Reflections on a Semseter of Death

My final semester as an undergrad is finally coming to a close (assuming I pass all my courses of course). It has been one heck of a ride. There have been ups and downs, wins and losses, many lessons learned and much sleep missed. Being so close to the end is both exhilarating and terrifying. I am ready to be done, to embark on a new chapter of my life. I also have no idea what that chapter might entail which is more than a little frightening.

My last semester has been one of the hardest of my undergraduate career. Trying to balance a heavy course load, job searching, and training (I'm a Canadian national team athlete) has been incredibly draining. I also struggled with the myriad of different projects I had to complete for my various classes. It seems we are finally saying goodbye to lecture, essay, exam course formats. This semester I gained invaluable new skills through professors encouraging engagement with a variety of different mediums. I helped to created a webpage (It's on Anglo-Saxon execution cemeteries), I started blogging, I worked with databases, and I learned basic statistics (not a new medium to the education system I know, but certainly new to me!). Learning these news skills is incredibly relevant to the job-market today but getting there inevitably involved a good deal of frustration and exhaustion.

I suppose it may not have helped that all my courses seem to be focused on death and human remains, which can at times get a bit depressing. Interestingly though, I think my engagement with death has actually made me think about death in more positive terms. Death surrounds us all. It is common to all humans, in all cultures, in all time periods. It is the common factor between all the remains that archaeologists study, no matter what race, or sexual orientation, nationality, identity; they are all dead. So in a way death unites us, and that to me is strangely comforting.

I lived dear to my family, I gave up my life yet a maiden.

Here I lie dead and I am ashes, and these ashes are earth.

But if the earth is a goddess, I am a goddess, I am not dead.

                           Roman tomb epitaph (CIL, vol. VI, no 35, 887)

 

For anyone interested in tomb epigraphy, here is a link  to a selection from the Roman Republic, Enjoy!

 

 

Do we need to legalize same-sex death?

I came across a recent re-post of an older blog from the Death Reference Desk that I found incredibly disturbing and for none of the reasons you might expect when reading a blog about death. The post was talking about some of the legal issues surrounding same-sex marriage rights and their effect on funerary practices. I have always been a supporter of same-sex marriage. I think it is completely ridiculous to still be enforcing inequality in any way; its 2013 people, smarten up!

I have never before considered the legal implications of legislation prohibiting gay-marriage on funerary practices. Apparently in states or countries where gay-marriage is not legal, same-sex partners have no legal rights to the body of their deceased partner. The blog post told the story of a man, Ron, who had to fight with the state authorities and the office of the medical examiner to get the body of his partner of 17 years released to him for burial. It took Ron four weeks to finally get the body released to him even though his partner had specified in his will he wished his final rights to be undertaken by Ron. I find this story to be incredibly sad and shocking particularly in relation to what we have been learning about in class this week.

We have been learning about the complicated politics of death, particularly the repatriation of human remains. There are people around the world fighting to get the human remains of ancestors re-buried in order to respect the deceased’s beliefs and wishes about their funeral and burial rites. There has been a massive shift in archaeology and anthropology in the last few decades from a primacy of scientific inquiry above all else to a primacy of beliefs systems and traditions associated with human remains. While I definitely think this is a positive shift in the field, I find it a little disconcerting that the voices advocating for respecting the wishes of the long dead are louder than the voices advocating for respecting the wishes of the very recently dead. It makes me quite angry to think that someone who has just been torn apart by the loss of a loved one has to deal with the additional trauma of having to fight to lay their loved one to rest. I sincerely hope that more states and countries will soon legalize same-sex marriage and stop treating human beings as second-class citizens because of their sexual orientation.

ya...that's gonna leave a mark

I’ve recently been spending far too much time staring, with equal parts horror and fascination, at pictures of skeletal pathologies and trauma. A really cool resource I was introduced to through a different class is a downloadable excel table which has links to thousands of pictures of skeletal pathologies/traumas (To access the table just follow the link and click ‘skeleton photos’ to initiate the download).

It’s worth mentioning that these are photos of real human remains and some of the pathologies can be quite unpleasant looking so if you find that sort of thing disturbing then this resource is not for you! If you have an iron constitution however and are bored one evening feel free to peruse the collection. Personally I find many of the pathologies give me the heebie-geebies but I do enjoy the battle-type wounds such as sword or battle-axe wounds. Sorry, perhaps I should rephrase that. I am interested in looking at the effects of battle on the skeleton; I’m quite sure I wouldn’t 'enjoy' getting my skull sliced through with a sword.

 At this point you may be asking yourself what is the relevance of all this babbling. Aside from being very interesting, blade injuries are quite useful to a mortuary archaeologist because they are one of the few skeletal pathologies or skeletal markings that are relatively easily attributable to a cause. Blade wounds appear, to the trained eye, quite different than post-depositional damage and unlike the diseases which leave skeletal traces, are much more easily attributable to their specific cause.

Of course evidence of blade wounds only appear on the skeleton if the blade comes into contact with the bone. It is quite possible to kill someone with a blade and leave no evidence of the injury on the skeleton. Additionally, blade wounds cannot always be determined to be cause of death. Some blade wounds, for example, are clearly severe enough to have caused the death of an individual if they were inflicted ante-mortem.

The problem is that peri-mortem injuries (that occur around time of death) can’t be attributed to occurring before (causing death) or after death (post-mortem mutilation) with certainty. Nevertheless blade injuries present on skeletal remains are one of the most useful forms of evidence available to archaeologists for reconstructing cause of death.

 References:
Images from Donald J. Ortner, Ohio State University, Global History Health Project.
Image 1: Towton No. 006, Adult male from Towton, England collection AD 1461. Sword wound to top of Skull.
Image 2: ANM 2069, Adult male from Prague, Czechoslovakia collection. Sword wound, dislodged bone on skull.

The Writing's on the Wall (but you probably can't read it, unless you're good with hieroglyphs)

My classmate Cailin posted a cool blog about a necropolis in the ancient kingdom of Kush which neighbours Egypt. The people there built funerary monuments that seem to be hybrids between pyramids and tumulus’ (tumuli?). The part of her blog that really caught my attention though was the archaeologists who worked there found inscriptions wishing grandma good meals in the afterlife.  That reminded me of some very cool graffiti from the builders who worked on the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

Some of the ancient graffiti found deep inside the Great Pyramid Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/who-built-the-pyramids.html).

I love ancient graffiti because it is one of the few glimpses we get of ‘real’ people. The graffiti by the pyramid builders, such as an inscription by one of the worker gangs identifying themselves as ‘the Drunks (or the Drunkards) of Menkaure’, breathes life back into the ancient stones of these monuments. I think sometimes when we are looking at monuments from so far in the past, especially monuments like the pyramids that have been assimilated and incorporated into popular culture; we forget that they are graves.  Even the powerful pharaohs were people who loved and were loved and while their funerals and funerary monuments undoubtedly had important socio-political functions they were probably emotionally important to the people who mourned them as well.

This week we have been learning about how different cultures understand or categorize the lifecourse. For simplicity’s sake, the lifecourse is basically different stages an individual goes through in life such as childhood, adolescence, etc. I found the discussions we had in class about the lifecourse really got me thinking about how individuals experienced life in past societies. I suppose I tend to get so caught up with the material culture side of archaeology; C14 dates, grave goods, stone monuments, etc. that  in a strange way I almost dehumanize the people I’m trying to learn about. Archaeology is all about reconstructing social organization, and subsistence patterns, and funerary practices, and the list goes on and on. I think it’s really important to look at a smaller scale sometimes even though reconstruction of individual lives from the archaeological record is often not possible; we can at least imagine some of those little moments in life that the archaeological record remains largely silent about. I mean, perhaps a bunch of rowdy ancient Egyptians builders got drunk and urinated on the partially constructed tomb of their illustrious pharaoh while he was in bed restlessly counting sheep? cattle? camels? because he had lost at Senet that evening.

Queen Nefertari Playing Senet, Tomb of Nefertari;
ca. 1279–1213 B.C. (http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/100005246)

Gladiator Burial Clubs

Reading my classmate Lauren’s post on the discovery of Richard the III (http://beyondgraves.blogspot.ca/2013/02/can-you-judge-life-by-its-skeleton.html), and pondering some of the luck involved with our ability to ID him, got me thinking about issues of archaeological inquiry/discovery and status. When we get right down to it both archaeologists and the general public have an affinity for high status figures and discoveries (in general!). While doing research for a case-study on deviant burials I was plagued by high-status discoveries. My search results for the site of Sutton Hoo went something like: ‘Sutton Hoo ship burial, the treasures of Sutton Hoo, Sutton Hoo a princely burial ground’, and on and on. To be fair I understand that it is much more difficult to make interpretations from the archaeological record the less information you have. High-status individuals, like Richard the III, appear more commonly in our written history and very ‘rich’ burials such as the Sutton Hoo ship burial give archaeologist a wealth of information to work with. An unmarked mass grave, where many lower-class individuals have ended up, offers archaeologists fairly limited interpretive potential.

I would suggest an interesting area for looking at mortuary archaeology of the lower-class is Roman-period gladiators. While some gladiators could actually become quite wealthy most were not and regardless of wealth, they were still slaves. Gladiators were actually part of a specific social class legally referred to as infames in which people with certain occupations such as gladiators, prostitutes, and  actors were considered, regardless of wealth or fame, to be very lower-class (Lex Julia Municipalis (CIL n. 206)) (For more information on Infamia see: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0063:id=infamia-cn). Additionally because they were slaves many gladiators ended up dying far away from their kin and homeland; while this makes for interesting isotopic analysis, it means gladiators may often lack the people who would traditionally mourn and bury them. Gladiators, however, dealt with these issues in a very cool way. They created what might be called burial clubs or unions. They would all contribute a small portion of their winnings to a fund which they would then use to provide a funeral and burial for other gladiators in the club when they died (Kyle 1998:160-1). We have extant epitaphs that allow burials to be identified as gladiators (Carter 2007).

I, Victor, a left-handed gladiator, lie here, though my fatherland is Thessaloniki. Fortune killed me, not perjured Pinnas; no longer let him boast. I had an arms-mate, Polynices, who avenged me by killing Pin-nas. Claudius Thallus was in charge of this memorial from what Victor left behind (ex testamento).

(Robert (1940) 94-5 no. 34 = IGBulg III 1019, In Carter 2007).

I think these burial clubs are a fascinating way we see a group coping with their social position that would provide an interesting means of investigating a lower-class group from the archeological record.

References: 
Carter MJ. 2007. Gladiatorial Combat: The Rules of Engagement. The Classical Journal 102(2):97-114.

Kyle DJ. 1998. Disposal from Roman Areans: Some Rituals and Options. In Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, 5:155-183.  London: Routledge.