Costume of deads or costume of livings?
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-03-30

There is a long debate of interpreting the archaeological discoveries from cemeteries, especially, as a suggesting (sometime as a certitude) of the costume of certain community/group/ethnic. Discoveries from settlement where never taking into consideration as a reliable source for such debate. But there are epoches when we do not have cemeteries, at least known one’s, and there are epoches when we do not have settlements, archaeologist preferring to excavate the cemeteries. Such a situation is in Lower Danube region in the 6th-10th centuries. So this is a good situation to a wider kind of questions relating the costume. Costume of a person? Of a group? Of an elite? Of the other, non-elite? Of the dead? Of the living? Of the image of the buried person? Of the image of his family? How can we interpret the very same object discovered both in a settlement and in a cemetery from those questions point of view? It is an expression of the dead ascribed to the living space, the so called “closing objects”? or can be ambivalent? We intend to provoke some answers and more debates based on the discoveries from the mentioned area and not only, dated in the time frame of second half of the 1st Millennium A.D., a region and epoch of dramatically changes in the hole Europe.

Author - Dr. Ciuperc , Bogdan Iosif, History and Archaeology Prahova County Museum, Ploieşti, Romania
Co-author(s) - Dr. Magureanu, A., Institute of Archaeology Vasile Parvan, Bucharest, Romania (Presenting author)