Funerary practices

Introduction

The archaeological study of funerary practices has advanced greatly in recent years. Protocols for on-site recording and observation techniques capturing fine detail in the laboratory have lifted the veil on practices whose variability was often unforeseen. This might be seen to lend support to the idea that the mortuary practices lacked any overriding rationale, or at least were independent of social organization. However, a homogeneous thread can in fact be perceived behind this diversity, comprising a recurrent pattern of symbols and an underlying logic suggesting that a funerary ceremony represented a codified form of expression, an ideological ‘discourse’ linked to real historical circumstances. Like other rites of passage, this diversity ‘spoke’ in some way about the society to which those close to the deceased belonged, and of their world view. Funerary practices are not therefore a faithful and passive reflection of the way societies were organized, but nor are they a purely ideological product disconnected from economic and political contingencies. This is clearly apparent during the Iron Age, a period that spans, for most parts of Europe, the last 8th c. BC, continuing into the early centuries AD beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire. We shall follow the chronological and spatial development of these practices in pre-Roman Europe, examining the most significant archaeological evidence available.

Methodological and theoretical framework

Humans did not always bury their dead. In Iron Age Europe, the majority of communities did not bury all their dead, and some seem to have buried none at all. This means that unburied bodies, though no doubt treated with respect as in all human societies, escape archaeological detection. Among the filters that come between the actual funerary practices of a distant era and our current understanding of them, the decision to bury or not to bury appears increasingly to be one of the most significant. It is combined with other similarly cultural choices, such as the level of restraint inherent in the funerary deposits, the number of graves located in a single place, and the degree of permanence or monumentality of the burials. All these elements obviously have a significant bearing on the chances of discovering graves and understanding their distinctive features. Such social filters come on top of other constraints, which are often easier to quantify; these include natural erosion, later human intervention, or the level of effort invested in field research. Burials thus represent merely the tip of an enormous iceberg which encompasses the totality of all funerary practices. The concept of the grave or tomb, which defines a place where a person was buried, comes from the Greek tumbos, meaning burial mound, and from the Latin tumere, meaning swelling, in the sense of a mound marking a burial pit, where – however slight the relief – the living can remember the dead. The role of a grave was also to materialize symbolically the relationship between a social group and the land it inhabited, exploited, and from which it drew its sustenance, as well as to perpetuate the memory of the deceased in the consciousness of the survivors.

Among the people who were not formally buried, by far the majority during the Iron Age, some have nevertheless left archaeological traces: these include individuals accidentally or deliberately placed in natural hollows or scoops dug for reasons that had nothing to do with commemorating the dead; we shall later see that a high proportion of these individuals are very likely to have been the victims of human sacrifice. As stated, only a fraction of the population received formal burial during the Iron Age, but in proportions that varied according to the region or period. This fraction is often equated with the political, economic, and religious elites. There is little doubt that this was the case when the grave goods are significantly richer, or some burials more monumental than others, but it is less obvious when the burials of a given community show little differentiation. Indeed, among societies of broadly equivalent political complexity, some were remarkably restrained in their burial practices, while others exhibited very significant differences between graves. This suggests that funerary practices did not always reflect economic and political organization. Rather, they conveyed an ideological message (fig. 1). They showed not what these communities were, but how they wanted to appear, depending on their ethical values and the circumstances of the time¹. Such a discourse is not explicit, but close observation of differences between graves and cemeteries yields much information on the communities’ conception of social relations, especially between rank, gender, and age groups, even when differences in rank were removed for religious reasons or to promote cohesion when solidarity was vital. Significant differences between graves, as well as between groups of graves and cemeteries, can thus be perceived from elements such as the number of burials, the relative distribution of men, women, and children, the period of use, the grave goods, the treatment of the body, or the durability of markers on the ground to avoid recutting. Overall, the development of these funerary traits over several centuries and on a Europe-wide scale reveals trends which, when compared with patterns in other spheres of activity (domestic, artisan, cult-related, agro-pastoral, commercial, or diplomatic), provide precious insights.

The use of iron is attested over most of Europe from the 8th c. BC, at the time city-States were emerging in Greece and then Italy². Based on current knowledge, urbanization is detectable mainly through funerary and religious remains. Vast cemeteries developed on the outskirts of towns because of the high density of inhabitants, the permanence of the settlements, and probably also because more people were now being buried than disposed of in ways that left no archaeologically detectable traces; the exposure of bodies on platforms, and the cremation and scattering of remains on the ground or on water in selected locations, all require space to be available nearby, which becomes more limited or more difficult to access in an urban environment. As its name implies, a necropolis sensu stricto tends to accompany a polis, i.e. an urban agglomeration. Outside urban settings – which applies to the greater part of the Iron Age – large cemeteries indicate, if not the existence of villages, then at least the presence of long-lived territorial communities, whose shared burial ground becomes a symbolic centre. Conversely, the permanence of a territorial community did not necessarily give rise to the growth of large cemeteries; societies evidently made choices about their funerary practices, and, although these were undoubtedly carried out with respect, they did not result in interment for the majority of the deceased. We shall survey Europe from south to north and in chronological sequence to follow the non-linear and seemingly random development of funerary practices, using key sites which are statistically representative of the period. In this way we shall examine the variability of these practices and how they have been read in terms of their ideological and social significance.

The development of networks

This first section will examine mortuary practices from the 8th to 5th c. BC, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of so-called “princely” burials. In much of Europe, the overall picture is one of broad continuity with late Bronze Age burial traditions, but with increasing investment in funerary rites; some areas, however, seem to lack formal burials altogether in the earlier Iron Age. In various regions, from Iberia to the Ukraine, very ostentatious tombs appear. These contain exotic luxury goods which attest to one of the hallmarks of this period – the intensification of long-distance supra-cultural exchange networks. These networks allowed certain players to establish powerful dynasties which held sway for three or four generations. We will begin with the rich mortuary evidence from the Circum-Alpine zone.

The Circum-Alpine zone

At the beginning of the Iron Age, the new metal was mainly used for weapons, especially the long iron swords often placed as status symbols in the graves of the male social elite. These graves, which are isolated or grouped in small clusters, were often covered by a small round barrow. Within the usable corpus of 179 burials in the Circum-Alpine zone dated to between 800 and 625 BC and containing at least one iron object, iron swords are frequently the only metal artefact present. No standard panoply stands out. The burial rite (inhumation or cremation) varies too. There are, however, some preferred associations: first with iron knives (nearly always found near faunal remains), then with wagons, then with objects of personal adornment or toiletry sets made of iron or bronze, and finally with iron axes, especially in the eastern Alps³. Such patterns show that the adoption of iron metallurgy proceeded very slowly in Europe. While a significant threshold in its spread was passed around 730 BC, iron nevertheless remained the prerogative of social elites, who used it for military equipment and for prestige, especially in ceremonial funerals. At the turn of the 8th to 7th c. BC, the emerging city-States of Greece and Italy gave new impetus to exchanges with the north of the European continent, particularly across the eastern Alps. The situlae with narrative representations, which were often deposited in graves, are evidence of this network. They illustrate court scenes inspired from the figurative manner typical of the Orientalizing style⁴. The societies that used these situlae were organized in territorial groups and possessed fortified centres with ostentatious burials under barrows close by, and had relations with groups further north as far as the Austrian Danube and, more diffusely, beyond. The impressive funerary deposits in some burials show this without any ambiguity. The burial of Stična in Slovenia⁵, and the Strettweg grave with cult wagon⁶, the Kröllkogel barrow at Kleinklein with bronze burial mask and hands⁷, the grave with an elephant-ivory sword pommel at Hallstatt⁸, and wagon burials of richly attired women such as Mitterkirchen⁹ – all in Austria – are particularly telling. To a lesser extent, the numerous wagon burials from across this zone, including a high concentration in the Prague region¹⁰, are surely affirmation of a stratified social organization closely following wide-ranging exchange networks along several alternative routes between the Adriatic and the Baltic seas. A variety of goods travelled along this multi-branched axis, of which Baltic amber is the easiest to identify archaeologically. The barrow cemetery of Stična – with six burials in one barrow producing over 20,000 glass beads (a material and technique originating in the Near East) and a large quantity of Baltic amber beads assembled into elaborate pendants¹¹ – is a perfect example of such a structure resting on networks that were previously disconnected.

At the cemetery of Hallstatt in Austria, excavated repeatedly since 1846, over 2,000 graves have been recovered, several containing very rich assemblages. That is why the burial ground was quickly adopted as representative of the early Iron Age and gave its name to the period. The wealth displayed in this cemetery, located 340 m above an Alpine lake at the end of the high valley of the Salzberg and very close to the Hallstatt salt mines, is probably related to the exploitation of this exportable commodity and to the control that the local community was able to exert over the one of the most frequently used exchange routes in the seventh century BC linking the Adriatic to the Baltic via the eastern Alps. The Hallstatt cemetery was used between c.730 and 430 BC by an average population of some 330 people. The deceased were either inhumed or buried after cremation on a pyre, most often singly, but sometimes accompanied by one to three other individuals. A gradual shift from cremation to inhumation took place. Men and women, in equal numbers, seem to have occupied distinct areas of the cemetery, but both groups exhibit an identical socio-economic profile, with 20% of rich graves, among which 4% represent an even more lavishly furnished subsection. Over its three centuries of use, the cemetery’s social structure remained the same, although signs of far-flung connections became fewer after the end of the seventh century BC¹². It is notable that the graves of women are often among the most prestigious burials in this era. This echoes practices known in Italy at the end of the Villanovan and early Etruscan periods. Two extremely rich female graves of the first half of the 7th c. BC, consequently dubbed « princely graves » by our Italian colleagues, spring to mind: the Regolini-Galassi tomb at Cerveteri with gold jewellery by the dozen, and the Barberini tomb at Preneste with its spectacular Orientalizing objects¹³. However, in contrast to what took place later, artefacts made in the emerging Mediterranean city-states reached central Europe in small numbers only¹⁴. Exchange was from one to another, at a sporadic rate, and probably took place in an indirect manner.

Exchange increased in the course of the 6th c. BC, with the most prestigious funerary displays including tablewares made in Greek or Etruscan city-States. This is the case both north-west of the Alps, and in various parts of the European hinterland in contact with Greek colonies on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean coast. Mediterranean objects, many of which were destined from the outset for distant clients for example, the oversized Vix krater¹⁵, Illyrian amber figurines¹⁶, and Graeco-Thracian and Graeco-Scythian gold and silverwork¹⁷ – became the markers of social dominance. They featured especially in the largest and richest burials furnished with grave goods of diverse provenance.

The archaeological complex of Vix-Mont Lassois¹⁸, interpreted as a princely centre of the sixth and early fifth centuries BC, consists of a defended hilltop site and three wagon burials, among them the particularly richly furnished Vix burial (fig. 2). Originally covered by a large barrow, 38 m in diameter, the underground burial chamber contained a huge Greek bronze krater 1.60 m high, decorated with masks of Gorgons and a parade of warriors, two Attic cups, a Greek silver bowl, as well as two Etruscan bronze basins and an oenochoe. The woman lay in the body of a wagon whose four wheels had been dismantled and stacked along the walls of the chamber. She died aged 30-35, and was bedecked with jewellery of local manufacture, sometimes adorned with beads of exotic provenance (Baltic amber and Mediterranean coral), as well as a heavy gold torc with terminals in the form of a lion’s paw supporting a tiny winged horse and ending in a sphere. The other two wagon burials were located in the neighbouring commune of Sainte-Colombe. As well as the remains of a wagon, one of them contained an Etruscan basin with three griffins’ heads, and an iron and bronze tripod; the other produced two bracelets and two ear pendants made of gold, and an iron axe.

Another burial has recently been discovered near the River Seine at Lavau (Aube), 70 km north of Vix. Here too, a tumulus was erected over a large burial chamber. The body of the deceased, originally laid out in the body of a wagon, was adorned with a gold torc and bracelets, and accompanied by a dozen metal vessels imported from the Mediterranean, including a large cauldron, two wine jugs, a sieve, and a goblet. This tomb lay close to three more previously known rich graves of the same period, around 450 BC. The group is thus a perfect transitional ensemble, marking the end of the earlier Iron Age and the north Alpine princely phenomenon, as well as its north-western limit. Some twenty princely centres of this type are known in a zone between western Bavaria and eastern Berry in central France¹⁹. Their distribution, at a distance of some 100 km from one another, suggests the development of centralized princely territories of roughly similar size. Never before had territories of this scale been unified under a single power. Yet these polities were fragile and their rulers unable to stay in power for long, most probably because they were dependent on exchange relations binding them to Mediterranean powers, and they collapsed after the middle of the 5th c. BC. The princely graves played a major part within these societies as territorial and dynastic markers. The best-excavated of these graves, at Hochdorf (Baden-Württemberg), shows that they were not always erected at the capital of these autonomous political units. It is also worth noting that many burials were robbed after only a short interval²⁰, as with the Grafenbühl and Hohmichele in south-west Germany, and Üetliberg in Switzerland. The pillaging of the Magdalenenberg (also in south-west Germany), less than half a century after the funerary chamber was built, demonstrates that any ideological taboos protecting these burials were not universally observed, even before the full floruit of the princely phenomenon.

South-western and south-eastern Europe

The Circum-Alpine zone was not the only region to exhibit signs of ostentatious burial. In the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in the kingdom of Tartessos, the richest tombs known are those of Almuñecar, La Joya, Niebla, Carmona, and Setefilla. Imported items, as well as prestigious goldwork, have also been recovered from the remains of palaces or temples such as at Cancho Roano. In the Spanish Levante too, burials were organized along hierarchical lines, with “royal” or monarchic tombs, and “princely” or aristocratic burials dominating all the others²¹. The most prestigious tombs were capped by funerary monuments made of cut and sculpted stone. The tombs contained Attic wares, and objects of personal adornment are also found more frequently there than elsewhere in the Iberian Peninsula²². This political organization lasted a century and a half at most, and collapsed as Phoenician trade was disrupted and the communities of the Iberian interior became increasingly threatening²³. The practice of ostentatious burial ceased at the end of the 6th c. BC, but towns such as Carmo, Hasta Regia, or Castulo, which occupied an area up to 50 ha in extent, continued to rule over small independent territories as long as the late third century BC. Such manifestations of power are related to the privileged links that the indigenous elites forged with Phoenician and Greek colonies. Archaic States emerged in the Levante towards the middle of the 5th c. BC, around the cities of Hemeroskopaion (near Alicante) and Sagonte, which adopted an Ionian alphabet²⁴.

Turning to the ancient region of Illyria in the Balkans, the five graves of Pilatovíci, Atenica, Novi Pazar, Pécka Banja, and Trebenište (Tomb VII) are richer and more monumental than the others, with prestigious burial accorded equally to individuals of either gender or sex²⁵. More ordinary graves, but still containing imported goods, are also known, suggesting at least three, if not four, levels of status. The imported bronze vessels from Novi Pazar and Trebenište seem to have been made by the same southern Italian Greek workshops as those of Hochdorf, Grächwil, and Vix north of the Alps. Amber is also abundant in some Balkan graves, having passed through workshops established in Picenum or southern Italy²⁶. These prestige goods crossed the Adriatic and were then transported overland, or continued by sea to the area of the modern port of Dubrovnik. Significantly, these wealthy graves were located on communication networks that were still important in the Middle Ages for caravan traffic between the Adriatic and the Balkan hinterland. The region’s mineral wealth, especially the silver ores, hints at what was being exchanged for the fine tableware and precious jewellery. To this we must probably add other goods, still being transported by caravan in the Middle Ages: leather, wool, furs, livestock, wax, honey, resin, timber, rare plants, and slaves. The medieval caravans could consist of several hundred pack animals and an armed escort²⁷. Those of the 6th and 5th c. BC were probably not so very different. In Thrace, the majority of princely burials date to the beginning of the 4th c. BC, but are conveniently considered here as part of this tradition. The tombs at Strelca, Brezovo, Rozovec, Dalboki, Daskal Atanasovo, and Kalajanovo run from east to west over a distance of some 200 km between the Gate of Trajan and Yambol. Others are spread along the Danube basin: Vraca (Vratsa), Sofronievo, Peretu, Chirnogi, Gavani, and Agighiol; two more are located in Transylvania²⁸: Dobolii de Jos and Sfântu Gheorghe²⁹. These probably reflect attempts at legitimating the power of aristocratic families who controlled exchanges with Greek city-States, as some accompanying settlements resemble those we know north of the Alps: Zimnicea in the Danube valley, some 300 km from the Black Sea, for example, has produced – in addition to Thracian, Getan, and Scythian products – fragments of hundreds of Greek amphorae which reached the site from around 430 BC onwards. These wine containers also travelled to Piscu Crasani further north and as far as the slopes of the Carpathians at Cetatenii din Vale³⁰. Among the Scythians, ostentatious burials also illustrate attempts at legitimating increased power. Their elites were buried with the traditional bow, trilobite arrows, akinakes or short sword, massive spears, and body armour, as well as with people put to death to accompany them in the grave³¹.

In all these zones with rich burials, a distinct hierarchy of at least three levels is apparent within the graves. Furthermore, the very richest burials or groups of burials were not randomly distributed but lay at quite regular intervals from one another. Where the settlement pattern is known sufficiently, the richest sites show a distribution that mirrors the burials. It suggests a very centralized model whose major sites can be used to define influence over a hypothetical territory – i.e. the degree of integration. The most ostentatious burials included grave goods from Greek and Etruscan city-States, suggesting a causal link between the wealth of the family of the deceased, the importance of its role in long-distance exchange networks, the extent of its political power, and the probably tyrannical nature of that power. The message sent by the burials is thus not just an indication of a high level of organizational complexity, but also of the form of political regime. Elsewhere, funerary practices were more restrained (even if with differences demonstrating some social inequality), which appears to reflect the probably less authoritarian, more respectful character of lineage-based or village based power structures in these regions.

North-western Europe

Even further north, the south–north exchange axis is marked by fewer and less ostentatious burials in the 8th and 7th c. BC, like the large barrow at Voldtofte on the island of Fyn (Denmark), or that of Seddin in Mecklemburg³². Greek and Etruscan artefacts are extremely rare, but cordoned buckets and bronze situlae – made in the southern Alpine foothills (or even copied on the middle Rhine) and consequently of lower local social value – were given to the northern political leaders. These ceremonial vessels are known from graves located along the Meuse up to the Rhine delta and the lower Weser in the Bremen area. Others were present in the region of Seddin and along the Oder and Neisse. Further afield, in Scandinavia and the British Isles, finds of such objects are extremely rare³³. Formal graves are practically absent from the British Isles for much of the Iron Age, apart from in one or two areas such as East Yorkshire (discussed later), as other funerary practices were in existence. The absence of durable traces suggests that it may have been less important for those communities to keep a distinctly reified place commemorating the social elites.

Turmoil and reconfiguration

The start of the second half of the first millennium BC saw significant changes in the funerary record. The overall number and size of cemeteries increased markedly, with particularly striking concentrations in some areas such as Champagne and the middle Rhine-Moselle region³⁴. Distinctions in wealth and monumentality were also reduced in many areas. This reflects the collapse of the old despotic dynasties and probably a reduction in politically autonomous territories. These upheavals were magnified in the 4th and 3rd c. BC by the onset of migration by sections of these north Alpine societies, which brought about the demise of the supra-cultural exchange networks. Cremation burial remained the dominant rite in the north German plain, and became increasingly prevalent in the final centuries BC in many other parts of north-west Europe, when we again begin to see a return to more ostentatious funerary practices around the fringes of the expanding Roman Empire. These changes correspond to a reconfiguration of the supra-cultural networks, which now extended much further north. This section follows the same geographical framework as before, again adopting a necessarily selective approach.

The Circum-Alpine zone

Since the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of inhumation graves have been discovered in the Champagne region, where some 400 cemeteries are known, on average only about 3.5 km apart from one another. The calcareous subsoil has contributed to good preservation, but unfortunately the majority of these were dug in the past without adequate care or recording. Some graves contained vehicles, and at least three have produced an Etruscan oenochoe. The tradition can be traced back to the end of the 6th c. BC. At that time, as illustrated by the large cemetery of Chouilly-Les Jogasses, women were buried in one half of the funerary area, and men in the other, on either side of a four-wheeled wagon burial. Thereafter, when the cemetery grew outwards from this nucleus, the graves were arranged, no longer according to the sex of the occupants, but probably in family groups that included men, women, and children.

All told, remains of vehicles – mostly two-wheeled chariots – have been found in more than 250 graves, most often in male burials, but associated with women in some twenty cases. In seven instances, two individuals were found superimposed in the same grave, and in six of these the woman was uppermost. Only one grave contained two men. On two occasions three individuals were recorded in the same grave. The study of well-recorded graves belonging to the Aisne-Marne culture has made it possible to take social analysis much further³⁵. Weapons belonged to men, and torcs signalled women. Among the graves without neck-rings, but containing other items of personal adornment like fibulae or belt hooks, three-quarters were female. A similar proportion of the graves that produced only pottery, or had no grave goods at all, were male. Each cemetery contained equal proportions of men and women. It is possible to distinguish four levels of wealth overall, both among men and women³⁶. At the top, obviously, come the chariot burials, followed by the warrior graves (10-20% of the total). Wealthy women are represented in similar numbers, and their graves were located in the same parts of the cemeteries as those of the warriors and of children with rich grave goods. The cemeteries were thus organized in family groups of different status, who used the same space for several generations. More than half the burials were those of men without weapons and of women with little jewellery. The last group consisted of men and women without any grave goods at all.

In this region the cemeteries are densely and evenly distributed, but overall differences in wealth are perceptible. Thus, chariot burials are generally present only in cemeteries of more than a hundred graves. Local communities appear to coexist independently. Some exhibit greater opulence than others, but the rich chiefs do not appear to have extended their power over a larger territory. These small political units, clearly hierarchical, characterize the Celtic world during the period of the great migrations, a period when the number of cemeteries decreases regularly after experiencing a strong and rapid growth in the middle of the 5th c. BC. Burials with Greek and Italic vessels, such as Châlons-sur-Marne, Somme-Bionne, Somme-Tourbe (fig. 3), or Pernant count among the richest. Among the most prestigious, male burials remain in the majority, but the proportion of female burials turns out to be higher than expected. At Bucy-le-Long (Aisne), for example, four out of the five cart burials uncovered were those of women. Moreover, it was a woman who was laid to rest in the richest burial of the 4th c. BC, at Waldalgesheim (Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany).

As an example of a late Iron Age cemetery where the cremation rite predominates, we may examine Lamadeleine, Luxembourg³⁷. In use during the 1st c. BC, this lay outside the western gate of the monumental Titelberg oppidum. The cemetery was organized in three groups of graves, containing seventy-nine cremations and six inhumations (all perinatal deaths). An unknown number of graves had undoubtedly been destroyed prior to excavation³⁸, but the age and sex profile of the surviving remains consisted of at least fifty-two adults, two young adults, one immature, one adolescent, three older children, eighteen young children or infants (including the six perinatals), and five too fragmentary to identify³⁹. As always, the proportion of subadults is much lower than would be expected in a normal population⁴⁰. The cemetery expanded into a new area about every twenty years, with use of the pre-existing clusters diminishing before ceasing altogether⁴¹ (fig. 4).

Lamadelaine is one of the very rare well-analysed and published examples of a cemetery associated with a large fortified town-like settlement belonging to the end of Gaulish independence. Even allowing for lost burials, the number of individuals interred here was clearly low compared to the likely number of inhabitants. The number of datable graves in any single twenty-year span was eight, sixteen, thirteen, thirteen, and finally five. A permanent grave in this burial ground would appear to have been a privilege reserved to a minority. However, more recently, hundreds of new graves have been discovered outside the eastern gate of the Titelberg⁴². This second cemetery was clearly far larger than Lamadelaine and would appear finally to bring this agglomeration closer to an urban model.

South-western and south-eastern Europe

In the 4th c. BC in southern Spain, the sculpted funerary monuments of the Iberian sovereigns, like that of Pozo Moro, were replaced by monuments with heroic iconography, such as the heroon of Porcuna⁴³. This new mode of expression probably sanctioned the rise to power of a warrior aristocracy in a more fragmented political landscape, as though a compression and concomitant tightening of the level and scale of integration were at play. It seems to be a phenomenon similar to contemporary developments in Celtic areas north of the Alps.

The Celtic migrations, however, set many more people in motion⁴⁴. Some descended on northern Italy, others penetrated Lower Austria, south-western Slovakia, and northern Transdanubia. They settled there and consolidated their hold, as attested by many cemeteries, like those of Sopron-Bécsidomb or Ménföcsanak⁴⁵. At the beginning of the 3rd c. BC, a series of chieftain’s tombs were built, including that at Ciumeşti, famous for its helmet topped by a bird of prey with wings that move, but also containing among the other artefacts greaves of Greek manufacture. Several of these burials yielded Hellenistic bronze vessels. It is unlikely that these luxury goods all represent loot brought back by valiant warriors. The majority were probably acquired through commercial exchanges and/or as diplomatic gifts⁴⁶.

An important example of funerary practices not faithfully reflecting social organization is provided by the Dacians. Between 130 and 31 BC, vast quantities of Roman coins reached the Carpathians (over 25,000 Roman denarii and local copies have been discovered in some one hundred coin hoards), but other Roman products are much rarer than in other parts of central Europe. This choice is most likely to stem from Dacian religious prohibitions. These affected most social activities, but only screened certain objects among the goods exchanged with the Mediterranean civilizations. Such ritual particularities call to mind a monotheistic belief system, which could conceivably have been inspired by religions practiced in more complex societies: Buddhism introduced via the steppe regions, Judaism recently adopted in the Crimean kingdom, or Egyptian cults in the Hellenistic cities of southern Thrace. The binding rules of this Dacian state-run religion not only obscured the underlying social organization, but also seem to have encoded funerary practices, ensuring that no individual was associated with grave goods or equipment indicative of his or her status. Further archaeological evidence shows the high level of complexity of such a social organization. The vast settlement of Sarmizegetusa, spread over 3 km and centred on an imposing timber and stone sanctuary of Hellenistic inspiration, is interpreted as the capital of a state that disintegrated at the death of its leader, Burebista⁴⁷.

North-western Europe

In Scandinavia, little evidence of social distinction is discernible in burials between the 6th and early 2nd c. BC. Cemeteries consist of cremation graves that resembled one another in their generalized sobriety. The adoption of iron metallurgy, which thereafter rested on local resources, was accompanied by a tendency for communities to turn inwards. Furthermore, regional style differences appear to confirm that community identities were being strengthened⁴⁸. However, some caution is required in the face of this apparent return to more egalitarian social relations; indeed, field boundaries suggest that differential access to land was institutionalized, even if the extent of such power largely escapes us.

Clear social differences become apparent again in the 2nd c. BC. Richer graves in many parts of north-west Europe also signal, through the exotic goods found in them, that long-distance links had been re-established via the social elites. Relations with the Roman world in particular grew rapidly, and “principalities” or “kingdoms” become perceptible⁴⁹.

In Britain, the middle Iron Age Arras culture is named after the nineteenth-century discovery of a large cemetery in East Yorkshire⁵⁰. Dating to between 400 and 150 BC, its funerary practices mark it out as distinct, bar a few exceptions, from the rest of Britain (fig. 5). The Arras tradition is characterized by individual ⁵¹inhumation burials surrounded by a quadrangular ditch, sometimes containing a two-wheeled vehicle, as was the case at the same time on the Continent. There are, however, specifically local traits: the dead were laid to rest on their side in a flexed position, the vehicle was dismantled, and the funerary assemblage was indigenous in character. These attributes suggest not immigration, but partial borrowing by local elites of practices from the other side of the Channel to manifest their prestige. It is, however, worth noting that a recent excavation of a chariot burial at Ferry Fryston revealed the presence of a possible outsider within this elite: strontium isotope analysis shows that the man might have grown up much further north, in the Highlands of Scotland or even in Scandinavia⁵². Only a minority of the Arras burials contained goods, and these were mostly fairly modest – a bracelet of bronze, jet, or shale, or a brooch. Just a few individuals buried with chariots exhibited signs of greater opulence: two men with swords, and a woman with an iron mirror and bronze container at Wetwang Slack; a man with a mail coat at Kirkburn; and a woman with another iron mirror and a string of tiny blue glass beads, wrapped around a coral-decorated brooch at Wetwang village. South-east England was marked by a stronger current of influence during the 1st c. BC, as shown by the widespread adoption of cremation burial, coinage, and the potter’s wheel. Cremation cemeteries – not unlike those across the Channel, but again displaying distinctive insular characteristics – became more frequent: they were generally small, with only two known that contained over a hundred cremations. They show very uneven degrees of wealth, with a few particularly ostentatious burials containing imported wine amphorae and Roman pottery – for example, the Welwyn-type burials found in the region north of the Thames. As we have seen, this reappearance of individual rich burials is part of a wider phenomenon evident around the fringes of the expanding Roman Empire, which continued into the Roman Iron Age in northern Europe⁵³.

More than a thousand individuals dated to the Iron Age have been recovered from the bogs of north-west Europe, where the acid and anaerobic environment ensured exceptional preservation, including soft tissue and hair. Many of the individuals appear to have been executed: strangled, or with their throat slit or skull broken, they were thrown into the bogs and pushed into the mud with the help of poles and sticks⁵⁴. It is of course difficult to establish whether the executions were carried out as punishment for wrong-doing, or represent human sacrifices. Some bodies, like Tollund Man (Denmark) or Lindow Man (England), were recovered still with the rope that was used to strangle them. Lindow Man, found near Manchester and dated to the 1st c. AD, had been fatally struck three times on the head, his throat was slit, and he had been bled, as well as garroted (asphyxiated) until his neck was finally broken⁵⁵. This triple execution is likely to be ritual. The individuals found in this type of context appear for the most to belong to a relatively high level of society. They were well-nourished and do not show physical signs of heavy labour, and in some cases they even had manicured nails⁵⁶.

Similar suggestions have been made for bodies found in disused cereal storage pits. These are not formal graves, but rather attest to sacrificial practices involving both humans and animals⁵⁷. A marked increase in this practice, which was probably destined to ensure good harvests in the gift of supernatural powers, is noticeable from the fifth to the third century BC in Lower Austria, the south of Germany, the Paris basin, and central southern England.

The social significance of funerary practices

The death of someone close deeply affects the survivors, leaving them moved and distressed. In traditional societies, their whole world view is shaken to the core. After the death of one of its members, the community needed to restore its view of the world order. Not only did people have to dispose of the body rapidly for reasons of hygiene, but they also had to make sense of the separation from that inert body and its rapid physical decay. They had lost an individual who had previously contributed in all sorts of ways to the community, which, above all, was suffering the loss of a link in its own social and reproductive chain. Consequently the family and the whole community needed to mourn in a ritualized manner, a practice that involved interaction with supernatural powers.

Archaeological data are only partly representative of actual funerary practices, especially those reflecting their more ostentatious elements. When graves are monumental in character, they reveal unambiguously the will to mark, both in the soil and in memory, the social role of the deceased. But the contents do not necessarily or unambiguously reflect his or her status, as objects could have been previously destroyed ceremonially without leaving any traces. This constitutes a serious challenge for archaeology. Indeed, there is no guarantee that the artefacts deposited in a grave are representative of what was destroyed or expended during the funeral – i.e. everything that constituted the funeral ceremony. The frequent use of the same categories of objects in the most richly furnished mortuary deposits all over Iron Age Europe, however, implies that a largely shared model – symbolizing identity and status differences (accoutrements, toilet instruments), generosity (vessels used in banquets), mobility (horse gear, vehicles), and, for males, armed force (weapons) – was in operation. The main variations observable across the continent relate to the proportion of people who were buried. Not all the dead of a community were interred, and those who were buried may not have been accorded any signs of distinction. In this respect, major differences can be seen between Iron Age societies of similar complexity. The grave should be conceived, not as a faithful reflection of the life and status of an individual, but as the expression of an “ideal” or symbolic status that the community or group bestowed on the dead. Funerary practices fit into a sequence that conforms to other rites of passage: rites of separation are followed by rites of integration into the community of ancestors⁵⁸. For the Iron Age, such practices appear to take different forms articulated between two poles:

• integration into a large community of equals, rendering social differences practically imperceptible;
• assimilation within the mythical genealogy of a dominant or emerging group, be it a family, a lineage, an aristocratic or economic group; in this instance, the markers of group membership are clearly displayed.

Rites of passage are fundamentally aimed at the submission of those they are celebrating. It is conceivable that funerary rites fulfilled the function of integrating the dead into a “useful” category, whether useful to the community as a whole, or to an already dominant or emerging social group, for instance a new dynasty⁵⁹.

Here too we must neither confine ourselves to social analysis at a local scale, nor undertake a narrowly defined thematic enquiry such as solely archaeological or solely palaeopathological studies. Mortuary practices are full of meanings that are obscure but also intimately connected to other social dimensions. This contradicts the idea of a myriad of meanings that escape our understanding, a myriad that is entirely unpredictable and can only be described, without any hope of higher-level explanation. It is possible to draw out structural meaning related to the more or less ostentatious nature of power and the more or less intensive character of social, political, and economic exchanges.

Feasting was a tradition common to north-Alpine social elites from at least the 14th c. BC onwards⁶⁰. The abundance and/or luxury of the tableware found in their graves signals the importance of the banquet to members of the social elites buried with great ceremony; it symbolizes the funeral feast, of course, but more generally the banquet was a crucial element in their power strategies. These high-ranking individuals offered lavish hospitality, in a range of contexts, in order to pose as models of conviviality, solidarity, sociability, and generosity, and to parade their wealth, power, good fortune, and divine protection – i.e. their legitimacy. Literary and ethnographic sources show how universal such practices were in hierarchical societies and how frequent the occasions for organizing a spectacular feast were: births, rites of passage to adulthood, marriages, military victories, changes of status, collective enterprises, funerals, etc⁶¹. At funerals, those close to the deceased also demonstrated that they had the capacity and the will to assume the roles of political and religious leaders and guarantee continuity. They thus conveyed a message, transforming the ceremony into a huge communications event aimed at the local population, but conceivably also foreign potentates invited for the occasion. Indeed, expenditure was not limited to attracting the favour of those invited or merely to impressing them at the time: by marking the landscape, the intent was to make a lasting impression on the collective memory. It is likely that the more unstable the position of the dominant group – for instance, in times of political or economic strife – the greater their outlay, especially those whose territories controlled communication networks, or major routes for the exchange of goods, people, and ideas. Such situations promote material and intellectual improvement, but are potentially unsettling for the organization of traditional societies⁶². Material improvement seems almost invariably to lead to changes in social balance, and new ideas inevitably shake up traditional conceptual frameworks.

This approach conforms to the “dual-processual” theory⁶³, which holds that leaders use different kinds of politico-economic strategies on a continuum from exclusive and highly centralized “networks” to inclusive and more decentralized “corporate” strategies. The “network” mode emphasizes personal prestige, wealth exchange, individual power of accumulation, elite progression, lineage-based models of inheritance and descent, particularizing ideologies, personal networks, and specialized craft workshops. Archaeological evidence of this mode takes the form of individualization, exchange systems for prestige goods, and ostentatious burials. The “corporate” mode stresses basic food production, communal ritual, public construction, power-sharing, cooperative large-scale projects, with the segments of society linked together by rituals of integration and by ideological means. Hierarchy is present but not individualized; economic distinctions are limited or even completely absent from mortuary practices.

The available evidence, the most significant of which we have reviewed in this chapter, shows that distinctive trends were at work during the seven or eight centuries under consideration. From south to north the size, durability, and materiality of funerary assemblages increases. This tendency unfolded in two main phases, separated by a temporary reversal from the 4th to 2nd c. BC; however, this was not so much a general outward diffusion as a dendritic spread along the main river networks. In its first phase, this translates into burials that were monumental, richly, or very richly furnished, and either isolated or in small groups; in the second, cemeteries are larger and the burials more clearly materialized, but with less evident distinctions in terms of wealth and monumentality.

These observations suggest that funerary practices too were sensitive to the intensification of contacts among the different societies occupying the European continent. Such relationships bring in their wake changes in all domains of activity: economic, of course, political because they tend to change the social equilibrium (in other words, traditional power structures), but also ideological because they foster the introduction of new ideas. The latter were sometimes a result of simple borrowings, but more often a product of difficulties created by the opening up of the community to other societies, exacerbating the causes of conflict and requiring the reinforcement of internal solidarities in compensation. Such a scenario could explain why many Iron Age communities in Europe chose to express their internal solidarity symbolically by having a greater number of people buried in communal cemeteries, and by adopting more uniform forms of burial. Where funerary deposits are very restrained, the intention may have been to show that equal value was accorded to all individuals in the face of death, a death risked to safeguard the community. Less extreme cases of restraint in mortuary rite seem instead to reflect a type of political regime where power was exercised in a more consensual manner, or at least less despotically, than in the so-called “princely” societies.