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Death confronts us with the ultimate boundary through which we all inexorably pass. According to Derrida, awareness of our own mortality calls fort...
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Death confronts us with the ultimate boundary through which we all inexorably pass. According to Derrida, awareness of our own mortality calls forth other intangible boundaries, such as ethical constraints to our freedom and the moral indelibility of our actions. Death is the decisive end point from which the legacy of our behaviour is irrevocably judged. It compels us to take personal responsibility, and this is perhaps what Benjamin Franklin was alluding when he wrote “In this world nothing could be said to be certain except death and taxes”. What then of the troublesome dead – those who lay beyond normal social categories or through their own deeds offend the very social order. In later medieval Ireland, strangers, suicides, or unrepentant murderers were rarely buried in consecrated ground. Unbaptised children were also treated differently in death, interred in Killeen cemeteries - liminal, clandestine places often reusing the early medieval settlement enclosures that had long since fallen out of use. The origin of this practice is often assumed to be associated with the adoption of Christianity, the Limbus Infantus of the medieval church that decreed baptism to be the threshold through which all must pass before entering Christian society, and without which incorporation into the society of the dead was impossible.
This paper assesses the origins of this practice drawing on a recently excavated early medieval settlement cemetery from Carrowkeel, Co. Galway. The cemetery was in use for over 700 years, and the spatial segregation of children can be recognised in the early phases of the site. Was this segregation a precursor to the later medieval practice of Killeen burial? Did the adoption of Christianity elaborate the pre-existing boundaries of an early medieval society obsessed with status in life and its continuity into death? To understand how these nuanced conceptual and physical boundaries worked in the past, this paper begins by addressing the boundaries that divide our discipline in the present. Using Carrowkeel as a case study, this project illustrates how a multi-disciplinary team of specialists can work together to bridge the perceived gap between humanities and science-based research, and how this can be delivered within a time-bound development schedule.
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