spread out or arranged along the length of the cist, and with clear visual links to the practice of inhumation graves; these links were absent for the smaller cists in which the cremated remains were placed in a heap contained by the stone slabs. The change in the dimension of the stone cists sets them apart from the wooden structures and suggests that the stone cists were differently involved with, or explored, in the move towards settling on a new burial form. Soon the practice of using wooden coffins was given up and in their place stone cists were transformed to adjust to the very simple requirements of a cremation. This change happened in several regions; future analysis of the changing sizes might reveal different versions of a gradual decrease of size as well as modes in the size distribution as certain forms – longer-than-a body, half-a-body, and size-of stone-slabs boxes – were favoured. Stone cists, including those reduced to a simple signifier in the form of a stone slab under or on the top of an urn, remained in use well into the Late Bronze Age in many parts of central and northern Europe. Among our detailed case studies, the Vollmarshausen cemetery provides examples of such stone structures. While the majority of the graves were urns in pits, 7 per cent (19) were elongated stone setting graves (Bergmann 1982: 121–134, Taylor 2016: 55–56). The stone linings consist of a simple, sometimes doubled row of boulders of sandstone or quartzite, framing the inner area of the grave containing the cremated remains. The stone frames measure 1.20–1.40 m  65 m and oscillate around the northeast–southeast axis; no traces of an inner wooden structure were found. The cremated bones were usually scattered over a third of the floor with finds on top of or directly next to them, confirming that the area confined by the stones was conceived of as the burial place. Ceramic Urns: During the transition phase pots also began to be used as containers for the cremated bones. This is a distinct development, and for most areas of Europe, this association between the death and vessels was novel, representing a distinctly different way of keeping the remains together. A very wide variety of pots were used, although they, in general, were medium to large vessels with similarities to cooking and storage vessels. It has been debated whether urns were produced specifically for the funeral or were taken from the general household repertoire after their ‘profane’ use-life (e.g. Wiesner 2009: 38–41). Indications of urns produced specifically for funeral use include a lack of quality in material or firing despite the appearance of the vessel being very good, as the urns did not need to be suitable for domestic use, in other words, being able to resist the impact of secondary firing during cooking (e.g. Budden 2007). Suggestions of urns being selected from the existing domestic assemblage are signs of use, such as soot, scorching, food residues, wear, as

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well as repair (e.g. Eibner 1974, Rebay 2006: 65). It seems highly likely that this element of the burial practice, like so many others, differed between communities, and reused vessels as well as purposefully produced ones have been documented. In some cases, analysis suggests that the choice of the urn was influenced by the personal characteristics of the buried individual, such as gender. This has, for instance, been proposed for the Marburg urn burials: double conical vessels were used for females (seven out of nine individuals deposited in this vessel type were anthropologically sexed as female, one was not determined, and one has slight male tendencies) and males were buried with vessels of a different form group, with outwards-pointing rims. The accessory vessels seem to have been chosen in a similar, gendered way, although some overlap remains for both groups (Dobiat 1994: 122–123). Overall, however, there is limited evidence of urns being specific identity markers. A typical feature of the urns was the practice of closing them with some kind of lid. These were often ceramic lids, but other ceramic vessels and flat stones were also often used. Vessels used for such purposes were usually simple bowls familiar from local domestic contexts. In some areas, however, a wider range of ceramic forms, including plates and open bowls, were used to close the urn, and in some areas several pots stacked upon each other were used in this manner. In the Vatya culture of central Hungary, it was common for a small bowl to be placed inside the mouth of the urn with its base downwards and a larger bowl then placed upside down covering both the small bowl and the mouth or neck of the urn (Fig. 7.5, Vicze 2011: 54). There could be variations within a cemetery or a local area with some urns having lids and others not. The tops of urns have often been damaged by ploughing and other activities, so this data is not necessarily reliable. Nonetheless, it seems that the percentage of closed urns continues to vary in the following Urnfield period both with regard to region and period and even within individual cemeteries. Wiesner estimates that about 10 per cent of urns in the early and at least 20 per cent in the classic Urnfield period were covered; with regional variations, the percentage reaches as much as 40 per cent in middle- and southern Hesse (Wiesner 2009: 72). Other methods of closure were also used. At Zuchering, for example, while there is little evidence to support the idea that the urns – most of which date to the later cemetery phases – were closed with a bowl (Schütz 2006: 24), a large piece of pottery was sometimes used as a kind of cover (e.g. Grave 91). Also, in this cemetery, the accessory vessels rather than topping or closing the urn were usually placed outside the urn at shoulder level within the pit. At the cemetery of Grundfeld, bowls and fragments of bowls have commonly been interpreted as remains of urn covers, even if they were no longer found in their original location within the graves (Ullrich 2004: 154).

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRAVES

7.5 Schematic view of a Vatja urn (Hungary), closed with multiple bowls (Vicze 2001: 94, Fig. 59)

Variation also exists in terms of which way bowls are placed on top of the urn, even within a small region or cemetery. For instance, amongst the 67 burials from Marburg, seven urns had lids in the form of bowls placed over the opening facing down, whereas 13 urns were covered with a bowl facing up. Two had stone covers and two were covered by other means (Dobiat 1994). There are also many examples of a stone used to close the urn. In the cemetery of Vollmarshausen, 78 (40%) urns were covered with a flat stone and 11 were marked with a stele up to 42 cm long that doubled as a grave marker; only five urns were covered with bowls.2 There are further differences within this cemetery. For example, the use of stone lids differed between different parts of the cemetery. This has given rise to the suggestion that particular social groups, such as families, may have had different traditions and preferences (Bergmann 1982). Wood and other organic materials may also have been used as lids, although evidence for this is predictably scarce and ambiguous (Wiesner 2009: 74). Two urns from the Ha A cemetery of Gries, Austria, had remains of organic

2

Graves 63, 99, 101, 217, and 274.

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substances that have been interpreted as an urn cover of bark or wood (Hell 1958). Observations of resin on the inside of the mouth of urns are suggestive of some kind of material being attached to them, and the urns being securely closed. This is, for example, the case for grave 31 from the Ha B cemetery of St. Andrä, Austria (Eibner 1974: 243). This emphasis on the use of lids or other forms of closures is important as it suggests that the urn in itself was not considered to fully or properly enclose the remains. Closure and containment were important features of most of the cremation burials. This contrasted with the simple use of the pyre as the burial place without any extra layering. Practices in which there was no further stage after the cremation, and in which the body seemingly fused with the pyre remains and its location, were experimented with already during the transition phase and became more common in some areas during the Late Bronze Age, but, in general, it did not become the norm, and, overall, urns, with their notion of containment (and protection?), came to dominate burial rituals. Through time, the burial ritual shed its former association with structures, such as cists or barrows, and the urn, placed in a tight pit under flat field, became the normal grave. The lasting importance of the closing of the mouth of the urn is interestingly illustrated by some of the very rich Late Bronze Age cremation burials which arguably represented an archaic form, and which, therefore, reveal what was esteemed about earlier burials. In the Late Bronze Age grave from Seddin, in Brandenburg, Germany (c. 800 BC) the primary burial was found in an urn with a lid that was fixed onto it with ceramic pegs. Inside was a sheet bronze amphora which held the cremated bones and these, it is thought, were wrapped in marten fur, so this indicated another case of layering and closure (Kunow 2003). In the near-contemporary Lusehøj grave from Voldtofte, eastern Denmark, the urn also had an unusual lid. In this case, the bronze cauldron had a bronze lid that had been smeared in a thick layer of resin with pieces of amber inserted into it (Thrane 1984). This emphasis on closure is interesting. In some examples much effort seems to have been given to ensure that the remains are enclosed, almost sealed. This, we have argued (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008: 59–60) is, for example, the case throughout the Vatya culture, where the secure closure of the urn within their tight pits might have resonated with the use of storage vessels within contemporary settlements. In this case, placing the dead in urns referenced familiar materials and practices of storing and curating. At the same time, the emphasis on the secure closure of urns may have had a complex relationship with some regional practices that were concerned with accessing the cremated remains after burial. These connections will be further explored in Chapter 8, but we note here the special expression of this at the Vollmarshausen cemetery, where many urns were re-accessed through holes

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in the side rather than through their openings. In contrast to cists and coffins, which may have had various connotations of resting places, containers, or rooms, the containment provided by urns was ontologically and metaphorically different. This is primarily due to size and physical closeness/closure, two qualities that help further the notion of the urn as a containing body. The sizes of Middle Bronze Age urns, although varied, meant that the body-buried shrunk, and the degree of containment (including lids and being within a pit), created a new whole. From this emerged a body in representation, the urn became the stand-in for the deceased, its walls became its skin (RebaySalisbury 2010, Sørensen and Rebay 2008c). The second layering of elaborate cremation burials. After the first layer or ‘skin’ of material or structure around the cremated bones, further elaborations were often added, although there was considerable variation in whether such second layers were constructed and also in their characteristics, even within cemeteries and among secondary inserted burials within barrows. When present, it typically took the form of structures or additional spaces built to frame the first layer and provide a layer through which concerns beyond the immediate treatment of the body could be expressed. This was done either through constructions above ground, such as stone cists and burial chambers or through structures below ground in the form of various kinds of pit graves. The concern underwriting these practices seems to be to provide a distinct space for the cremated remains, suggesting that in many cases the remains of the pyre, even if wrapped or enclosed in a container, were not sufficient to constitute a grave. This, in turn, reveal that there were properties or meanings associated with the cremated remains that demanded further action. This, however, was probably the part of the burial practices with the greatest variation; in various ways this was about transforming pre-existing practices into new ones ‘suitable’ for the new kind of dead bodies. Furthermore, pre-existing practices were themselves influenced by many factors, including regional traditions, different materials, and variations in the marking of social differences. At the cemetery of Grundfeld, Germany, we see this transformation clearly. It used elongated stone chambers with inhumations during the oldest phase, with the size of the chambers linked to the age of the buried individual (Ullrich 2004). Through time, the percentage of inhumations declined, elaborate stone constructions became scarcer, and new burial forms were introduced with cremations in stone chambers and urn burials (Ullrich 2004: 145). The stone chambers of Graves 26, 31, and 34 show the comingling of these practices well; they contained cremated remains but their sizes (2.25–3.3 m long and 1.05– 1.9 m wide) had not been adjusted but still corresponded to those for inhumed bodies. This is similar to the principles seen in many burials from northern Europe, as discussed in Chapter 5.

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7.6 Burial mounds of Gravhøje, Maglehøj, and Brederød, Denmark illustrated by Andreas Peter Madsen 1887 (CC BY-SA)

These constructions may have one or more additional ‘layers’ in the form of, for example, a mound of soil, turf, or stone packing, and they may have been further marked through features such as kerbstones, or preparation of the area they were placed on, such as stone pavings. The Maglehøj burial, eastern Denmark, provides a good example of the details and stages of these additional layers. The cremated remains were wrapped, placed within a 0.6 m long stone cist closed with a large flat stone, and this, in turn, was enclosed by a packing of water rolled stones. This was then covered by sand, gravel, and a thick layer of seaweed (Zostera marina) and over this was a stone packing. On top of all of this was an earthen barrow (Fig. 7.6, Goldhahn 2009a). This second layer may even be discerned in the simple urn cremation pits of the Middle Bronze Age. Urn graves in pits without any further markers characterised the Late Bronze Age, and they became the simplest formal burial form that emerged with the full acceptance of cremation. There were, however, several stages towards this form and degrees of variations, both at the level of local experimentation and in the form of trends. In particular, despite apparently leaving behind the connection to the cist, during the transition phase it was common for urn burials to include some kind of lining or second layer, either in the form of small cists-settings or stone plates at the base and side of the urn. Such use of stone slabs around the urns (placed around, under, or over the urn) were common throughout most of central and northern Europe and became so increasingly through the early Urnfield Culture but declined again later. For instance, Vicze, based on evidence from two well preserved Vatya cemeteries, has proposed that stone packing was probably

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRAVES

originally common around Vatya urns and that this was a distinct departure from Early Bronze Age practices in the same region (Vicze 2011: 55). The 1854 excavation of Budapest-Kelenföld found that in addition to stone slabs around, on, and under urns, the bases of some urns were even placed on a thin layer of pebbles (Vicze 2011: 55). These stone slabs were not needed for any practical reasons and may rather allude to the idea of a second construction layer; they appear to be remnants of the practice of using cists. This suggests that they were a kind of signifier (providing a sense of a quality/association) or reference to the traditional use of cists. If remnants of former practice then they may illustrate how established practices can linger on – they were not of any more importance in terms of the construction but provided an acknowledged and somewhat desired association. This, as with many of the other features of the transition to cremation, suggests that the pre-existing practices (and the beliefs and understandings they framed) acted as a kind of drag on the change of burial practices. The further layering – creating a space and relationships. Further layering took the form of earthen or turf mounds and stone cairns that added to the sealing and marking-out of the burial monument. The spatial relationship between the individual burials may be considered as an additional ‘layer’, in this case a social one. The individual burial became enclosed within the burial landscape. In terms of the overarching aims of this volume, it is, therefore, interesting to consider whether the change in the treatment of the deceased body affected the spatial arrangements of the individual graves. In other words, how was the sociability and connectedness of the deceased expressed during the transition phase? Did the cremated remains maintain relationships with other bodies, to the landscape of the death of members of communities? In mortuary studies, it is generally assumed that such connectedness was materialised through spatial proximity and spatial clustering resulting from burials being placed close to others of the same group/kin/family. This approach has long been used to identify social clusters within Bronze Age cemeteries in central Europe. Among our case studies, this is illustrated by Vollmarshausen (Bergmann 1982, Taylor 2016). The placement of secondary burials within barrows seems to mark the connection between people in an even more obvious manner as this was a matter of physical inclusion; although, of course, our interpretation of this phenomenon may be coloured by our own assumptions of the importance of family ties. The social landscape of the dead that we are referring to was constructed in different ways within our study areas but might be seen to fall into two main traditions. In central Europe, there were large cemeteries with graves under flat field or small mounds whereas in northern Europe barrows, including secondary interments in their fills, were common and continued to be used until cremations had become the almost exclusive funerary practice in Period V.

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As discussed in Chapter 5, there are considerable variations in the forms of cemeteries observed during the first half of the second millennium providing a diverse and rich backdrop for the understanding of how the individual burial fits within a ‘landscape of the dead’. In central Europe, the development of flat cemeteries during the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium BC had already introduced a departure from the use of some kind of barrow. Together with the general increase in the size of the cemeteries, with many reaching into several hundred, this suggests a declining concern with visually marking and dominating the landscape and in its place, the use of burial places as distinct social areas/arenas developed. It seems that this format did not need marking or elaborate demarcation. This may be due to its obvious presence and otherness. It was within such existing attitudes to cemeteries as distinct separate places for all or large parts of the community that cremation was being introduced. The interesting question is, therefore, whether the cremation graves were singled out – were they grouped separately, marginally, or centrally? There exists no systematic database through which such questions can be pursued; but it seems clear, and maybe surprising, that inhumation and cremation during the transition period were often used in what appears as interchangeable ways, or at least without any clear indicators of discrimination against one of the two forms. The central founder grave under barrows may, for instance, be either an inhumation or a cremation; but this did not necessarily mean that the following burials used the same practice. This was the case, for example, at the cemetery of Pitten. The size of the cremation flat cemeteries varied considerably. Both the Vatya and the Füzesabony cultures in Hungary can have cemeteries that numbers into the thousands (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008: 57), although smaller sites were more common and, in some regions, cemeteries were usually in the order of 20–200 graves, corresponding to small village communities. The use of cremation did not, however, seem to have any direct link to the size of the cemetery. There was also a substantial variation with regard to whether there was internal clustering of graves. Examples are known of graves arranged in rows (Encrusted Ware sites), or oval groups (Vatya cemeteries) but there is no suggestion in the literature that such patterns reveal discrimination between inhumation and cremations during this period. In northern Europe, the tradition of barrow building introduced with the Single Grave Culture continues into the Bronze Age with flat cemeteries first becoming common during the Late Bronze Age; these moreover were usually of a small size until the Early Iron Age (Jensen 2013). The building of barrows declines after the Early Bronze Age, but they stayed in use through secondary burials in the barrow fills or through burials around their perimeter, and cremation burials remained associated with barrows in northern Europe during the transition phase. Whereas one may argue that these barrows were not

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7.7 Core and layering of a cremation grave

strictly speaking cemeteries, it is nonetheless clear that barrows were a social landscape of the death constructed through both the clustering of barrows and the secondary interments which can reach considerable numbers. The relationship between the individual burials and the larger structures were, however, at times complex. In particular, details of the placing and variations among secondary burials may suggest shifting emphasis or foci through time. In some cases, it seems that secondary burials in these composite burial structures were made in reference to at least two notions of kin – the most recent interment and the original one, with the former maybe within living memory and the latter more distinct and abstract. This distancing to the original, the so-called founder’s-graves, may also be why the burial tradition, including whether inhumation or cremation, need not be copied strictly. The continued role of the founder’s grave is, therefore, intriguing in terms of how it may or may not have affected changes in praxis. At Pitten, for instance, the largest mound in the cemetery appears to have influenced the location of graves even after it ceased to be used (it had a total of nine burials; Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981: 95–99) as subsequent graves were clustered around it, but it did not similarly influence the choice of burial ritual (Sørensen and Rebay 2008b). Reflections on forms and layers. Clearly, there was not a straightforward relationship between these different elements, and there was much variation throughout Europe indicating the extent to which not only the funerary rituals but also the grave forms were being experimented with and changed (Fig. 7.7). The degree of experimentation is well illustrated by the case study of Pitten where almost contemporary burials could take very different physical forms. Despite these variations, a distinction can be drawn between structures and

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materials in direct contact with the cremated bones and those used to construct additional layers. From this point of view, it appears that pottery and textiles, and to some extent wooden boxes, were used in manners that were essentially interchangeable and which provided different associations than the secondary layers. They were all used next to the bones, and they seem to express similar associations. They seem to have explored, and drawn association with, the idea of dressing the remains, of re-bodying them. The urn-as-body metaphor was present during the Late Bronze Age, as demonstrated by face-urns, and there are Early Iron Age examples of urns ‘clothed’ such as an urn from Niederkaina, Germany (Kaiser and Puttkammer 2007: 77), where the rust stain left by an iron pin on its body indicates a pin had been used to hold a ‘shroud’ together and was placed on the ‘correct’ parts of the urn’s body. However, even in the later periods, explicit imitations of the body never became the norm, suggesting that during the Middle Bronze Age these may have been rather loose associations rather than concrete interpretations. The foci of the secondary layers, when added and which ranged from hides and fur to stone constructions, stone packings, and turf and earth mounds, were closure and sealing. In communities where there was a wish for post-burial access to the dead this emphasis of sealing was counteracted in various ways, as discussed in the next chapter. The grave forms, just as the treatment of the cremated remains, were often concerned with creating a likeness to – aiming to be a simile of – the inhumation grave. When this was done well, the different states of the body (skeleton or fragmented) seem to have been of little consequence, as it was overshadowed by the ‘right’ funerary choreography. This argument is illustrated by graves within the Füzesabony Culture cemetery of Streda nad Bodrogom. Take, for example, graves 24 and 35, the former a cremation and the latter an inhumation, but the placing, orientation, and composition of objects as well as the body were almost identical. This even applies to details, such as the body in grave 35 being placed on the left side with the head to the west, and the cremation in grave 24 placed to the west of the pottery within the rectangular pit. In both cases, the pottery was placed at the ‘feet’, and, in addition, the set of pottery was organised similarly in both graves, with a jug placed inside the bowl and a small cup, completing the set, placed with the body (Fig. 7.8, Polla 1960: 311–314, 353). The two graves illustrate how the treatment of the cremated and the inhumed body could be interchangeable: they were being displayed and cared for in the same manner and the bodies, despite their material differences, were framed and the centre of attention in similar ways (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008: 56). It was, however, these connections that gradually became lost, as seen in the shrinking of the size of the stone cist through time from body-sized to small square cists or simply a flat stone under the base or as a lid. With such changes, the similes between the two kinds of dead bodies could not be maintained.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRAVES

7.8 Cremation Grave 24 (left) and inhumation Grave 35 (right) of Streda nad Bodrogom, Slovakia (Polla 1960: 353)

SUMMATIVE REFLECTIONS

Within the wide range of variations and experimentation with the form of cremation graves, we can discern a number of specific stages through which a new standardised burial practice became formed. We do not imply that these stages were followed in the same manner by all communities, rather we are attempting to synthesise how these various forms gave rise to new performative norms, new tropes. The introduction of cremation has often been directly linked to the appearance of urn cremation burials; but as demonstrated earlier, there was a transition phase between the use of elaborate grave construction to urns becoming the essence of the burial, and there were also major regional differences in the temporality of the changes. In northern Europe cremations remained linked to funerals in barrows during their introduction, and only after they had become dominant and based on urn burials did flat cemeteries come into use. The size of these varied with most of the South Scandinavian cemeteries being small (some ten to twenty graves) with larger ones (hundred graves) found in northern Germany and central Europe. In contrast, the use of cremations became linked to flat cemeteries much quicker in central Europe, and it was the dominant burial practice in many areas although the cemeteries did not reach the size of the Early Bronze Age ones.

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As a part/partner of this process, the roles of pottery and the manner of its use within the grave changed in ways that are significant for tracking the change in the meanings surrounding the buried body. During the Early Bronze Age, pottery was a standard element of inhumation graves in most areas, although not in northern Europe. While pottery for a while remained in use as part of the furnishing in the grave, new roles were developed, and in this diversification, we may locate the development of the use of pots as urns – the containers for the fragmented body. In some areas, we see pottery employed as a kind of construction material used to line and define the grave, and in others special pottery sets may be used to annotate the body – placed at the front, back, head, and feet. Most importantly, at some point, the pot began to replace the coffin or grave chamber as the container for the bone – initially often placed within various stone constructions but in time the pots as urns became the grave. An early example of this is the Vatya cemeteries, with their emphasis on pits resonating with the use of pits within contemporary houses. At that stage, the burial practices had changed substantially, and the body was treated in a radically different manner to the earlier cremation burials. As part of this progression, we suggest that at some stage, in some ways, the urn burials developed and became the norm. The Hungarian regional study is suggestive of different pathways towards this, as within relatively short distances from each other three very different engagements or entanglements between dead bodies and pottery developed (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008), see Fig. 5.2. From being objects associated with the body, and in some cases even potentially expressing links between specific types of vessels and particular parts of the body (i.e. cups placed at the face), we see emerging tendencies of the body and vessel merging with urns in some cases maybe taking on properties of being bodies. However, this connotation seems to have been precarious and it did not become a dominant materialised metaphor. The urns transgressed beyond being an embodiment, becoming, it seems, primarily a container, and in so doing it might have acquired the sense of being a representative of the body-buried rather than the body whole. The place of burial was also a partner to this discursive engagement with how burials should look and what they were about. In particular, the various forms of coffins or burial chamber constructions that had been in use for inhumation burials did not immediately cease with the introduction of cremation despite there not being any practical needs for such constructions. They did, however, gradually change and transform. Their traditional form was useful for insisting on the wholeness of the body both in terms of graves’ traditional connotations and through their ability to literately mark out the body shape. In the gradual reshaping of the graves, which usually first affected their size and dimensions, we see enormous local variation. The size of the

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burial chamber or burial construction appears to be the element that changed first and with the greatest ease, but the reference to some kind of structure took much longer to disappear, and the small square stone-slab cists, which gradually became common and widespread, still resonate the former larger chambers. One may see this sequence of change as a reflection of grave forms becoming a very central and dynamic discursive structure through which new ways of treating and thinking about the dead body could be formulated and forged. As traditional structures were reshaped, they must have affected perceptions of what the cremated bones were and needed. The physical framing of the cremated remains was generally achieved through several technologies already familiar in the particular regions and burial traditions. In Denmark and northern Germany, for example, where the use of oak coffins for burial was familiar from inhumation graves, oak coffins remained in use for early cremations; for a while their length was unaltered before the coffins were adjusted to the size of the cremated bodies. So, change, rather than being imposed emerged from adjusting and transforming existing practices. Some pyre debris acted as the funeral place, but for the majority of burials a secondary treatment seemed to have been desired and routinely conducted. Whether we are referring to the simple pits in which cremated bones were redeposited without any further activities or to the complex stone structures where considerable attention was given to layers and compositions, the graves have in common that the remains, despite their state of fragmentation, were considered to need some final resting place. It is through this emphasis on a stage of re-incorporation that we recognise the prevalent concept of a body and the long-term influence from traditional inhumation burial forms.

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AFTER THE BURIAL Prolonged Engagement with the Body

P

ost-burial engagement with graves can take different forms. One obvious motivation (based on historical, ethnographic, and contemporary evidence) is to visit the grave to cater to the perceived needs of the deceased and for social-community reasons, probably at meaningful dates like the anniversary of death or at important times in the community’s calendar. It is, however, mostly impossible to tell whether this was part of Middle Bronze Age communities’ worlds and rituals. The continued effort invested in the physical construction of graves in many (but not all) the areas studied does, however, suggest that graves continued to be meaningful places and had some kind of significance beyond the short duration of the burial itself. ‘Having a place to go to’ for post-funerary practices can be necessary for mourning and various issues of societal cohesion and restructuring, drawing attention to the importance of creating a place where the living and dead can interact, and where cross-generational connections can be confirmed. In some ways, the ‘final resting place’ of the body – the grave, the burial mound, or the place in a cemetery – is a natural location for post-funerary practices. In this context, it is interesting to note that in our own society, cremation burials in communal graveyards and ‘woodland burials’, which are becoming increasingly popular in Europe, appear to drop the concern with making a specific place. This renunciation of an individualised burial place is often explained in terms of a decreased emphasis on community cohesion and genealogy, expressed, for instance, through the wish not to burden children or relatives who would have

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to maintain the graves, or it is due to environmental concerns. In our time, a place of memorialisation mainly seems to matter in cases of accidents and atrocities. Increasingly we witness crosses and candles placed at sites of such events, including terrorist attacks, like the marking of the March 11, 2004 attacks at the Atocha train station in Madrid (Margry and SánchezCarretero 2011, Sánchez-Carretero 2006, Truc and Sánchez-Carretero 2019). To move beyond generalised expectations about people’s behaviour and need to remember, we do, however, need to locate the specifics of whether and how this was indeed part of the Middle Bronze Age community’s mortuary practices. Were such needs invested in, and accommodated by, the burial constructions or in other ways performed and reiterated? For this argument, it is important to recognise the difference between individual involvement, which may have used a range of unauthorised and personal outlets, and that of sanctified social practices through which such post-cremation death practices were incorporated into the cultural canon. From the previous chapter, a concern with sealing and closure was identified and this was seen to, in particular, affect burials taking place away from the pyre, and therefore the largest portion of known burials. In northern Europe, this was a straightforward continuation of concerns expressed within inhumation burial practices. These burials were not designed for a re-opening of the individual grave, although continued engagement with the burial location through secondary burials in the barrow was common. In this area, evidence for post-burial activities in the form of re-accessing Bronze Age graves has been found, although it is unclear how common it was and whether it was a preplanned post-burial phase or a more ‘spontaneous’ occasional activity. It may be worth noting, however, that regular re-openings of graves is well known for graves from the first millennium AD in Scandinavia (e.g. Klevnäs 2016). Modern osteological analyses have found examples of cremations containing the remains of more than one individual, but per se these are not evidence of post-burial engagements, and while they raise intriguing questions about why these people were buried at the same time, there are no suggestions that graves were opened, and additional bones added to the burial. In contrast, in parts of central Europe, where there were well established, pre-existing customs of continued engagement with the buried person, including various forms of reaccessing individual graves, post-burial activities can be traced in some of the local practices that developed as part of the introduction of cremation. However, before stydying the examples of post-burial engagements with the body it may be pertinent to remember the evidence of death houses found in some parts of northern Europe, as discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. These constructions suggest a stage in the performance of the burial that was absent from central Europe (or has left no traces there). The death houses were usually burned down during the cremation or the interment of the cremation,

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or shortly after. This may have added to the sense of the finality of death in these cases. Thus, despite the many shared perceptions about the living body, in the thinking about death there may have been some modifications in various parts of Europe, with communities in northern Europe more firmly emphasising finality and sealing whereas in central Europe ideas about the continued needs of the cremated persons were, in some cases, articulated through specific practices. In turn, this coarse difference in the phasing of the burial performance within Europe may be highly informative about variations in attitudes and underlying ontologies. This makes examples of various post-burial engagements extremely interesting. In some parts of Middle Bronze Age Europe, we find that after the grave was created and the body placed in it, social engagement and physical interaction with the dead did not stop. The form of engagements was, however, extremely varied and it was probably the part of burial practices that was most local in its formulation, implementation, apparent intentions, and how its rationales were translated into action by different communities. Some of these practices were directly concerned with the needs of the cremated remains/body, such as food, whereas others, such as ongoing or recurrent activities at the burial place probably were shaped around wider societal concerns. In the following, we outline some of the main structures and practices that have been observed. This is, by no means, a full account of the range and variations as systematic data does not exist, but it is indicative of the degree of experimentation that took place. FEEDING TH E DEAD AND COMMENSALITY AT GR AVES

Ethnographically, one of the most common forms of post-burial engagement is the presentation and consumption of food and drink – in honour of the deceased, meant to be consumed together with the deceased, or for the dead alone. This, moreover, is one of the few post-burial practices that may leave enough traces for archaeological investigation. In our Middle Bronze Age data, we can distinguish two variations – offerings of food to the dead to cater for imagined ongoing or transitional needs and feasting at the grave site (as a performance of both socialisation and commensality). Sometimes these activities were relatively simple, but in other examples, they were built into the grave architecture or resulted in complex ritualization. Whereas the inclusion of food appears to be rare in Bronze Age burials from northern Europe (whether inhumations or cremations) remains of food and drink in graves or near graves were common in parts of central Europe and included meat (animal bones), shells, plants and nuts, and associated containers, most commonly ceramic pots and plates. When such remains are found within graves, they are usually interpreted as intended for the deceased and give rise to

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8.1 Feeding the dead at the cemetery of Gelej, Hungary (grave 26; Kemenczei 1979: Fig. 5)

interpretations of food being gifted to provide for the needs of the deceased or providing sustenance for the journey to the afterlife. In central Europe, the clearest evidence of pottery meant for use by the dead rather than community feasting is where vessels were placed directly next to the body of the deceased. In inhumation graves, the location of pottery was generally determined by the body’s topography and the available space in the grave, which depended on how the body was positioned. In most graves with stretched inhumations, the pottery was placed next to the head and/or feet, whereas crouched inhumations have more available space, and vessels may be placed behind the head, behind the buttocks and at the feet. At least in some areas, the choice of which pottery is located where seems to depend on form and function, with special forms placed next to specific parts of the body (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008). In Hungary, in the Füzesabony inhumation cemeteries at Gelej (Kemenczei 1979) and Mezőzombor (Koós 2006), cups and jugs were placed directly next to the mouth of the deceased or in the hands placed in front of the face, giving the impression s/he was drinking (Fig. 8.1). In such cases, the placing of the pottery suggests food and drink intended for the dead person. Interestingly, there are examples of this motive of ‘feeding the dead’ apparently also being played out in cremation graves. It has, for instance, been suggested that liquid foodstuff was poured over the cremated bones in graves within the Transdanubian Encrusted Ware cemetery of Királyszentistván, Hungary (Bóna 1975), as cups are commonly placed upside down on top of the cremated remains. Grave 12 from Bonyhád, with its two cups on top of the cremated remains, is an example of this practice (Csalog 1942: 126). At the cemetery of Dunaújváros-Dunadűlő, 340 (some 64%) of the 530 graves catalogued as Vatya burials contained a small one-handled cup (more rarely

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8.2 Urns with artificial openings from Vollmarshausen, Germany (Bergmann 1982: 193a, 186a)

two, three, or even four cups), either placed inside the urn on top of the ashes or outside next to it (Vicze 2011: 54, 86). Such use of this particular domestic vessel, which is known from contemporary settlements and which presumably was closely linked to drinking, was common in cemeteries of this cultural group. The inclusion of these cups, if not actually containing a substance, probably expressed links to the domestic space and notions of sustenance. The most striking example of ‘feeding the dead’ is provided by the cemetery of Vollmarshausen. In this cemetery, 153 urns were found with an artificial opening on their side, and only 29 urns were intact (Fig. 8.2, Bergmann 1982: 163). Broken sherds from the hole punched into the urn were sometimes found within the vessel; in other cases, they were fitted back to close the hole. There were also examples of sherds of other vessels or stones used to close the punctured hole (Graves 89, 328, Bergmann 1982). Sometimes the auxiliary vessels were also deliberately damaged. The excavator Joseph Bergmann proposed that urns were accessed and damaged after they had been buried and that this took place as a separate event. Based on the presence of one or several macroscopically visible thin layers inside the urns, he suggested that fluids and food were repeatedly offered directly onto the cremated bones through the hole in the side of the urn (Bergmann 1982: 163). Chemical analysis showed an increase in the proportion of organic matter of the layers within the urn, seemingly supporting this interpretation (Osterberg 1982). This practice of reopening the urns to deposit fluids/foodstuffs is very unusual and appears to be distinct to this cemetery. It could, therefore, be tempting to assume that this tradition was introduced by a foreign group, but further analysis has shown that the re-accessed urns were not related to any particular locations within the cemetery, burial form, or the age or sex of the deceased (Taylor 2016: 80), and strontium isotope analysis suggested that all were local (Taylor, Frei, and Frei 2020). It can, therefore, be concluded that this was a locally developed mode of behaviour that affected most of the grave constructions in this cemetery despite other variations and choices. The only discernible pattern was chronological, as the practice became increasingly widespread during Ha B before tailing off again (Taylor 2016: 86). It is difficult to explain this mortuary behaviour. If it was

AFTER THE BURIAL: PROLONGED ENGAGEMENT WITH THE BODY

merely about offering fluids or food, why were the offerings not just done through the mouth of the urn? Probably a more direct, tangible experience of re-accessing the remains was desired. Bergmann proposed that, to the local community, the cremated body must have been a ‘living dead body’, and further argued that this suggests that to them the soul had not become detached from the cremated remains (Bergmann 1982: 163), hence the body had to be fed. The fact that also auxiliary vessels were damaged in the process is likewise not easy to interpret; of the only 19 undamaged urns, 10 were accompanied by damaged auxiliary vessels. Some scholars have drawn parallels between this practice of re-accessing urns to the house urn tradition of northern Germany, Scandinavia, and Poland (Bergmann 1973), such as the house or door-urn from Robbedale, Bornholm (Behn 1924: 51–52, Pl. 21) with its rectangular fitted plate over the ‘door’. These house urns do, however, generally date to the Late Bronze Age, and they were usually closed, at times even tightly, with lids secured using resin or similar glues (Sabatini 2006, Sabatini 2007). They were purpose-made cremation urns and they do not provide any indication of a concern with reaccessing the cremated remains after their burial (Taylor 2016: 99). Moreover, the re-accessing would have had a different dramatic choreography if the opening was added prior to the urn being included in the funeral ritual. The comparison with northern German urns with Seelenlöcher [soul-holes], which started with Kurt Tackenberg’s (1976) comprehensive review of urns with a hole in the wall, is, therefore, probably misleading as regards Vollmarshausen and the manner re-accessing the cremated remains was orchestrated by its community. House urns and other urns with holes on the body were generally designed with holes during their production, whereas for the community using the Vollmarshausen cemetery accessing the urns was something that happened at a late stage of the funeral. There were no regularities in where on the urn the hole was punctured, the broke-off sherds were often missing (hinting at further now invisible activities), and the holes were often large and at times resealed with stones or sherds (Taylor 2016: 99). The praxis, moreover, was not adopted by other cemeteries in the region. We suggest that rather than seeing the Vollmarshausen use of urns as part of a wider phenomenon, it is more helpful to recognise this as an expression of the development of a distinct local tradition that lasted for some generations. It was probably inspired by wider shared concerns and ideas, but the solutions found were local. The more widespread practice of making holes in urns noted by Tackenberg (1976) has been interpreted in two ways. One approach argues that this represented a deliberate ‘killing’ of pottery, in other words, the suggestion that openings were created to make the pottery useless, to withdraw them from

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the use of the living and dedicate them to the dead (Roeder 1933). The other theory argues that the holes were for the soul to get to its cremated bones before leaving the urn again (Tackenberg 1976: 21–25). Neither of these approaches links such holes to arguments concerned with post-burial re-accession of graves, as they refer to decisions affecting earlier stages of the chaîne opératoire of the funeral. Food remains outside the graves are often suggested to be for the mourners and it is assumed they were consumed during feasting at the grave in connection with the burial and potentially also during rituals of later returns. Although important for revealing how death (and the burials) was conceptualised, in most cases the temporal duration and the staging of events cannot be established. There are, however, exceptions where it is possible to argue more precisely for what took place, and there are cases where it can be documented that graves were re-visited after the grave had been closed, at least once, but sometimes multiple times. At the cemetery of Pitten, clusters of sherds were frequently found next to grave structures. Smashed pottery was found in several different layers, which suggests visits to the graves happened multiple times, with intervals long enough for sediments to accumulate (Sørensen and Rebay 2008b: 170). It is very likely that the vessels were used to hold and serve food or drinks at the side of the grave, and that after such use the vessels were taken out of circulation and smashed (Fig. 8.3). Similarly, in the Marburg group, some features may hint at mourners’ activities. For instance, in the Botanischer Garten barrow group, there was an extended concentration of ash with a high number of sherds a few metres away from a cremation. It has been estimated that the sherds represented 100–120 vessels (Dobiat 1994: 42), suggesting a location for major and possibly recurrent activities. Features that first appear like graves upon excavation, and sometimes contain pottery and other objects, but with no traces of human remains, are relatively common in some areas. Their interpretation relies on similarities and differences to other local funerary structures. In some regions, so-called symbolic graves mimic grave pits in size and orientation and may contain sets of pottery but no body, for example, Streda nad Bodrogom, Grave 9 (Polla 1958) and Gelej, Grave 16 (Kemenczei 1979). The term ‘symbolic grave’ implies they were used as graves for missing bodies, but it is also possible that they were connected to post-funerary rituals, such as feasting and offering food and drink. This is the case, for example, at Vollmarshausen, where there were 45 pits with pottery interspersed between the burials throughout the cemetery. Bergmann (1982: 165) interpreted these as yet another form of food offering to the dead, but as they were not related to any graves it might be that they contained the remains of activities conducted by the living (Taylor 2016: 101).

AFTER THE BURIAL: PROLONGED ENGAGEMENT WITH THE BODY

8.3 Pottery clusters in relationship to graves at the cemetery of Pitten, Austria (Sørensen and Rebay 2008b: 170, Fig. 10)

CREATING SPACES FOR CONTINUED INTERACTION

Evidence of pre-planning of various post-burial engagements is particularly interesting as it reveals some of the complexity of how dead was conceptualised and how it was understood through the body of the deceased. Our concern in this chapter is not the architecture of the graves per se (see Chapter 7), but there are examples of constructions that appear to be purpose-built to facilitate communication between the living and the dead beyond the act of burial. This may take the form of creating direct physical

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8.4 Door opening of Grave 121 of Pitten, Austria (after Hampl, Kerchler, and BenkovskyPivovarová 1981: Pl. 54)

access to the cremated remains of the bodies or it may be done through the creation of a place of engagement, typically in close vicinity to the resting place of the dead. Examples of such constructions are rare, but their occasional presence is titillating as they raise questions about what other intangible practices may have been involved to make sure a burial was finished – that the last liminal stage was passed, and death made ‘final’. Within the period we focus on, we have only found evidence for the construction of ‘doorways’ as a means of accessing graves at the cemetery of Pitten, Austria (Hampl, Kerchler, and Benkovsky-Pivovarová 1981), but there might well be a wider range of such additions. At Pitten, the presence of doorways on some burial constructions were integral parts of the grave architecture and certainly not added afterwards. Access to the body after the interment was, therefore, pre-planned and anticipated. Door openings were observed in ten cases within the group of the cylinder graves in this cemetery. They consisted of two side posts, usually made of limestone blocks, leaving an opening of 0.6–0.8 m, and with some form of ‘lintel’. Graves 121 (Fig. 8.4), 189, and 192, for example, use a single large block of limestone as a lintel, whereas the lintel of Grave 104 was composed of two pieces. The cover of the door opening of Grave

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119 was made of several smaller stones, suggesting that a wooden frame originally supported the stones. Graves with door openings were apparently left open. This would have ensured an ongoing connection between the dead in the grave and the outside, both physically and psychologically. This is evidenced by substantial layers of sediment having built up. For example, for Grave 104 an identical stratigraphic sequence of sand layers was recorded outside as well as inside the grave to a height of 40 cm from the base of the grave. That the door openings not only provided an ‘exit’ for the grave but also enabled some kind of communication is suggested by clusters of broken pottery often found at the door opening. For instance, in Grave 189 a cluster of sherds, similar to the ones recorded outside, was found just inside the door opening, further linking the inside and outside spheres of the grave. Offerings of food and drink or feasting at the grave seemed to have taken place. Structures for continuing engagement with the dead after the closure of the graves are fairly common in the Lüneburg area and were first described as ‘altar-like’ offering places (Lienau 1913: 215–217). At the Ripdorf barrowgroup, for example, small rectangular or oval open spaces were added directly east of the grave structures and defined by a stone lining. The enclosures were usually void of finds and could easily be confused with disturbed stone kerbs, but they may have been built to deposit offerings (Geschwinde and Görner 2002: 81–82). Larger open spaces that appear to be forecourts have also been found. At Ripdorf, three rectangular forecourts at the east of the burial mounds ranged from 6.5 to 9.2 m in width and 10.5–11.2 m in length. The rectangular spaces were enclosed by stone linings; one of the forecourts was additionally surrounded by a ditch. All the forecourts appear to have had entrances at opposite sides to the north and south. Although only a few finds were recovered, charcoal from fires lit in the forecourts produced radiocarbon dates from a long period of the Bronze Age (1392 +/– 82 cal. BC to 926+/– 95 cal. BC), evidencing continued use of the space during and after the burials (Geschwinde 2000: 90–95). Further south, in the Marburg area (Dobiat 1994), depositions of ash, burnt materials, and pieces of pottery are frequently found close to the burial mounds and seem to be the remains of repeated rituals held in the vicinity of the graves. Burial mounds were frequently enclosed by low stone walls, built by two to four layers of stones to a height of 0.4–0.8 m. Whereas round enclosures typically encircle the burial mound, rectangular ones usually encompass some extra space around the mound that was used for post-funerary engagement. The rectangular stone structures are varied both in plan and in size; the largest, nicknamed ‘Tanzplatz’ is 27 m long (Fig. 8.5).

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8.5 Rectangular funerary enclosure at Marburg-Tanzplatz, Germany (Dobiat 1994: Plan 29)

In some cases, architectural features were built to facilitate post-funerary engagement, such as the small extensions to the stone enclosures of graves U20 ‘Botanischer Garten’ and 2 ‘Lichter Küppel’ (Dobiat 1994: 91). The larger burial mounds appear to be associated with higher numbers of fragmented pottery. Re-fitting and restoring the fragmented vessels revealed that they were deposited as fragments, and not smashed at the site; only parts were deposited at the graves. Sherds of vessel bases were preferentially chosen for deposition, both outside and within the grave structures, for example, at Grave U11. The other parts of the broken vessels may have been discarded elsewhere or kept as a memento, linking the mourner and the deceased through fragmentation and enchainment (Brück 2006b, Chapman 2000). In a sense, all graves, monumentalized or not, can serve as spaces for special activities focusing on the deceased and community membership. Whether marked or merely remembered by the participants, the interment of the body itself creates a space. So, no ‘special’ construction is necessary for this to be a special place, but when such special structures exist, they are a testimony of

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pre-planned activities – and this in turn suggests a degree of ritualisation, in the sense that they were recurrent practices that were expected and had to be done in a certain manner, rather than spontaneous expressions of grief. DISTURBING THE GRAVE: THE PH ENOMENO N OF ‘GRAVE RO BBING’ OR REACCESSION

‘Grave robbing’ or the re-opening of graves sometime after the burial was a very common phenomenon in the Early Bronze Age, especially in central Europe along the middle course of the Danube in Lower Austria, Moravia, and southwestern Slovakia, where about 90 per cent of graves were reopened (Sprenger 1999: 18). It typically involved removing some objects, in particular bronzes (as evidenced by the patina left behind), but it might also be seen in dislocation of body parts, either deliberately or as a secondary effect of the interference with the grave. In some central European cemeteries, almost all graves were affected. In Gemeinlebarn F, for instance, an Austrian early Bronze Age cemetery, only 15 of 259 burials remained undisturbed (Neugebauer 1991: 115). Similarly, in her detailed study of grave robbing at the nearby cemetery of Franzhausen, Sprenger found that only 73 of 647 burials were without traces of secondary interference (Sprenger 1999: 36). This kind of practice was previously interpreted as evidence of grave robbing, the unlawful extraction of precious metal objects by groups unrelated to the burying community (Neugebauer 1991). Some of the robbings were targeting particular parts of the body, often the neck and chest area, where substantial numbers of bronze ornaments could be expected, whereas the leg area – the area where pottery was most often placed – remained intact (Fig. 8.6). The green bronze patina on some skeletal parts and evidence for partial skeletal articulation suggest that the grave was opened and objects removed some time after the burial, but within the living memory of the burial and what was in it. Strikingly, it even seems that several graves could be opened at the same time, as body parts were not only dislocated but sometimes found in neighbouring graves (Sprenger 1999: 22–23), providing a tantalising hint of this as a community event. The re-opening of graves targeted not only objects but also body parts. At Gemeinlebarn F, 123 of 216 burials were missing the individuals’ skull (Neugebauer 1991: 127). Over recent years it has become clear that grave reopening was often a specific cultural practice (Hänsel and Kalicz 1986, Rittershofer 1987), and it can be observed in different regions and periods (e.g. Aspöck, Klevnäs, and Müller-Scheeßel 2020). Within some Middle Bronze Age Hungarian cemeteries, roughly contemporary with the Austrian Early Bronze Age, disordered skeletons, incomplete bronze assemblages, and broken pottery in the grave fill indicate later disturbance at the cemetery. This has been proposed for Füzesabony cemeteries such

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8.6 Grave 220 of Franzhausen I, Austria with traces of targeted disturbance of the upper body, while the lower body remained intact (Neugebauer and Neugebauer 1997: Pl. 98)

as Hernádkak (Schalk 1992: 81), Gelej (Kemenczei 1979) and Mezöcsát (Hänsel and Kalicz 1986), where at least half of the graves were disturbed. Women’s headdresses and upper body ornaments were most often the targets with graves of men and children robbed less often. For these cases, it has been proposed that the time between the burial and the re-opening of graves was around three generations (Pástor 1969: 82–83), and it has been argued that the motivation was that bronze grave goods were taken back after some time, probably after the corporality of the dead person had ceased (Hänsel and Kalicz 1986: 52). The detailed knowledge of the grave (where it was, who was buried, and where objects were located) suggest that the re-accession may have been done within ‘living memory’, in the sense of being able to recall details, and that this was probably shorter than three generations.

AFTER THE BURIAL: PROLONGED ENGAGEMENT WITH THE BODY

In Scandinavia, the practice of reopening graves within living memory of their construction was not, we think, widespread and common during Period II to IV, but it did take place. It seems that male burials were predominantly selected for reopening and that it was done not too long after the burial (Jensen 2002: 189). Some of the well-preserved oak-trunk graves provide very revealing evidence of how it was done. Of the oak-trunk coffins from the barrows at Guldhøj and Storehøj, both in Jutland, Denmark, two had been reaccessed by a shaft dug through the barrow mound and then a rectangular (app. 24 cm  14 cm) opening cut into the lid of the coffin. A long rod – the example from Storehøj was 84 cm long – with a hooked end had been used to ‘fish’ out the objects (Fig. 8.7) and was subsequently left behind (Jensen 2002: 190, Randsborg 1998, 2006, Thrane 1978). The obvious targeting of precious metal early on led scholars to argue that these were instances of grave robbing. The reason for opening the graves was thought primarily to have been material gain, and some even speculated that it would have been seen as ‘unlawful’ in prehistory (Neugebauer 1991: 132, Neugebauer 1994). It has also suggested that the ‘grave robbing’ was carried out by different groups from the ones who buried the dead, thus marking changes in politics and control of territory (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 247–248), or that it was done to disarm or harm the deceased by erasing expressions of identity (Jensen 2002: 189). The systematic nature of the re-opening within some cemeteries and the clear suggestions that these were not hush-hush night-time operations do, however, suggest that there might have been other specific cultural reasons related to the understanding of the temporal needs of the deceased and that such reaccession might in some areas have been part of the burial practices. Margarita Primas (1977: 107), based on the frequency of the practice of ‘grave robbing’, was amongst the first to propose that it should be interpreted as a recurrent practice and thus a ritual, or at least that this practice was socially tolerated. Bernhard Hänsel and Nándor Kalicz also proposed the idea of meaningful re-accession for Füzesabony graves at Mezőcsát (Hänsel and Kalicz 1986), and this was reinforced by Karl-Friedrich Rittershofer’s essay on grave robbing (1987). Cross-cultural research (Kümmel 2009) shows that motivations and aims of reopening graves vary widely, but also that the practise itself has been widespread. Commonly, graves have been re-opened for secondary burial practices, or due to the assumed economic or magic values of things within the graves – which may extend to both objects and body parts. More recently, the proposition that this reveals that the inalienable links between people and their objects only lasted for a while after burials whereafter the objects were taken back into circulation, has been widely argued (e.g. Aspöck 2015). However, Klevnäs has helpfully warned against uncritically assuming this link, stating that,

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8.7 Oak coffin of Storehøj, Denmark, with evidence of grave robbing in the form of a hole in the coffin and the hooked rod that was left behind (Boye 1896, after Thrane 1978: 10)

However, in its fullest exposition, Maussian possession [the basis for the idea of inalienable links] was deeply embedded in Pacific understandings of the material and spiritual compositions of both persons and things, and built on highly specific explanations of the ways in which things and people could be mutually composed and bear elements of the other (Klevnäs 2015: 12).

Whatever their emic reasons, when such practices emerge, they suggest a change in the perception of the purpose or the sanctity of the grave and the role objects were assigned in the further ‘life’ of the deceased. They suggest that the burials were not final, as further actions were possible, potentially even appropriate. As regards the status of the objects, whether in the form of grave goods or objects associated with the dead body/the deceased, such practices

AFTER THE BURIAL: PROLONGED ENGAGEMENT WITH THE BODY

suggest they must have been imbued with a sense of temporality; they belonged in the grave/with the deceased for a set time but not, necessarily, forever. The time involved may have been influenced by notions of bodily corporality (whether abstract or directly articulated through expectations about the process of decomposition). Until such time of re-accession, the person in the grave might not have been perceived as ‘totally dead’ or on the transition between life and death. Usually, there is no evidence for particularly respectful treatment of the bones, or particular care taken when extracting grave goods, suggesting a stage when the physical body had lost most of its living qualities, it may have become a substance of little relevance. In practical terms, reaccessions of objects took place while the location of the grave and objects within it were still remembered or could be subject to recall. These objects, after a time with the deceased, were probably transferred back into the possession of the living (Sprenger 1999: 19). This hints at a dissolution of the link between people and objects. If that was indeed what motivated these Middle Bronze Age communities, then this seems to suggest that for them death progressed through stages, or bodies could lose their links to objects through time. So how does the practice of ‘grave robbing’ translate to cremation graves? Clearly, it is significantly more difficult to detect and record the disturbance of a deposition of cremated bones, in particular if the bones were not enclosed in urns. Post-burial dislocation of pieces of burnt bones is hard to detect if completeness of the bones was not required in the funerary process. Furthermore, cremations were not always associated with grave goods, so their absence does not per se reveal that objects have been taken out. However, analogous to the green bronze stains on skeletal remains in inhumation graves, similar traces of diffused copper salts of decaying bronze artefacts have been noted on cremated bones from the cemetery of Pitten, Austria (TeschlerNicola 1985). The process resulting in such patina on cremated bones is, however, not fully understood. There are no reliable estimates of the time needed for copper salts to become incorporated in cremated bones, and hence it is unclear if a short exposure to bronze artefacts, for instance during the cremation, would have sufficed, or if we can assume that bronze goods were buried with the cremated bones and removed after a certain time. At Pitten, re-opening of inhumation graves and removal of objects affected 38 of the 75 inhumation graves and was particularly noted for the early central graves of burial mounds (Rittershofer 1987: 11–12). The removal of objects appears to be focused on precious diadems and ornaments worn on the chest for women or weapons for men; amulets and intimate objects such as finger rings and pins were left with the body, as were ceramic vessels and food remains. With cremation graves, the situation is less clear; 30 of the 75 cremated individuals show green traces of copper salts on some of the remains, although

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no bronze grave goods were recorded in the graves. This might suggest that the removal of grave goods remained a common practice in the region during the Middle Bronze Age, during the time of transition to cremation, even if it did not reach the level of normative behaviour that we saw in the Early Bronze Age. POST-BURIAL PRACTI CES AS PART OF LOCAL WEBS OF MEANI NG

Based on evidence of special local practices and a range of indirect hints and suggestions, we can conclude that post-burial activities continued into the Middle Bronze Age, including for cremation burials. It was not, however, a dominant practice. It was very diverse and localised in how it was enacted, and some instances encourage us to think about this ‘as a community’s specific way of life, led within its self-spun webs of meaning’ (Erll 2008: 4). Overall, however, we can discern two kinds of post-funerary treatment, which reflect different positions and attitudes to the human body; this difference may relate to how the temporal span between the burial and the finality of death was conceptualised. One treatment seems to reveal an understanding of the dead body as still ‘sort of living’ after the burial and thus assigned human/bodily needs (of which food and drink are the most apparent). The other treatment suggests a stage at which the corporeal remains seem to lose their importance, or at least their status so that their links to objects changed. As cremation burials in urns became dominant, these extended concerns about the continued and mutable status of the dead body gradually became less relevant and the stretching of the length of death that was expressed through post-burial reaccessions disappeared as a common concern. Death and the dead body became containable and liminality reduced.

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CONCLUSIONS On the Nature of Change in Burial Practices

I

n the previous chapters, we aimed to provide detailed scrutiny of the change from inhumations to cremations by focussing on what we initially proposed as a transition period, as a time during which core elements of burial practices were gradually transformed or changed and new normative practices developed. Such a period of unsettled social norms can be enormously revealing of societies’ core perceptions and values, bringing to light fundamental aspects of their ontologies. This is not least so when the norms express societies’ culturalization of their understanding of death and the status of the dead body. Moreover, as communities were working through novel ideas and developing new practices, there would also have been resistance to change, core values would have dragged on the ability to straightforwardly adopt changes. In turn, such resistance, subversions, and conservatism become revealing of such ideas and views. To stay attuned to the many examples of divergencies, experimentations, conservatism, and locally based understandings, the chapters throughout refer to this transition from inhumation to cremation as a period of transformation rather than simply a change. In transformations there is still a recognisable connection to an earlier form despite substantial modification; this in some ways facilitates transformation as it means it can be experienced as more or less natural, as obvious (Sørensen 2019). Although cultural practices were altered, the sense of continuities that transformation ensured helped to make the changes feel less like ruptures. Pre-existing traditions were reframed, in turn 191

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advancing the eventual success of the transformation. The phenomenon of Middle Bronze Age bi-ritual cemeteries and the inclusion of both inhumation and cremation burials within many barrows confirm that while fundamentally different practices, inhumations and cremations were not in conflict. In the previous chapters, we have operationalised this idea of transformations by investigating the major modifications of existing practices. This allowed a focus on practices and local communities as co-authors of their cultural lives rather than passively responding to larger trends and fashions. Through the chapters, we have brought forward for critical reflections various aspects of the core constitutive elements of burials – focussed on the body itself and the burial place. Attention also needed to be paid to potential evidence of subsequent interactions with the body, or the grave, and traces of activities taking place around the burial ground, as that was a common characteristic of Early Bronze Age mortuary activities in some areas and therefore may have influenced ideas about the status of the body after death. From these chapters arose a sound confirmation of the idea of a transition period, not sharply defined and not to be confused with periodisation or chronology, but rather as a means of capturing the temporality that is involved in cultural responses and formations of new tropes, of the conservative pull against the push for innovation and the simultaneous desire for new forms and curiosity about ‘how the neighbours behave’. We argue for the transition as a duration, and for it ‘taking time’. Several themes have emerged through the chapters, none of them necessarily surprising or radical but rather articulating, consolidating, and nuancing many existing views through an extensive data exploration and explicit theorisation of change in mortuary practices. The comparative focus firmly rejects interpretations that see this simply in terms of religious conversion. We argue that this interpretation rather than explicating the changes puts a black box around them. Such notions tend to assume that cultural changes are rational and infused with intentionality. Both assumptions are dictated by the present, including its assumptions about rationality. We question both in terms of our ability to provide the necessary insights to evaluate them in meaningful ways rather than simply impose our views upon past communities. Moreover, we posit that to the extent that intentions behind burial activities can be distilled, they were not just related to beliefs, as they were also always social; the two dimensions are intertwined in cultural practices. Burials were performances of cultural practices and tradition, of being and becoming communities. They were framed within interconnected understandings of the social and biological body, of death and the dead body, and wider social realities. These were complex contextual ontologies. How in turn intentions were framed will always appear blurred to us. Having the local as our explicit focus and yet drawing comparisons over a large region – geographically stretching from Hungary to Denmark, and

CONCLUSIONS

socio-politically from tell communities to dispersed farmsteads – have made it possible to explore the dynamics between localism and wide geopolitical trends in new ways. We are firmly on the side of localism, but only as regards the ‘how-to-do-this’ aspect of cultural practices. Traditions were remade, innovative ideas and trends explored and incorporated within existing practices, and new normative attitudes about how to conduct burials – and presumably also about how to understand the dead body – were gradually being formed locally. Sometimes aspects of this were developed as a tradition by a single community, such as the practice of making holes in the urns at the cemetery of Vollmarshausen or the door openings incorporated in the burial structures at Pitten, whereas in other areas it took the form of shared regional customs, such as the inclusion of small cups in the urns on Vatya Culture cemeteries. The local focus does not, however, entirely explain trends and fashions. That neighbours mimic each other does not provide a sufficiently wide-ranging mechanism for explaining the broad uptake of cremation, nor the changing use of vessels from being a container of food or grave goods to becoming the holders of the cremated body that we find so widely over continental temperate Europe. In their essence, both phenomena ruptured existing practices and constituted deeply based differences in attitudes to the dead body, and yet they were able to affect mortuary practices throughout the wide area of study. We must assume that for most of these communities the introduction of cremation was probably a result of received ideas, fashions, and influences; but despite this recognition of external influences and larger scale trends we still argue for this as a transformation, as local cultural practices were widely explored to give the cremated body familiar connotations. Therefore, although new ideas and influential trends about cremation were cultivated and made familiar, only gradually were core elements of existing understandings shed. The process of transformation was thus a dynamic dialogue between external fashions and communities’ understanding of these, and the latter was partly based on pre-existing practices and familiar tropes. Having these dialogues in mind, detailed analyses of changes in the treatment of the body itself, the construction of a burial place, and the interactions with the body post-burial provided detailed insights into how people locally changed their practices from inhumation to cremation burials. THE MECHANISMS OF CHANGE

One of the recurrent themes is how communities explored ways of performing burials that gave sense in terms of existing practices. Rather than change being rapid and new forms and ideas appearing over a very short duration, it is possible to demonstrate that in almost all areas it took a few generations before

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the core ontological aspects of inhumation burials were given up. By this we refer to the insistence on the presence of a body and the long-lasting tendency to treat the cremated remains in manners that alluded to, or narratively created, the remains as a body. This resistance was widely expressed through practices aimed at creating a physical likeness to a body such as stressing its size, proportions, and appearance. This was done, for example, by dressing the cremated bones, laying them out in the shape of a body, placing dress ornaments at the right places, by building burial chambers around them, or in other ways emphasizing their physicality and spatiality. These different elements gradually ceased from being a core concern and a framing of the choreography of burial practices and spaces, and by the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the emphasis on the body as a corporeal entity had largely gone. Some of the mechanisms underlying these changes may relate to how social norms are generated and how memory works. Burial practices are performative events that tend to be done according to a ‘script’ or tradition. Underlying these are social norms about what is considered the right and proper behaviour. From this point of view, the transition from inhumation to cremation may be seen as a change of normative conventions. Understanding how norms are generated and changed may thus be helpful. In sociology, such norms are at times referred to as descriptive and injunctive, and it is argued they help individuals to adhere to social norms because deviating from them is likely to produce unpleasant social interactions (Cialdini et al. 1990), and to this we would add insecurity and confusion. ‘Descriptive norms provide information about how similar people behave in similar situations, whereas injunctive norms provide expectations about how people are supposed to behave, and may be associated with disapproval, shame, or rejection’ (Sørensen 2019: 111). It can be argued that the transition, as a time of leaving one set of prescriptive practices behind and developing new ones, was a period bereft of descriptive norms about burials; new ones were being ‘worked out’. The intriguing question, in turn, is why new conventions were developed, and in the case of the Late Bronze Age urn burials how and why such a uniformly applied and standardised practice developed. Sørensen has argued that a . . . core motivation behind normative conventions may be the desire for sociability, generated both from individuals and from the collective, and the resulting striving towards behaviour that ensures one’s recognition as a member of a group, a tradition, or other forms of solidarities. Simultaneously, such conventions may also generate conflict in terms of challenges to those who act as gatekeepers, or it may generate other forms of social power. From this point of view, tradition itself may be an arena for the exercise of power and at the same time a potential focus for change and rejection (Sørensen 2019: 111).

CONCLUSIONS

The fundamental roles that social convention have in maintaining communities’ regulations and practices suggest that transformation may arise from deliberate challenges to existing traditions, including the normative convention they reference. But it may also result from gradual slippage in normative behaviour eventually leading to a need for, or allowance of, rejuvenation or reformulation of what these conventions were about. Memory, or recall, is central to such processes, creating an interplay between the present and past, and being instrumental to social understandings of how society functions and what are its customary practices. Whether embedded or explicit, memory and recall provide the roadmaps for action. Memory is, however, also attuned to how it is exercised and to whether and how it is ingrained in everyday practices, producing cultural and collective memories, underwriting habitus, and guiding punctuated performances in which ‘traditions’ – as the way we do things – are put on display. However, due to the size of our Bronze Age communities, the memory involved with decisions about how to conduct burials might have been a matter of recall rather than memory, as the need for burials were not an everyday occurrence. This means we should think about the deliberations regarding how to perform a burial as a deliberate memory action of retrieving information about how to conduct a noneveryday event, in this case recalling the practices of how ‘we bury’. To be available for recall these memories need to be attached, whether to narratives, rules, or material forms. These, in turn, may be unstable, and subject to vagaries such as arise from the capacities, intentions, and wishes of the ones given the role of recalling how to perform burials. We argue that in small-scale prehistoric societies, burials were probably rarely routine activities based on embodied knowledge, but on the contrary discursive practices, fine-tuned cultural products sensitive to and depending on recalls and contexts. Moreover, whereas memory helps to give longevity to forms of cultural practice, and often aid resistance to change, it does not assure stability. Therefore, whereas some changes in burial practices may be deliberate, driven by a desire to follow fashion or be seen to be innovative, digression can also simply be due to slippage of memory. In particular, within small-scale communities with time gaps between individual burials, social memory about how exactly burials are to be done may have been vague and provided little basis for descriptive norms; memory may have provided the general framework for action but lacked in explicit details. This in turn may have led to reliance on something similar to injunctive norms which would mean that prescription for the individual burial was shaped around vague memories together with expectations (and imaginations) of how others would have conducted burial rituals. And this means that horizontal comparisons, in other words how others, including neighbouring groups, behave, may have gained more influence in this time of flux.

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We thus propose that the wide-ranging ideas, fashions, trends, and arguments about reasons, coherence, and consequences that we must imagine affected communities’ sense of propriety during this time had various roll-on effects. Firstly, such ideas, whatever their roots, destabilised the existing ontological security about how to treat the dead body, but secondly, having breached this ontological scaffolding, it also undermined the roles of memory and traditions as the source of action, and in their place new practices were formed through cultural adaptation, imitations, and inventions. This necessitated the transformation of existing practices, but the ways of creating this were by experimentation, copying of practices, and formation of new logics as a basis for a changed ontological understanding of dead bodies, and thus possibly of death itself. The focus of these altered conventions were various aspects of the body and concerns about how to constitute its remains as the right kind of dead body. Cross-cutting our case studies we have discerned several themes that reveal ways in which new understandings of the body were being materialised and turned into performative conventions. Three themes were particularly striking as stage settings for experimental engagements and thus as the subject of reinterpretations and shifts. These were the recall of the anatomical body, the need for constructions, and the development of containers and associated ideas of containment. THE ANATOMICAL BODY

We argue that in Continental temperate Europe the stress on the anatomical whole, on the size and dimensionality of the body, was basic to how the dead body (and also the living body) was understood before the introduction of cremation. This was an integral part of the fundamental principles underwriting the understanding of the dead. Based on this core insight, the data made it possible to track how the emphasis on these elements gradually changed and how the changes were formulated and accomplished. The emphasis on the anatomical body was one of the most conservative aspects of the burial practice in the sense of lingering on and taking precedence despite other changes in how the body was treated. This emphasis on anatomical order or composition, and the identification of anatomical parts, can even at times be found in Late Bronze Age cremation urns, at a time when the transformation of the burial rite otherwise seems to have been completed. This consistency suggests, we propose, that the anatomical body, as a body made of components and having structural order, was deeply involved in the understanding of dead bodies and integral to how death was perceived. There was apparently a sense of importance or propriety in the recognition or emphasis on these elements of the body, and it was this attitude and beliefs about the

CONCLUSIONS

body that was most resistant to change. We argue that this core ontological aspect of the body used adaptation as a mechanism of ‘survival’. Practices evolved that made this possible, and – for while – they enabled the anatomical body to literally be extracted from the cremated body. And that body could be reassembled, whether in a Vatya urn or a stone chamber. The anatomical body, with its size and components (and needs) was still present; it was not reducible in any straightforward manner. Letting ‘go’ of this understanding was the aspect of the transformation that took the longest time. THE NEED FOR A ROOM: TRANSFORMING DIMENSI ONS

Whereas the size of the burial chambers or burial constructions appear to be the element that changed first and with the greatest ease, the presence of some kind of structure took much longer to disappear – the body could not be buried without some kind of protection. As discussed in Chapter 7, this change can, for instance, be traced in Scandinavia and northern Europe, where small square stone cists gradually replaced the larger coffins before the urn by itself came to constitute the grave. Despite the gradual shrinking of the size of the burial from containers or chambers that exceeded the size of the body, sometimes considerably so, to small square cists, the idea of a structure around the burial remained in place for a long time. It is even commonly suggested that the placement of a few stones around Late Bronze Age urns was a remnant of the idea of a cist or coffin around the urn. CONTAI NERS AND CONTAINMENT

The most dramatic development was that of funerary urns. In this transformation, the body changed from having physicality and volume, needing space, to becoming materials/remains that could be collected in an urn. The remains of the dead became containable in new ways, and the vessel changed from being a grave good or container of food to becoming the container for the remains. Any lingering references to the living body became more strained and, in some cases, primarily metaphorical (as when it is argued that the funerary vessel provided a shell or skin for the cremated remains). There are many instances of the anatomical body still being referenced in the placing of the remains within the urn, but the referential practice was radically altered. Rather than the body laid out and the links between the remains annotated and visualised – an anatomical mapping – the body within the urn has collapsed into parts of the body. The urn provided a means of holding these parts together, but not of displaying them. In this change, it seems that the social significance of the burial itself, or at least how it could be used as a theatrical performance of social ties, must also have been altered.

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RETURNING TO THE QUESTION OF ‘ORIGIN’

Our goal has been to explore how change took place, to provide insights into cultural mechanics of transformation. It has, however, also made the importance of the circulation of ideas and influences very clear. Although our comparative study was not concerned with questions about the origin of Bronze Age cremation practices, it cannot but acknowledge such questions as extremely challenging. Our study indirectly exposes how questions about ‘origin’ are extremely complex and easily become fraught with problematic assumptions. Traditionally, attempts at ‘answering’ questions about the origin of cremations have tended to use assumptions of single roots and uniform mechanisms of spread and reception that need to be scrutinised and detailed. Even at the simplest level, our study shows that there was not a fixed ‘package’ of cremation practices, and it is very unlikely that the adoption of cremation in different parts of temperate Europe was linked to pre-formulated ideological connotation. Moreover, we found that such assumptions leave far too little room for the messiness of how communities constitute themselves and shape their cultural and social practices, which is so richly evidenced through the data. Nonetheless, it is noticeable that the conservative emphasis on the physicality and spatiality of the cremated body characterised almost all of the regions we have investigated, but not all. Within the regions of temperate Europe we have investigated, the exception to this is found within part of Hungary. This seemingly returns arguments about the spread of cremation to earlier arguments that the Urnfield Culture developed in the Carpathian Basin and spread from there, as discussed in Chapter 2. Such arguments were, however, based on the idea of cremation as a rapid change. This ignores the range of bi-ritual cemeteries and comingling of ideas that this volume has discussed, and it ignores that cremation was already in use in Hungary during the Early Bronze Age Nagyrév phase. Understanding the spread of cremation as a short-term phenomenon with a singular point of origin is not viable anymore. This, however, does not mean that the very early use of cremation urns in Hungary is not a very striking phenomenon, and not least so the large, standardised cremation cemeteries of the Vatya Culture and its uniform use of urns. Equally striking, however, the neighbouring cultural groups chose other burial forms (Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury 2008), and rather than cremation in urns spreading from the Vatya Culture to other areas, Middle Bronze Age Hungary provides us with a mosaic of burial traditions – these differences were possibly used as a means of performing local identities in a relatively densely inhabited region, but they also suggest nuances in how the dead body, and its needs, was understood. Our study has revealed that there were substantial local elements in the adaptation of cremation. This characteristic was largely ignored by earlier

CONCLUSIONS

treaties about the spread of cremation, and the consequential tension between a local focus and general interpretations has tended to drag on meaningful contemporary discussions of the spread of/change to cremation burials. It is, therefore, worth briefly returning to this question and to ask whether and how we can progress in our understanding of the spread of cremation practice? Moreover, it seems to us useful to do this by separately reflecting on the spread of cremation as an idea versus how it was materialised in practice. Cremation as an abstract idea. Although in some regions, such as the Lüneburg area or the Vatya Culture, cremation had been practised before the Early/ Middle Bronze Age spread of cremation, there are good reasons to suggest that generally the idea (the ontological reasoning) for the take-up of cremation practices was external to local cultural traditions and connected to desires to be part of a trend, to imitate. The reason we propose this is that there were coherent and shared characteristics in terms of what the emphasis on change of established practices was about. Throughout, the shared aspects were centred on the cremation of the deceased rather than other aspects of the burial, and the gradual transformations of the latter were very diverse in terms of practice and apparent concerns. In addition, this happened roughly around the same time, and the longer-term trend led to very similar burial practices over large parts of Europe. Had cremation versus inhumation merely been about local and individual preferences, a much more random pattern would be expected than what we observe. We believe that there remain good reasons to support the view that the idea of cremations, the ontological reasoning and rationale around the abstract state of the body in death were external to many of the areas we have looked at, and that this is exactly why the transformation took and needed time. Cremations materialised in practice. Equally obvious, the understanding of what this meant in terms of how the grave should be constructed and, in particular, what kind of matter the cremated body was, and how it should be treated, had to be locally comprehended. We suggest, therefore, that the circulation of the idea of cremation, in the form of reasons why cremation was an appropriate burial form, was separate from any practical guidance about how it should be done. It must either have been the case that the influence took the form of ideas and abstract notions, but lacked actual instructions, or that different communities would naturally assert their control over such practices, as they had to carry them out. The composition of such communities, ranging in terms of the capabilities and personality of its cultural stewards to their inclinations towards their neighbours and the ‘far-away’, would have hugely influenced actual practice, making them open towards some ideas and ready to change some of their important ritual practices, while resisting other ideas, or finding some trends unpalatable or incomprehensible. Amid these constellations, pre-existing understandings of the body as a physical whole together

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INDEX

19th century, 9, 15–16, 18–19, 78, 82, 101 abilities, 38, 43, 68 abject, 45 Adendorf, 140 Aegean, 26, 65, 68 aesthetic, 64, 110, 153 afterlife, 31–32, 41, 149, 177 age, 45, 48, 66, 68, 70, 76, 79, 82, 94, 97, 99, 101, 105, 119–121, 124, 131–132, 158, 165, 178 old people, 70 Alexander, John, 30 Alpine, 60–61, 75, 127 anatomical, 116, 132–133, 138–139, 148, 154, 196–197, 199 anatomy, 138, 140 animal remains, 104, 145, 147 anthropomorphic vessels, 146 antiquarianism, 16 architecture, 61, 63, 77, 117, 141, 176, 181–182, 184 architectural, 149 Arcini, Caroline, 147, 156 Argaric period, 65 Atocha train station, 175 Austria, 19–20, 92–93, 110, 120, 122, 128–129, 133, 138, 141, 163, 181–182, 185, 189 Austrian-Hungarian, 19 Balkan, 23, 26–27 Barbing, 127 barrow, 18, 64, 79–80, 88, 105, 108–109, 111–112, 122, 155, 166, 168, 175, 180, 183, 187 Bavaria, 65, 86, 98, 101, 115 Becker, Sebastian, 30, 74 beliefs, 4–7, 14–16, 28–29, 32, 38, 40, 42, 45, 53, 55, 71, 84, 100, 113, 125, 136, 145, 150, 167, 192, 196 Bell Beaker, 83 Benares, 50 Bergmann, Joseph, 95, 97, 178–179 Bernsdorf, 60 biography, 43, 52, 69, 95 Biological death, 38 bird-sun-boat, 30, 72 bi-ritual, 2, 119–120, 192, 198

Bleckmar, 135, 160 Blischke, Jobst, 119 bodiness, 12–13, 41, 43, 48, 52, 111, 138, 141, 154 body body ideology, 106 reducible qualities of a body, 47 body-sized grave, 90, 109, 144 Bohemia, 65 Böhm, Jaroslav, 23 Bonyhád, 92, 154, 177 Borum Eshøj, 140 Botanischer Garten, 103, 153, 155, 180, 184 branding, 30, 74 bronze, 18–19, 28, 30, 60, 69, 72–74, 77, 84, 91, 99, 101–102, 106–108, 121–122, 130, 135, 143, 156, 160, 164, 185, 189 Brück, Joanna, 62, 65 Bruzelius, Nils Gustaf, 18 Budapest-Békásmegyer, 146 Budapest-Kelenföld, 167 cadaver, 46 Čaka, 123 Carpathian Basin, 55–56, 58, 60–63, 66, 83, 90, 198 Celtic, 18 central Europe, 15–16, 18, 20–21, 23, 25–30, 55, 59–60, 62, 64–65, 76, 80, 82–83, 86, 92, 108, 116, 137, 157, 167, 171, 175–176, 185 central European, 21, 26, 57, 82, 105, 185 central grave, 108–109, 111 chaîne opératoire, 11, 52, 114, 125, 148, 150–151, 180 chiefdom, 29 child, 44, 67–68, 70, 96, 104, 108–109, 120, 143, 157, 160 childbirth, 45 Childe, Vere Gordon, 23–25, 33 children, 17, 66, 68, 70, 79, 82, 94, 98, 102, 106, 120–122, 174, 186 choreography, 49, 123, 157, 170, 179, 194 choreographed event, 33 choreographed practices, 49 Christian, 9, 16, 19, 31 cists, 65, 77, 106, 110–111, 137, 155–156, 160, 164–167, 170, 173, 197 citation, 40, 49–50, 55 classical authors, 16, 25, 31

225

226

INDEX

Closure, 164 containment, 164 coffin, 77–78, 99–100, 109–111, 117, 138, 141, 152, 154–156, 158–160, 172, 187–188, 197 coffins, 77, 95, 99, 106–107, 110–111, 137, 140–141, 156–158, 161, 165, 172–173, 187, 197 community, 6, 12, 24, 32, 39–42, 60, 63–64, 68, 70–71, 75, 79–80, 84, 92, 95, 101–102, 114, 116, 118–120, 125, 127, 168, 174, 177, 179, 184–185, 190, 193 Compassionate cannibalism, 39 conventions, 2, 6, 9, 37–38, 48, 59–60, 64, 69, 96, 123, 194–196 Corded Ware, 76, 83 corporeal, 2, 41, 91–92, 94, 190, 194 cosmology, 29–30, 50, 73–74, 85 Cottbus-Alvensleben, 139 Cova des Pas, 77 cremation platform, 94, 129 Csongrád, 92 cult places’, 95 cultural groups, 7, 18, 81, 198 cultural norms, 37, 40, 55 Damsgård, 112, 126, 128, 134–135, 137 Danube, 26–27, 86, 90, 98–99, 119, 122, 146, 185 Danubian, 25, 29, 59 death houses, 107, 116, 118, 175 Denmark, 29, 64, 68–69, 73, 77–78, 87, 89, 107–109, 117–118, 120, 123, 126, 128, 134–135, 137, 140, 155–157, 164, 166, 173, 187–188, 192 diseases, 45 DNA, 23, 68 Dobiat, Claus, 122 Dolný Peter, 92 door opening, 182 doorways, 182 double burials, 96–97, 104, 143 dressed person, 48, 157 Dunaújváros, 92, 130, 139, 145, 177 Dunáujváros, 139 Earle, Timothy, 62 Eastern Europe, 73 Eastern Germany, 19 eastern Mediterranean, 21, 23, 26 Egtved, 69, 77, 108–109, 143, 157, 160 Elbe-Weser, 20 embodied subject, 46 embodiment, 42, 47–48, 172 emotions, 37 Encrusted Urn Culture, 77 Encrusted Ware, 83, 89–90, 92, 126, 141, 153–154, 168, 177 England, 14, 16, 65–66, 89, 127, 131 Esztergom, 92 ethnic, 18, 22–23 ethnicity, 20, 23, 119

ethnographies, 37 Etteln, 118 Evolutionary approaches, 21 Ex Oriente Lux, 21, 26 experience, 7, 37, 41, 44–48, 126, 131, 179 experimenting, 49, 150 face-urns, 146, 170 families, 50, 62–63, 68, 70, 79–80, 106, 163 family, 44, 60, 63, 68–70, 95–97, 105–106, 125, 143, 167 female, 47, 71, 76, 81, 94, 96, 98, 100, 104, 106–107, 119–122, 132, 135, 143, 156, 160, 162 fire, 7, 30–32, 39, 66, 99–100, 107–108, 122, 126–127, 131, 135, 137–138, 141, 154 flowers, 77, 131 food, 39, 41, 62, 64, 77, 97, 100, 118, 134, 147, 161, 176–178, 180, 183, 189–190, 193, 197 Forschner, 60 fortifications, 60 France, 73, 89 Franzhausen, 185–186 fuel, 114, 126–127, 131–132 fur lining., 77 Furmánek, Václav, 32 Füzesabony, 89–91, 121, 157, 170, 177, 185, 187 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 36–37 Gelej, 92, 177, 180, 186 Gemeinlebarn F, 185 gender, 46, 48, 68, 76, 80, 82, 94, 104, 119–121, 124, 162 Germanic, 18, 22, 121 Germany, 21–22, 31, 34, 60–61, 73–74, 88, 96, 99, 101–103, 105, 108, 117, 122–123, 126, 129–130, 132–133, 137, 139, 141–142, 144, 147, 153, 159, 164–165, 170, 178 Glennan, 145 Gogâltan, Florin, 66–67 Gräslund, Bo, 18, 32 grave robbing, 185, 188–189 Great Britain, 25 Great Hungarian Plain, 90 Greece, 25, 29 Gries, 163 Grimm, Jacob, 31 Grundfeld, 87, 98, 101–102, 145, 162 Gualöv, 147 Guldhøj, 78, 187 habitus, 55, 195 Hallstatt, 18, 21, 57, 98, 123, 132–133 Hänsel, Bernhard, 59, 187 headdress, 106 Heidegger, Martin, 36 Henriksen, Mogens Bo, 20 hermeneutic, 10, 36 Hernádkak, 92, 186

227

INDEX

Hertz, Robert, 32 hide, 77, 110–111, 156 Hindu cremations, 39, 113, 126 hoards, 3, 15, 57, 71, 76, 91, 127 Hoernes, Moritz, 21 Hostmann, Christian, 19 house urn, 179 houses, 60–62, 68, 91, 116, 118, 149, 172, 175 human bones, 33, 49, 65–67, 100 Hungary, 19, 62–64, 66, 77, 83, 86–87, 90, 121, 126, 130, 133–134, 141, 145–147, 153–154, 157, 162, 168, 177, 192, 198 Hungarian, 59 Hvidegård, 111, 140, 156, 160 Iberia, 65 iconography, 30, 71, 73–74 India, 31, 50, 125 Indo-European, 23, 25 Indus River, 31 infants, 45, 120 Inzersdorf, 122, 129 Iron Age, 19–20, 28–29, 63, 68, 121, 146, 168, 170 isotope, 23, 33, 68, 178 Italy, 23, 29, 73, 146 Jutland, 108–109, 112, 118, 187 Kalicz, Nándor, 187 Kaliff, Anders, 118 Kaul, Flemming, 73–74, 117 Kelheim, 147 Kimmig, Wolfgang, 26–27 kin, 65, 68, 76, 110, 120–121, 124, 167, 169 Királyszentistván, 92, 141, 147, 177 Kivik grave, 75, 145 Klevnäs, Alison, 187 Knovíz culture, 65 knowledge, 10–11, 33, 36–37, 43, 55, 59, 62, 186, 195 Környe-Fácánkert, 92, 126 Kossack, Georg, 29–30, 72 Kossinna, Gustaf, 21–22, 24 Kraft, Georg, 23 Kristeva, Julia, 45 Kristiansen, Kristian, 28–29 Kulc, 92 Kulturkreislehre, 20–21 Lahn, 103 lake, 61, 63 Larsson, Thomas, 29 Latène, 19, 57 Lausitz, 25, 107 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 16 Leubingen, 79 Lichter Küppel, 103, 184 life expectancies, 68

lifecycle, 43, 46, 114 localism, 193 Low Countries, 23, 63 Lüneburg, 82, 87–88, 105–106, 117–119, 135, 137, 140, 143, 159, 183, 199 Lüneburg group, 82, 105, 119 Lusatian, 22, 34 Lusehøj, 79, 123, 164 Lustrupholm, 108, 120 Luther, Martin, 16 Maglehøj, 166 male, 94, 98, 100, 104, 106, 121, 123, 132, 162 Marburg, 80, 87, 103–104, 121, 137, 153–155, 162–163, 180, 183 Marburg region, 80 Marburg school, 22, 34 medieval period, 16 Mediterranean, 21, 26–28 Megyaszó, 92, 157 memory, 14, 98, 103, 158, 169, 185–186, 194–196 men, 61, 69–70, 79, 82, 120–121, 186, 189 menopause, 47 Merhart, Gero von, 26 Mestorf, Johanna, 16, 19 metaphor metaphorical, 55, 157 Metzner-Nebelsick, Carola, 31 Mezőcsát, 92, 157, 187 Middle East, 28 migration, 23–26 Mikkelsen, Martin, 68 mobility, 26, 63, 68–69 Montelius, Oscar, 18–19, 25, 57 Moravia, 185 mortality, 44, 70 Mortality patterns, 68 Mosonszentmiklós, 92 moss, 78–79, 110 mourners, 32, 47, 50, 180 Müller, Sophus, 31, 82 Müller-Karpe, Hermann, 26, 147 Mycenaean, 26, 60, 65 national, 20, 26 nation-state, 20 Near East, 21, 26 Nebelsick, Louis D., 31 Nebra sky disk, 73 Neckarsulm, 34, 123 Netherlands, 89 Nicole Taylor, 95 Nordic Bronze Age, 18, 22, 25, 28, 107 normative practices, 12, 40, 191 norms descriptive norms, 194 normative convention, 195

228

INDEX

northern Europe, 16, 18–19, 21, 25, 28, 49, 56–57, 61–63, 66, 68, 73, 76, 80, 82–83, 86, 118, 128, 137–138, 140, 153, 161, 165–168, 171–172, 175–176, 197 Northern Europe, 20, 57–58, 62, 64 northern Germany, 18–19, 105, 117, 121, 135, 157, 171, 173, 179 offering places, 183 Old Norse literature, 31 ontological turn, 37 outsiders, 33 Over barrowfield, 126 Palincaş , Nona, 146 performative events, 194 personal objects, 76, 78, 81 physical transformation, 44, 52, 125, 136 Pitten, 19, 86–87, 92–94, 110, 116, 120, 126–127, 129, 131, 137–138, 141, 153–155, 168–169, 180, 182, 189, 193 Plakofen, 127 Poland, 22, 146, 179 population movement, 23 post-funerary practices, 174 post-humanism, 43 Potsdam-Eiche, 73 pottery, 13, 17, 24, 64, 67, 76, 83–84, 90–92, 97, 99–100, 104, 121–122, 129–131, 134–135, 141–143, 145–147, 153, 162, 170, 172, 177, 179–180, 183, 185 Prähistorische Bronzefunde, 22 pregnancies, 46 Primas, Margarita, 187 purification, 31 pyre, 33, 52, 75, 94, 98–100, 104, 108–109, 112, 114, 116–117, 126–127, 129–138, 143–144, 147, 152–156, 159, 164–165, 173, 175 race, 22, 25 Raluca Burlacu-Timofte, 66 razors, 30, 73, 81, 106, 135 re-accessing, 175, 179 regionalism, 82 Reinecke, Paul, 19, 25, 57 religion, 1, 8, 28–30, 35, 73, 145 re-opening, 175, 178, 185–187, 189 resistance, 9, 124, 191, 194–195 Ripdorf, 135, 160, 183 rites de passage, 40 Rittershofer, Karl-Friedrich, 187 rock art, 30, 73, 75 Roman, 18–19, 132 Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, 19 Routine practices, 84 sacrifice, 31 Sandagergård, 117

Scandinavia, 18, 23, 30, 73, 75, 82, 116, 119, 146, 155–156, 171, 175, 179, 187, 197 Scania, 147 Schmidt, Jens-Peter, 116, 135 Schuchardt, Carl, 31 Schutschur, 117 Scotland, 77, 145 Sea People, 26 seaweed, 78–79, 110, 166 Second World War, 22 secondary burial, 108–109, 160, 167–168, 175, 187 Seddin, 123, 164 settlement, 3, 21, 28, 59–62, 64–65, 67, 69, 80, 84, 90, 98, 119, 129 sex, 66, 97, 99, 101, 119–121, 124, 132, 143, 158, 178 shaman, 111, 145 Sherratt, Susan and Andrew, 28 shrouds, 157 Siedlungsarchäologische Methode, 20, 22 Silesia, 118 Sir Thomas Browne, 16 Skallerup, 108 Skelhøj, 64, 79, 109 skeuomorphs, 51 Skrydstrup, 77 Slavs, 22, 25 Slovakia, 32, 75, 123, 171, 185 Sofaer, Joanna, 45 Sørensen, Marie Louise Stig, 82, 194 soul, 4, 31–32, 39, 179–180 southern Germany, 19–20, 57, 77, 98, 121, 127 Sprenger, 185 St. Andrä, 164 status, 1, 3, 7–8, 12–13, 40–41, 44–46, 75–76, 82, 87, 94, 97, 101–102, 114–115, 120–121, 123–124, 130, 132, 134–136, 138, 151, 188, 190, 192 Stempel, 103 stone paving, 77, 109, 153 Storehøj, 187–188 stratigraphy, 18, 91 Streda nad Bodrogom, 92, 170–171, 180 sun-boat-bird, 3 Sweden, 75, 145, 147 Switzerland, 63 symbol, 28, 30, 46, 74 synchronism, 51 Százhalombatta-Alsó Szőlők, 92 Százhalombatta-Földvár, 62, 66 Szigetszentmiklós-Felsőtag, 92 Taylor, Nicole, 97 tell, 60–61, 63–64, 66, 91 temperate Europe, 2, 6, 25, 59, 65–68, 193, 196, 198 textile, 110–111, 140, 143, 156–157, 170 Thomsen, Christian Jürgensen, 17, 157 Three Age System, 17–18 three-aisled long houses, 63 Thuringia, 65

229

INDEX

Thy, 108, 112 Tischler, Otto, 19, 21 Tisza, 91 Tiszafüred, 157 tribes, 20–21, 23 Trindhøj, 78 tropes, 29, 55, 171, 192–193 Trundholm Sun Chariot, 73 tumuli, 18, 76, 155 Tumulus Culture, 57, 61 Tumulus Period, 57 Undset, Ingvald, 19 Urnfield Culture, 3, 10, 15–16, 19–21, 23, 25–28, 30, 34, 65, 86, 90, 107, 166, 198 urnfields, 3, 15–18, 20–22, 24, 26, 28 Vatya, 62, 64, 89–90, 92, 130, 133–134, 145, 162, 164, 166, 168, 172, 177, 193, 197–199 Veliacˇik, Ladislav, 32 Veľké Raškovce, 75

Vicze, Magdolna, 130, 166 Virchow, Rudolf, 22 Vollmarshausen, 86–87, 95–97, 129, 133, 144, 161, 163–164, 167, 178–180, 193 Vomp, 129 von Merhart, Gero, 22 Wagner, Ernst, 19 Wales, 77 warfare, 26, 81 warrior, 28, 30, 34, 74, 81, 123 weight, 116, 125, 132–133 Wiepenkathen, 160 Wiesner, Norbert, 162 woman, 69, 108–109, 143, 157, 160 women, 69–70, 77, 79, 82, 120–121, 124, 143, 189 World System model, 27 Zealand, 108, 111 Zuchering, 87, 98–100, 122, 126, 130, 133, 135, 137, 141–143, 145, 147, 155, 158–159, 162