Sian Mui

http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12829/

This work provides a study of corpse positioning as an aspect of mortuary practice. The positional representation of the dead body is fundamental to the perception of death and the deceased, but this aspect of burial treatment has been overlooked and under-theorised in archaeological and anthropological scholarship. With an aim to explore the significance of the positioning of the corpse and its place within wider debates surrounding dying and death, this research examines burial positioning in inhumation graves in early Anglo-Saxon England, c AD 400–750. Bringing together 3,053 graves from 32 cemeteries, this thesis combines statistical methods, artistic reconstructions, typological analysis, grave artefacts, osteological data, literary sources, and representational art to produce a new and challenging examination of funerary remains.

This work has identified a positional norm of supine deposition, extended legs, and arms positioned according to one of seven ‘main types’. Patterns and variations in burial positions were manifested as an interplay between conformity to this positional norm and variations beyond it: from the individual level to regional practices, and in relation to long-term changes through the early Anglo-Saxon period. The arrangement of the cadaver was intimately linked with the deceased’s social identity and relationship with other people, mediated by the bodily engagements that took place between the living and the dead in the mortuary performances. The positions of corpses can be argued through this new evidence to be comparable as a source to human representations in art, revealing a wider gestural repertoire in the early medieval world. This work has offered new and exciting insights into living and dying in early medieval England, and has set new agendas for studying body positions from archaeological contexts. This has far-reaching methodological and interpretive implications for the study of death and burial, in the past as well as the present.

This work studies body positioning in inhumation graves in early Anglo-Saxon England, circa AD 450–700. Addressing skeletal positions from excavated cemetery records, it offers an interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon attitude towards to the body and death. Burial data are examined statistically to identify evidence for patterns, variations, and changes in positioning practice, which are compared against evidence for postural symbolism in the context of early medieval England and northwestern Europe. It is argued that body positioning played a key role in constructing death representation, mediating and reproducing social ideals and values. The corpse was embedded in a wider discourse of Anglo-Saxon ambivalence, offering fluid responses to the changing social, political, and religious landscapes of the early medieval period.

This work studies local variations and changes in funerary rites in sixth- to eighth-century Northumbria, and the implications of the processes of Christianisation for these variations and changes. It seeks to understand the interactions between Christianity and localised interpretations of death and identity. By bringing cemetery data to intra-site scrutiny, analyses are undertaken in three scales: the positioning of bodies in graves, the arrangement of graves within cemeteries, and the location of cemeteries in the landscape. The sites are examined individually, and results are brought together to interpret the social milieu from which these mortuary practices arose. The study has identified, on the one hand, great variability in early medieval funerary culture that existed not only across cemeteries, but also within them; and on the other, sets of homogenising burial discourses. It is argued that these similarities and differences were heavily implicated in the expression of communal and personal identities, within a landscape of social, political, and religious change between the sixth and eighth centuries. Processes of Christianisation introduced new ideas about living and dying to these people, who made conscious decisions about how to interpret and respond to these ideas in light of their local positions, thus creating the vibrancy of mortuary evidence in early medieval Northumbria.

Laying out the dead body in an extended and supine position is very much a taken-for-granted practice in the contemporary western world, and it is frequently assumed to be the universal standard posture for the corpse. As we expect corpses to be laid out extended and supine, this portrayal is widely replicated and perpetuated in art, popular media and museums. This chapter reflects on the reproduction of corpse postures in two seemingly very different contemporary environments: film/TV portrayals and museum reconstructions. Contending that our idea of the “ideal” burial position is historically and culturally rooted in the trajectories of burial cultures in Western Europe, this chapter discusses the role of cultural expectations in informing the visual imagination surrounding mortuary practices, and explores the methodological and interpretive implications of such expectations in both academic and public contexts.

Shrouds are cloths used in wrapping or covering corpses, in effect concealing bodies and faces from onlookers’ gaze. The emergence of churchyard cemeteries in later Anglo-Saxon England introduced the practice of shrouded burials in a number of post-Conversion cemeteries. The shift from the earlier clothed burial to the later shrouded burial marked a shift in representation of death, posing questions about the influence of Christianity and the Church on the conception of dying and death. Bringing together evidence from archaeological record, manuscript illustrations and literary sources, this paper explores the visual implications of shrouds by considering how these bodies, in their shrouds, would have been conceptualised, displayed and seen. It argues that, through the manipulation of funerary perception, the shrouded burials were heavily implicated in rhetoric of sin and salvation, folded in complex paradigms of death and life after death. Shrouds were not simply a negation of ‘pagan’ clothed burial, but they represented, more profoundly, an active uptake of Christian ideologies.