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    Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries

    Kinship, community and identity

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    Author(s)
    Sayer, Duncan
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are well-known because of their rich grave goods, but this wealth can obscure their importance as local phenomena and the product of pluralistic multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and some Merovingian cemeteries and aims to understand them using a multi-dimensional methodology. The performance of mortuary drama was a physical communication and so needed syntax and semantics. This local knowledge was used to negotiate the arrangement of cemetery spaces and to construct the stories that were told within them. For some families the emphasis of a mortuary ritual was on reinforcing and reproducing family narratives, but this was only one technique used to arrange cemetery space. This book offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistic perspective. Each chapter builds on the last, using visual aesthetics, leitmotifs, spatial statistics, grave orientation, density of burial, mortuary ritual, grave goods, grave robbing, barrows, integral structures, skeletal trauma, stature, gender and age to build a detailed picture of complex mortuary spaces. This approach places community at the forefront of interpretation because people used and reused cemetery spaces and these people chose to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased because of their own attitudes, lifeways and lived experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will also be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social differentiation because it proposes a way to move beyond grave goods in the discussion of complex social identities.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46719
    Keywords
    Mortuary archaeology; Community; Kinship; Early Anglo-Saxon; Merovingian; Social archaeology; Burial; Cemetery organisation; Social identity; Spatial archaeology
    Publisher
    Manchester University Press
    Publisher website
    https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/
    Publication date and place
    Manchester, 2020
    Grantor
    • University of Central Lancashire - [grantnumber unknown]
    Classification
    Archaeology by period / region
    Europe
    c 1000 CE to c 1500
    Sociology: death and dying
    Pages
    336
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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