Death: Mirroring life? An exploration of the perspectives gleaned from skeletal and burial material
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 27/04/2017

When a loved one dies it is usual to present a ritualised, but exceptional, set of behaviours. For example, today people often wear black to symbolise mourning, a corpse is often dressed in the deceased's best clothing and funeral services often have a more religious underpinning than perhaps the rest of life entails. All this is behaviour that does not necessarily reflect the everyday, but is deemed ‘appropriate’ for that stage in the life course for the society.
Academics today often explore burial type, provision etc. in order to gain insight into an individual’s identity in the past. However, there is rarely discussion of how an individual’s newly ‘deceased’ status effects their identity overall in the eyes of their community and how the exceptional behaviours, like those discussed above, could distort the perception we have from the burial context. Using an osteobiography approach, I aim to explore the life story as exhibited in the bones and the death story through the burial context, to see how much the two narratives agree. To do this I have used case studies from Roman Britain and concentrated in particular on the theme of disabled identity.

Stephanie Evelyn-Wright, University of Southampton