MICROMORPHOLOGY OF RITUAL. GEOARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES OF A CREMATION URN AND ACCOMPANYING VESSEL
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-01-08

The rise of Bronze Age Urnfield cultures resulted in widespread introduction of cremation as a dominant funeral rite across large areas of Europe. The Lusatian culture, a local variant of this phenomenon, thrived in the lands of present-day Poland roughly between 1300 and 400 BC. According to current knowledge, these communities practiced burning of their dead and depositing the remains in the ground – typically in an urn placed in a shallow pit, sometimes with additional vessels; the type and abundance of grave goods differs chronologically. Known cemeteries consist(ed) of hundreds or even thousands of graves and were probably used for considerable periods of time. Still, some aspects of the “Lusatian” funerary ritual remain a mystery: little is known about post-cremation treatment of human remains and their deposition in the urn. Another question pertains to the contents of the accompanying vessels. Attempting to fill in some of these blanks, we conducted a pilot geoarchaeological study of a cremation urn and accompanying vessel, discovered in a Lusatian culture grave dated to the HaC-period at a cemetery in Rolantowice, near Wrocław, Poland. In order

to explore the depositional and post-depositional circumstances, the structural and compositional properties of the vessels infills were investigated by CT scanning, micromorphology, physico-chemical and botanical analyses. Our results suggest that after cremation, which most likely hadn’t been too protracted in time, the bone fragments might have been meticulously picked from the pyre and packed into the urn with the aid of crushing. Investigations of the accompanying vessel delivered as yet inconclusive data (some analyses still in progress). A similar research protocol applied on a larger scale, with targeted sampling in different zones of cemeteries and at cemeteries of various chronology, may provide promising information about possible changes of funerary ritual in time.


Author(s): Krupski, Mateusz (Archeolodzy.org Foundation; Institute of Archaeology, University of Wroclaw) - Hałuszko, Agata (Archeolodzy.org Foundation) - Sady, Agata (Archaeology Department, Silesian Museum) - Malkiewicz, Małgorzata (Institute of Geological Sciences, University of Wrocław) - Grześkowiak, Marek (Institute of Archaeology, University of Wroclaw)