Northern Exposure (1991): All Is Vanity, Season 2, Episode 3
"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity."
Ecclesiastes 1:2
Bog people, Egyptian mummies, elaborate Chinese imperial tombs filled with terracotta warriors, mounds dotting the English landscape, catacombs, Incan sacrificial dead... The list goes on and on. What these tell us, or what we think they tell us, can, and no doubt will, fill bookshelves and populate journals for years to come.
Amidst all the research and speculation there is a great deal of discussion of the dead's identity. "Identities are rooted in practice (Curta 2007; Jones 1997). Hence, material culture in all its varieties can serve in the construction, communication and transformation of identities as well as conveying them through time from generation to generation." That's what Howard Williams and Duncan Sayer (2009) tell us, at any rate.
Howard Williams, in his earlier 2004 paper Death Warmed Up, goes even further. For him the dead possess a kind of agency that is often overlooked by contemporary archaeologists. "...the bodies of the dead in past societies may not have had a continued consciousness from a western medical perspective, but they may have had the 'agency' to affect the actions of mourners in their social memory through their corporeality. Therefore, while archaeologists have discussed permanent monuments in many past societies as foci for the influence of 'the ancestors' and 'the past' in a general sense (e.g. Barrett, 1994), the bodies of the dead during the funeral itself need to be considered as a further influence upon social choices and social remembrance."
This is all very well and good, so far as it goes. However, as Sherlock Holmes reminds us in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mystery Silver Blaze, sometimes the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time" isn't what the dog did, but the fact the dog didn't do anything at all. For all the talk among archaeologists of identity, status, monumentality and all the rest, there is a large dog that doesn't do much of anything. A quick Google search using terms like "burial" or "removal of heretics", "the archaeology of crucifixion" (meaning the notorious Roman penalty for various crimes, not The Crucifixion), and other similar searches looking for indications of research into the disposal of those who died on the extreme edges of society seems to confirm that perhaps professionals involved in the archaeology of death have reached the conclusion the dog isn't really there, or if it is there what it did during the night is of little consequence. While scholarly articles are generally lacking, some interesting things do come up when Googling to learn about how undesirables are treated upon death. For example, the Orthodox Church has published guidelines for dealing with the heterodox. When the heretic was prominent enough to receive a reasonably decent burial at a known site to begin with, the Catholic Church will apparently sometimes authorize removal to sanctified ground after declaring the person wasn't really a heretic after all, as was the case with Copernicus in 2010. However, for every person with the stature of a Copernicus, how many are there that were burned at the stake, thrown into a river, or buried in an unmarked grave along with other doubters or "malcontents"? From an archaeological perspective, unless someone finds physical traces of them they hardly existed at all, and before written language became the norm the archaeological record may be all there is to go on.
Amidst all the research and speculation there is a great deal of discussion of the dead's identity. "Identities are rooted in practice (Curta 2007; Jones 1997). Hence, material culture in all its varieties can serve in the construction, communication and transformation of identities as well as conveying them through time from generation to generation." That's what Howard Williams and Duncan Sayer (2009) tell us, at any rate.
Howard Williams, in his earlier 2004 paper Death Warmed Up, goes even further. For him the dead possess a kind of agency that is often overlooked by contemporary archaeologists. "...the bodies of the dead in past societies may not have had a continued consciousness from a western medical perspective, but they may have had the 'agency' to affect the actions of mourners in their social memory through their corporeality. Therefore, while archaeologists have discussed permanent monuments in many past societies as foci for the influence of 'the ancestors' and 'the past' in a general sense (e.g. Barrett, 1994), the bodies of the dead during the funeral itself need to be considered as a further influence upon social choices and social remembrance."
This is all very well and good, so far as it goes. However, as Sherlock Holmes reminds us in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mystery Silver Blaze, sometimes the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time" isn't what the dog did, but the fact the dog didn't do anything at all. For all the talk among archaeologists of identity, status, monumentality and all the rest, there is a large dog that doesn't do much of anything. A quick Google search using terms like "burial" or "removal of heretics", "the archaeology of crucifixion" (meaning the notorious Roman penalty for various crimes, not The Crucifixion), and other similar searches looking for indications of research into the disposal of those who died on the extreme edges of society seems to confirm that perhaps professionals involved in the archaeology of death have reached the conclusion the dog isn't really there, or if it is there what it did during the night is of little consequence. While scholarly articles are generally lacking, some interesting things do come up when Googling to learn about how undesirables are treated upon death. For example, the Orthodox Church has published guidelines for dealing with the heterodox. When the heretic was prominent enough to receive a reasonably decent burial at a known site to begin with, the Catholic Church will apparently sometimes authorize removal to sanctified ground after declaring the person wasn't really a heretic after all, as was the case with Copernicus in 2010. However, for every person with the stature of a Copernicus, how many are there that were burned at the stake, thrown into a river, or buried in an unmarked grave along with other doubters or "malcontents"? From an archaeological perspective, unless someone finds physical traces of them they hardly existed at all, and before written language became the norm the archaeological record may be all there is to go on.
As the Northern Exposure video clip above reminds us, death is one thing every living being has in common with every other. In the case of humans, unless we get lost in the wilderness or something, our bodies are all disposed of in one way or another by those we leave behind. While the funerary practices surrounding that disposal may be able to tell us something about a person's status, or perhaps what was important to them, or their identity and so forth, there are an awful lot of people throughout history that, for one reason or another, lived on the fringes. Perhaps, as in the fictional community of Cicely, Alaska (above), they wandered into town and no one can figure out who they were or where they came from, and so their death and, in that case, cremation becomes a kind of blank slate upon which everyone projects their own fragile mortality. I suspect that in most cases, unlike in the rather laid back and reflective town of Cicely, these people were typically reviled, or at best tolerated, by the culture they were a part of. For heretics, gad flies, revolutionaries or those living in extreme poverty, removal of the unpleasant and decomposing body was often largely a necessity - a chore likely delegated to someone else of lowly status, at least when their death wasn't an event intended to make a public example of them. The Old Testament is loaded with stories of what today would be described as genocide. Are we to believe the way the victims of these types of events were gotten rid of following their deaths, assuming any evidence of them can be found at all, had anything to do with their identity or agency?
The events of the 24th of August, 1572 is a case in point. This was a tragic day in the history of France. That day and the events of the following few days would be recorded as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. French Catholics, having received signals from a sympathetic king that he didn't disapprove, decided to do something about the Protestants in their midst and went on a killing spree that, over the course 3-4 days, resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of French Huguenots throughout the country. According to Parisian city records, men were paid to remove over 1,000 bodies that had washed up on the banks of the Seine downstream from the city afterwards. For a particularly gruesome account of the killing and subsequent disposal of Gaspard II de Coligny, a leader of the Huguenots at the time, follow this link. All of this is quite reminiscent of the horrific scenes of bloated bodies floating down rivers in Rwanda during that 1990s genocide, or perhaps the terrible events in the Balkans during the same decade. While forensic anthropologists and others were able to reconstruct these more recent examples of human brutality, none were on hand prior to the 20th century to record the fate of the unmemorialized victims of past social injustices, and there were many.
As our capacity to record and share the treatment of hated enemies or those living on the margins of our society has grown, our brutality toward one another has, thankfully, diminished. Let's hope it stays that way. Regardless, those we dig up from the ancient past were not likely to have lived too far outside the mainstream of their respective cultures. The archaeology of death is in fact, in many respects, the archaeology of the mainstream or, very often, elite during the period in question. Those living on the streets, questioning authority openly, or vanquished by an army being led by a king determined to wipe his conquests from the face of the earth aren't typically the people we are studying. For them the question usually isn't one of identity, but rather invisibility.
Sources:
As our capacity to record and share the treatment of hated enemies or those living on the margins of our society has grown, our brutality toward one another has, thankfully, diminished. Let's hope it stays that way. Regardless, those we dig up from the ancient past were not likely to have lived too far outside the mainstream of their respective cultures. The archaeology of death is in fact, in many respects, the archaeology of the mainstream or, very often, elite during the period in question. Those living on the streets, questioning authority openly, or vanquished by an army being led by a king determined to wipe his conquests from the face of the earth aren't typically the people we are studying. For them the question usually isn't one of identity, but rather invisibility.
Sources:
Duncan Sayer and Howard M. R. Williams. Mortuary Practices & Social Identities in the Middle Ages: Essays in Burial Archaeology in Honour of Heinrich Härke. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009.
Williams, Howard 2004. Death Warmed up: The Agency of Bodies and Bones in Early
Anglo-Saxon Cremation Rites. Journal of Material Culture, 9, pp. 263-91
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massacre
The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day
J.H. Robinson, ed., Readings in European History 2 vols.
(Boston: Ginn, 1906), 2:179-183. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/saint-bartholomews-day-massacre
On the Burial of the Heterodox, Orthodox Christian Information Center:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/death/heterodox_burial.aspx
Atkinson, Nancy. Once a heretic, Copernicus now re-buried with with Catholic honors,
Christian Science Monitor, May 24, 2010:
www.csmonitor.com/Science/Cool-Astronomy/2010/0524/Once-a-heretic-Copernicus-now-re-buried-with-Catholic-honors
