ABSTRACT

The way bodies are treated after death is a unique source of how people were socially understood, but it is difficult to comprehend. The living person is not the same as the dead body, and yet some of the treatment of the dead body refers to the persons as if they were still living. All human societies, and even some animals (Kluger 2013), feel the need to work though the experience of loss and grief through funerary practices. One component of this is handling the dead body to remove it from society and integrate it into the community of the dead, which can, as evidenced by ethnographic observations (for example, Carr 1995, Ucko 1969), be done in a staggering number of different ways. There is, of course, an archaeological bias towards treatments that leave obvious archaeological traces: certain elements of body treatment are only apparent in very special, well-documented cases, such as the burial of Hochdorf, Germany (Biel 1985a). The treatment of the body includes the choice of whether to inhume or cremate. Both practices are common in the Hallstatt period of central Europe, but show distinct regional and chronological patterns (Rebay-Salisbury in press-c). The next level of analysis is the way in which the body is equipped with objects and graves are built and furnished; the two often appear conflated in the archaeological record. Lastly, the ways in which bodies are buried together, in graves of multiple individuals, burial mounds and cemeteries, might give insights into how social ties were formed and communities were imagined and constructed.