Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries Kinship, community and identity

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sayer, Duncan
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Manchester Manchester University Press 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: Directory of Open Access Books - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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245 0 0 |a Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries  |h Elektronische Ressource  |b Kinship, community and identity 
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653 |a Europe / bicssc 
653 |a Merovingian 
653 |a Community 
653 |a Mortuary archaeology 
653 |a c 1000 CE to c 1500 / bicssc 
653 |a Kinship 
653 |a Spatial archaeology 
653 |a Sociology: death and dying / bicssc 
653 |a Cemetery organisation 
653 |a Archaeology by period / region / bicssc 
653 |a Social identity 
653 |a Burial 
653 |a Early Anglo-Saxon 
653 |a Social archaeology 
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520 |a 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.