Burial and Poetry: Exploring the limits of a metaphor
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-16

Both burials and poems are sites of careful crafting which remain richly expressive and emotive long after their compositional moment has passed. Archaeologists often speak of ‘reading’ burials and Martin Carver, in his contribution to Treasure in the Medieval West (2000), has argued that burials are poetry. Nevertheless, the ‘language’ in which they are ‘written’ is remote and ambiguous. This paper explores the uses and limits of thinking of burials as poetry, and of the act of interpreting them as a kind of literary analysis, and asks how the metaphor might be deployed to offer insights into the distant past and archaeology’s methodological present. 

We draw on the literary critical concept of ‘close reading’ to investigate the poetry of burials at different levels. The excavation report, a document normally shrouded in scientific language, forms a departure point as we move from attempts to read modern burial descriptions as poetry to discussions of how far we can ‘translate’ the burial into poetry that is readable on literary terms. A case study from the Early Bronze Age of Scotland provides the background to our argument that apparently inarticulate graves offer fertile ground for different sorts of ‘reading’. 


Mark Haughton (Cambridge University) and Susie Hill (Cambridge University)