Punitive postures for the early medieval deviant dead
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-04-26

In his influential 2009 book, Andrew Reynolds integrated documentary, place-name and archaeological evidence to identify and interpret later Anglo-Saxon execution cemeteries as evidence of judicial practice, indicative of the political ideology, legal culture and dispersed administrative geography of the Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the 7th and 8th centuries AD and persisting as places of death and disposal into the post-Conquest period.

Reynolds' consideration of burial posture was primarily related to distinguishing execution cemeteries from contemporary communal cemeteries and identifying modes of punishment, including hanging and decapitation. This paper presents a further reading of the evidence for burial posture in later Anglo-Saxon execution cemeteries by drawing on theories of public execution as theatrical memory work. I propose that the lack of formulaic disposal, and thus considerable variability in deviant burial posture at many later Anglo-Saxon execution cemeteries, can be theorized as more than evidence of casual disregard for the dead or the violent punishments inflicted whilst killing the interred individuals. Burial posture can instead be interpreted as a key performative strategy at the culmination of public executions, choreographed to overtly contrast with burial practices in contemporary Christian burial grounds. As well as marking out the deviant dead spatially, burial posture enhanced the emotive and mnemonic force of public execution and the act of burial itself. Punitive postures thus built mnemonic citations between successive burial episodes, installing memories of violence into fixed landscape locales. Focusing on the evidence from Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, I explore how varied punitive postures configured the remembrance of the deviant dead in the early medieval landscape. 

Howard Williams, University of Chester