Death and burial in Iron Age Britain / Dennis Harding.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harding, D. W. (Dennis William), author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Burial--Great Britain--History--To 1500.

Burial.

Iron age--Great Britain.

Iron age.

History.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--Antiquities.

Antiquities.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xv unnumbered pages, 328 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Corby : Oxford University Press, 2015.

Summary:

Archaeologists have long acknowledged the absence of a regular and recurrent burial rite in the British Iron Age, and have looked to rites such as cremation and scattering of remains to explain the minimal impact of funerary practices on the archaeological record. Pit-burials or the deposit of disarticulated bones in settlements have been dismissed as casual disposal or the remains of social outcasts. In Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain, Harding examines the deposition of human and animal remains from the period - from whole skeletons to disarticulated fragments - and challenges the assumption that there should have been any regular form of cemetery in prehistory, arguing that the dead were more commonly integrated into settlements of the living than segregated into dedicated cemeteries. Even where cemeteries are known, they may yet represent no more than a minority of the total population, so that other forms of disposal must still have been practised. A further example of this can be found in hillforts which, in addition to domestic and agricultural settlements, evidently played an important role in funerary ritual, as secure community centres where excarnation and display of the dead may have made them a potent symbol of identity. The volume evaluates the evidence for violent death, sacrifice, and cannibalism, as well as age and gender distinctions, and associations with animal burials, and reveals that 'formal' cemetery burial or cremation was for most regions a minority practice in Britain until the eve of the Roman conquest.

Contents:

1 Defining issues 1

2 Mortuary practices, problems, and analysis 25

3 Communities of the dead: formal cemeteries and burial grounds 55

4 Dead among the living landscape 95

5 Focal and signal burials 127

6 Graves and grave-goods 163

7 Social and ritual violence and death 189

8 Gender issues 219

9 Animal burials and animal symbolism 241

10 Conclusions: death and burial in the Iron Age 267.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [293]-319 and index.

ISBN:

9780199687565

0199687560

OCLC:

905487147