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Mortality, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2013.870544
AQ2 ABSTRACT Objects in graves have been a traditional focus of burial archaeology. Conventional
interpretations of their meanings revolved around religion (equipment for the hereafter, Charon’s
Penny), legal concepts (inalienable possessions) and social structure (status display, ostentatious
destruction of wealth). An interdisciplinary perspective drawing on archaeological literature,
10 anthropological evidence and sociological theory widens the range of possible interpretations. Textual
sources of the Roman and early medieval periods highlight the importance of gift-giving to the
deceased, but also to deities. Anthropology shows the importance of the disposal of polluted items in
the grave, and of protecting the living. Ethnographic cases also underpin theoretical considerations
concerning the role of biographical representations (metaphors) during the funeral, as well as
15 emphasising the desire and the need to forget the dead. Textual and archaeological evidence from
the Early Middle Ages suggest that these motives were not sharply separated, but that many of them
played a role during any one funeral. In addition, motives changed over time, and the associations
of particular grave goods (such as coins or weapons) varied across time and geographical regions.
Above all, multiplicity of messages and variability of meanings characterised the deposition of objects
20AQ3 in early medieval graves.
KEYWORDS: mortuary archaeology; burial rite; grave goods; continuing bonds; attachment
theory; reminder theory
Grave goods were deposited with the dead in many periods of the human past,
25 from the late Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages and the more recent past. Indeed,
we appear to be seeing a revival of this custom at the present time, with items
of sentimental value increasingly deposited particularly with children, possibly
reflecting post-modern sensibilities (see Harper, 2012). The term ‘grave goods’,
as used by archaeologists, simply denotes anything found in a grave in addition
30 to human remains and encompasses a variety of items, from the remains of
dress to deliberate depositions of objects in graves, as well as sacrificial
offerings.
Such depositions have always been central to the pursuit of burial
archaeology. To European antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth
35 century, the search for prehistoric cremation urns and the excavation of Bronze
Correspondence: E-mail:h.g.h.harke@reading.ac.uk
2 H. Härke
and Iron Age barrows was primarily a treasure hunt. With the growth of
archaeology into a scholarly discipline in the later nineteenth century, grave
goods provided one of the most important means for constructing chronologies,
giving a temporal framework to a past of hitherto unknown depth (Gräslund,
1987; Klindt-Jensen, 1975). From the end of the nineteenth and the early 5
twentieth century, grave goods were increasingly used for ethnic and social
inferences: regionally different styles of artefacts were used to identify ‘tribes’
and ‘peoples’ in an attempt to write national prehistories (Childe, 1929;
Kossinna, 1911); and differential wealth in graves within the same cemeteries
or regions led to suggestions of social hierarchies (Reinecke, 1925; Veeck, 10
1926). While ethnic inferences have more recently become controversial, social
inferences have become part of the methodological canon of archaeology
(Härke, 2000a). Above all, grave goods have always suggested a religious
dimension, their very presence apparently implying a ‘pagan’ concept of an
afterlife where material goods were useful and important (Paulsen, 1967; 15
Reinecke, 1925).
Since the 1980s, there has been a shift, mainly in Anglophone burial archae-
ology, from the reconstruction of life in the past, to the inference of attitudes
and behaviour in the encounter with death (Härke, 2002; Parker Pearson,
1999). This has led to an archaeological concern with anthropological 20
perspectives (see overview in Parker Pearson, 1999, pp. 21–44), emotion
(Tarlow, 1999, 2000), memory (Williams, 2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2004, 2006)
and the construction of post-mortem identities (Ekengren, 2004). This, in turn,
is beginning to make burial archaeology – and grave goods – more interesting
for historians and sociologists of death, and a recent attempt at a grand 25
narrative of the history of death (Kellehear, 2007) puts much emphasis on
inferences from grave goods. Other sociologists have begun to explore the role
of material culture in relation to death and memory (Hallam & Hockey, 2001).
This may, therefore, be an opportune moment to provide an overview of the
possible meanings of grave goods from an archaeological perspective, and 30
discuss why they might have been deposited in the grave. This is approached
by an anthropological and sociological consideration of archaeological interpre-
tations of grave goods, and by an application of the resulting classification to
early medieval burials. In that sense, the present paper is an attempt at bridging
old and new perspectives. The emphasis here is on the Early Middle Ages 35
(broadly speaking, fifth–tenth centuries AD) because of the rich and varied
grave-goods custom practised in Europe at this time (but discontinued later),
and because the existence of (albeit sparse) written sources in this period
provides additional information which is lacking for prehistoric periods.
rule, primarily the Celtic-speaking areas of the British Isles and the
5 Mediterranean where only some immigrant groups of mainly Germanic stock
practised this custom. After the eighth century, grave goods are only found on
the northern and eastern fringes of Christian Europe, in Scandinavia, among
the Balts, and among the nomad societies from Hungary to the North Pontic
and Caucasian steppes; in these regions, the custom disappeared at various
10 times in the early second millennium AD, usually with the advance of
Christianity. However, the grave-goods custom was hardly ever uniform, and
even where grave goods were not the norm, some burials were singled out for
depositions. For example, croziers and pectoral crosses have been found in
some clerics’ graves in contexts where ordinary Christians were buried in
15 nothing more than a shroud.
Objects found in early medieval graves include a wide variety of artefacts, but
these occur in regionally distinct, gender-differentiated kits. Dress items and
jewellery are typical items in adult female burials, and much rarer in male adult
and children’s graves. Their appearance in graves is the direct consequence of
20 the custom of dressed burial in this period. Keys and knives were usually worn
on the body and may be considered part of the dress. Separately deposited
items, such as weapons, tools and drinking vessels, dominated in male burials.
Other separate depositions included cooking vessels, household items, boxes,
musical instruments, games and horse harness. By contrast, boats, wagons,
25 beds, other wooden furniture and textile coverings of walls and floors were rare,
and limited to burial chambers of the social elite.
Miniature copies of artefacts occur, for example, in Anglo-Saxon graves; made
specifically to accompany the dead, they were probably a pars pro toto. The
deliberate destruction of artefacts before their deposition was rare in this period,
30 and mostly limited to Scandinavia. Animal and human sacrifices are a distinct
category of ‘grave goods’. Horses and dogs are found in, or next to, conspicu-
ously rich graves of northern Europe. Human sacrifice is documented for the
Viking period (nineth/tenth centuries AD), both in written sources (Ibn Fadh-
lan; Jones, 1984, pp. 425–430) and in archaeology (Bersu & Wilson, 1966).
35 Grave goods are found not just in inhumations, but also in cremations
wherever this rite was practised in the Early Middle Ages (Scandinavia, parts of
England and much of Eastern Europe). In this case, grave goods could be
‘primary’ (i.e. put on the pyre together with the body) or ‘secondary’
(deposited complete with the cremated remains in the urn or grave pit).
40 Numbers and wealth of grave goods in any one grave varied markedly
although the picture of differential wealth is likely to have been affected by the
decay of organic materials (see below). There are also varying proportions of
graves without any archaeologically recoverable artefacts or other depositions.
Thus, in early Anglo-Saxon England where artefacts are found in virtually all
45 cemeteries of the fifth to seventh centuries, about 50% of male graves and 70%
of females contained the standard ‘kit’ (weapons and dress ornaments,
respectively; Härke, 2011, p. 101; Stoodley, 1999), but even those without this
kit would often have a knife or a belt buckle.
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4 H. Härke
The custom of depositing grave goods disappeared from the various regions
of Europe at different times and for different reasons. While this disappearance 5
often coincided with the spread of Christianity, it is by no means certain that
Christianity was actually the cause of its disappearance in every single case
(Schülke, 1999). Such a causal connection is widely assumed in the case in
Anglo-Saxon England where the spread of Christianity during the seventh
century coincided with a gradual decline in the provision of grave goods which 10
were finally phased out early in the eighth century (see discussion in
Boddington, 1990; Geake, 1992, 1997; Williams, 2010b). On the other hand,
grave goods continued among the Franks and in Greater Moravia for up to two
centuries after Christianisation (Gimbutas, 1971, p. 142, pl. 44; Koch, 1996).
Where grave goods were discontinued, they did not normally disappear 15
suddenly, but gradually and with social differences. For example, during the
decline of the grave-goods custom in Anglo-Saxon England, weapons
disappeared first from children’s burials in the early seventh century, from
adolescents’ burials in the mid-seventh century, and finally from adult male
burials at the beginning of the eighth century (Härke, 1992b). 20
Inalienable property
In the 1920s, the German archaeologist Reinecke suggested that the deposition
of objects in early medieval graves was the consequence of property rights:
these objects were the inalienable part of the deceased’s property, hergewaete in
35 the case of men (weapons and war gear) and gerade in the case of women
(jewellery and household implements). Reinecke (1925) borrowed the idea
from historians of early Germanic law who had noted that the tenth century
code Sachsenspiegel divided personal property into alienable and inalienable
parts, and Reinecke suggested that deposition in graves was the only means of
40 disposal of inalienable property which could not be inherited, sold off or given
away. Later, inalienable property was given to the Church when the owner
died.
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6 H. Härke
The idea has been widely picked up in West European medieval studies,
particularly by German archaeologists who have seen it as a logical and
coherent explanation of the wealth and gender patterns of early medieval grave 5
goods (see Fehring, 1991; Härke, 2000a). A late echo of the concept of
inalienable property may be found in late medieval England where occasionally
personal items (such as seals) were destroyed after the death of the owner
(Daniell, 1997, pp. 150–151). More recently, though, Kars has argued that the
assumption of inalienable personal property may be inappropriate for the Early 10
Middle Ages; some objects may have been passed down the generations before
a situation arose in which they were deposited in the grave of the last owner,
forcing us to consider the possibility of inalienable collective possessions (Kars,
2011). Textual sources and artefactual evidence certainly demonstrate that in
early Anglo-Saxon England, some high-status weapons had circulated and been 15
owned by two or more individuals before accompanying the burial of the last
owner (Härke, 2000b), but it is difficult to say if the background was property
concepts or other ideas (see below).
Potlatch
The potlatch (or potlach) phenomenon was first described in a study of the 20
Kwakiutl of British Columbia (Boas, 1897) where the ostentatious destruction
AQ4 of accumulated wealth confers prestige and influence in their society. Gordon
Childe, although he never used the term, used the same concept when he
suggested that the grave-goods custom is a form of social competition typical of
unstable societies where status positions may be achieved and maintained by 25
such means (Childe, 1945). This concept is also implied in the perspective of
the more recent ‘post-processualist’ (post-modern) archaeology which holds
that burial ritual and grave goods are not just passive reflections of social
structures, they are, or display, active claims to rank, status and identity (Parker
Pearson, 1982; Samson, 1987). A potlatch interpretation of grave goods would 30
also make sense in a wider context: in European prehistory, phases of
grave-goods deposition alternated with phases of hoard deposition, and the
latter phenomenon was most likely a form of ritual destruction of wealth
(Bradley, 1982).
The distribution of the deceased’s property to the mourners and its con- 35
sumption during the funeral, both well documented in ethnographic literature
(Ucko, 1969, p. 266), may well be part of the same phenomenon. It was
noted by the tenth century Arab writer Ibn Fadhlan in his description of a
Viking funeral on the Volga: the property of the deceased was divided in
three parts – one for the heirs, one for the clothes in the grave and one for 40
making intoxicating beverages for the funeral (Jones, 1984, pp. 425–426).
There may be psychological as well as social reasons for this custom. The
religious scientist Jon Davies has suggested that the distribution, burning or
burying of the deceased’s property may be a symbolic ‘dismembering of the
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5 dead person whose death has so terrified and therefore angered us’ (Davies,
1994, p. 30).
8 H. Härke
Metaphor
The Norwegian archaeologist Solberg has suggested that grave goods may be
metaphors for the life, or specific events in the life, of the deceased (Solberg, 5
2004). Anthropologists and sociologists have known for some time that funerals
in some societies may be, or include, a representation of the deceased’s
biography. In a sense, this includes the biographical comments in Christian
funeral services, and even more so the increasingly popular remembrance
services and meetings where stories of the deceased’s life are told and swapped 10
(Walter, 1996). This biographical element may take on a material form: a
Second World War flying ace, Terry Prendergast from Dorset, was recently
buried in a cardboard casket in the shape of his beloved Hawker Hurricane
fighter plane painted in camouflage colours and carrying on the side the
number of the plane he flew in the war (Daily Telegraph, 11 May 2007). 15
Some grave goods are, thus, likely have served as material reminders of events
in the life of the deceased. Roman funeral processions included representations
and objects which gave an account of the deceased’s life and achievements (von
Hesberg, 1998, p. 23). Grave goods may also be metaphors of the origins of peo-
ple; this would explain the early medieval phenomenon of ‘burials out of place’: 20
individuals buried with items which belong to different regions or countries.
Examples are the ‘Lombard princess’ buried in Cologne cathedral (Werner,
1964), and the markedly Scandinavian character of the Sutton Hoo ship burial
in eastern England (Bruce-Mitford, 1975–1983). Thus, ‘foreign’ objects and
burial rites may be meant to express a distant origin, real or imagined. 25
A possible context for this biographical concern during the funeral may be
found in Attachment Theory (Bowlby, 1969; Sharer & Tancredy, 2001). This
holds that the death of an individual creates in the minds of the mourners a dis-
crepancy between their internal model of the world which incorporates the
deceased, and the real world in which the deceased is no longer present. The fun- 30
eral is therefore more than just a ritual way of coping with death: it is also a rec-
onciliation of the internal model with the real world. Grave goods (which do not
figure in Attachment Theory) may be a direct, material way of including aspects
of the deceased in the experience of the mourners, thus helping the process of
reconciliation between model and reality. Another explanation of the biographi- 35
cal role of grave goods may be provided by the ethnographic observation that
some societies locate memory not in the mind, but in objects, believing that the
mnemonic properties of objects are activated by their display (Battaglia, 1992).
The metaphor idea can be linked to the anthropological concept of artefact
biographies. Artefacts, in particular valuable objects, acquire their own 40
biographies by association with people and events of the past, and by the stories
told about them (Gosden & Marshall, 1999; Hoskins, 1998; Kopytoff, 1986).
This, however, is difficult to demonstrate with archaeological evidence alone;
usually, this will require textual evidence. Thus, the heroic poem Ilias suggests
that some craters (large bronze vessels) could achieve particular importance 45
because of their biographies (Whitley, 2002). For the Early Middle Ages, the
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40 Gifts to a deity
The best example of this category of depositions is the obulus intended for the
ferryman across the river Styx, Charon, who in Roman mythology provided
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10 H. Härke
passage for the souls of the dead. It was placed in many Roman graves in the
mouths of the deceased, or in the case of cremations, in or next to the urn
(Toynbee, 1971, pp. 44, 49, 119). Coins are also found in some graves of the 5
Early Middle Ages, but not in the mouths of the dead; it is therefore uncertain
if they were intended as payment during the journey, although this may well
have been the intention of coins placed in a hand of the corpse. Thus, three
coins were found in the hand of a skeleton in the Alamannic cemetery of
Grimmelshofen-Stühlingen (Southwest Germany); the grave dates to the 10
transition period from paganism to Christianity.1
Only some objects can ever have been meant as an obulus, and they should
be identifiable by their standard deposition or uniform distribution. At the same
time, the case of Charon’s Penny highlights that there may have been, in the
concepts of some societies, a distinction between goods specifically for the 15
journey and goods meant for use in the afterlife.
East Africa avoided contact with the property of the deceased, and both,
5 property and other objects polluted by contact with property were deposited in
the grave of the respective deceased (Routledge & Routledge, 1910, pp.
168–170). The Bantu of South Africa held very strong views on pollution, and
personal property which was too big for deposition in the grave was destroyed,
such as the hut of the deceased (Schapera & Eiselen, 1937, p. 248).
10 Similar ideas about the dangers of pollution by the dead or their property are
known from European and Jewish ethnography. English Gipsies used to include
the favourite possessions of the deceased inside the coffin, and destroyed all
personal effects and the home (i.e. waggon or trailer) of the deceased because
‘the death of a Gypsy is a polluting event’ (Okely, 1979, p. 87). In some parts
15 of Germany, up to the nineteenth century, the personal toilet items of the
deceased and the washing utensils used for cleaning the dead body were put
into the grave (Müller, 1970, p. 170; Zender, 1959, p. 41). And in some
present-day Jewish communities, the earthenware bowl used for the ritual
washing of the corpse (Tahara) is smashed and the sherds put into the grave;
20 however, a metal bowl used for this purpose is neither destroyed nor put into
the grave (De Vries, 1986, p. 275). It has been suggested that toilet implements
were included in Anglo-Saxon cremation vessels to prevent sorcery against the
dead (Lethbridge, 1951; see Richards, 1987), but the motive may well have
been fear of pollution from items of personal hygiene of the deceased.
12 H. Härke
Forgetting
Finally, objects may be buried precisely because they would be reminders of the
deceased. Such objects could be their personal property, but also other objects
associated with the deceased in some way. Some North American Indian tribes
used to destroy the house and the property of the deceased (Walter, 1999, 5
pp. 26–28). The motive of forgetting (rather than fear of pollution) is high-
lighted by the ban on mentioning the names of the dead among the Apache,
Navajo and Jivaro (Taylor, 1993).2 Archaeologically, this motive may be difficult
to prove, but Williams has pointed out that many of the grave goods found in
Bronze Age barrows had been laid out in such a way that they would not have 10
been visible to the mourners, with the exception of the large pottery beaker usu-
ally included in graves of this period. He has suggested that this may have been
an attempt to start the process of forgetting with the funeral (Williams, 2001a).
In early medieval graves, this argument might apply to highly personal items
which are unlikely to be status indicators. In the Anglo-Saxon cemetery of Stret- 15
ton-on-Fosse II, a shield with an idiosyncratic shield boss had been buried in
the grave of a male adult whose corpse had been subjected to post-mortem
AQ5 decapitation (Ford, 2002; Härke, 1992c, p. 62) – itself an act of final insult or
an attempt to ward off evil (Harman, Molleson, & Price, 1981), so very likely
from a dead whom the community wanted to forget rather than to remember. 20
In less dramatic cases, the attempt at forgetting may be explained with the
Reminder Theory according to which the process of mourning is made more
difficult by the presence of too many reminders of the deceased (Walter, 1999,
27, 65, with further references). The burial of such reminders may therefore be
a means of severing the ties in order to get on with life. Exactly this motive has 25
been reported for the users of a pet cemetery in England who frequently
disposed of such reminders by putting them into the graves of their pets (Ucko,
1969, p. 265). But again, this cannot be a general explanation of grave goods
because not all non-western societies tie memories to material objects or
monuments (Forty & Küchler, 1999, pp. 4–5). 30
14 H. Härke
procession and hung in the church afterwards (see above). It is quite conceiv-
able, and even likely, that the symbolic meanings of the grave goods or their
representations changed over time. 5
Last not least there is the question of who actually selected the objects for
deposition. Gender is an example of the uncertainties this issue can introduce
for archaeologists trying to make inferences from grave goods about the dead
themselves. An anthropological survey has shown that women tend to express
emotions of grief and mourning in more pronounced and explicit ways than 10
men in most societies, and vice versa in none (Rosenblatt, Walsh, & Jackson,
1976). This might impact on the choice of grave goods where women are
involved in their selection. Cannon (2005) has argued that in nineteenth-century
USA, the surviving partner chose the gravestone; thus, ‘typically male’ grave-
stones would have been chosen by women, and vice versa. This may well be an 15
explanation of some of the rare cases of cross-gender grave goods in early medie-
val burials where biological sexing and gendered grave goods appear to be at
odds (Härke, 2011; Lucy, 1997; Stoodley, 1999; see also Williams, 2005).
Conclusions
Reasons for the deposition of grave goods comprise a wide range of possible 20
motives, with marked regional differences and with considerable changes over
time. While not all of these motives can be identified in the evidence of early
medieval burials, the composite character of the grave goods sets found in graves
appears clear enough. Even particular items (e.g. a coin) may be included for
more than one reason, and these reasons may change over centuries or decades. 25
But it should be borne in mind that such inferences are difficult to make from
the archaeological evidence, and archaeologists are better at inferring broad pat-
terns than identifying individual motives. The surest means of identifying
motives for the deposition of grave goods are textual sources from the respective
period. Where these are lacking (as they are for most of human prehistory, and 30
for much of the Early Middle Ages), the best approach is a careful contextual
analysis of all correlations: what was deposited, when, where, with what, with
whom and how does it vary across geographical regions and chronological peri-
ods? The emerging patterns may then be used to suggest interpretations of grave
goods, but such inferences are only ever likely to apply to a particular society, or 35
even community, at a particular point in time. Whatever their background in
specific cases, grave goods were not simply intended to help the dead on their
journey to the hereafter and in their afterlife ( pace Kellehear, 2007), nor are they
mirrors of life in the past ( pace Haffner, 1989).
Acknowledgements 40
The ideas set out in this paper were developed in a seminar paper given in 2007
at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. One of the key
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inspirations for the approach adopted here was classes of the Interdisciplinary
MA. in Death and Society at the University at Reading (now taught at Bath),
5 and I am indebted to my colleagues Tony Walter, Clare Gittings, Ralph
Houlbrooke and Bob Chapman for helping to make this the most stimulating
course I have ever contributed to. Further inspirations were provided by a num-
ber of conference sessions at the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference,
Oxford 2000, and the Society of American Archaeology Conference, New
10 Orleans 2001. I am grateful to the British Academy and the University of Read-
ing for travel grants to attend the latter conference. Tony Walter, Eva Thäte,
Duncan Sayer and Howard Williams took the time to read, and comment on,
various drafts of this paper. Tony Walter kindly suggested it for publication in
Mortality; I am very grateful to him for his persistence and encouragement.
15 Notes
[1] A. Bräuning, Forschungen zum alamannischen Gräberfeld Stühlingen, public lecture 26
January 2012, Universität Tübingen.
[2] My attention was drawn to this by a Death & Society seminar paper given by C. M. Parkes
at the University of Reading in 2001.
20 Biographical Notes
Heinrich Härke studied at the universities of Göttingen, Edinburgh and
Oxford. He held lectureships in archaeology at Queen’s University Belfast from
1984 to 1989, and at the University of Reading from 1989 to 2007, with his
research focusing on the Early Middle Ages and burial archaeology. He now
25 does archaeological fieldwork and research in Russia and Kazakhstan, and
contributes to teaching at Tübingen University (Germany).
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