Recent attempts to understand people in the past have turned to the anthropological concept of personhood; an interpretation of identity where persons are permeable or partible and dividual rather than self-contained and individual (Fowler 2004).
According to Brück (2004, 307) identity is relational, this means it is created or made from relationships with people, places and things. Personhood is understood in association with other aspects of identity such as gender and age (Fowler 2010, 140).
The archaeological evidence used to discuss personhood has varied and includes:
bodies (Joyce 2001), objects (Brück 2001; 2006) and transformations through the burial rite (Fowler 2001). In Bronze Age literature, personhood has been related to fragmentation of objects and bodies by purposeful destruction, cremation and removal of fragments; these processes are seen as metaphors for the person being partible and dividual.
Jones (2002, 161) points out the need to be careful not to apply dividual personhood to all non-western societies. Jones discusses the biography of Bronze Age lunulae and jet and amber necklaces; and sees these artefacts as the locus of expression for the creation of relational personhood (Jones 2002, 166). The fragmentation of necklaces
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makes them partible to establish links between the living and the dead, lunulae are the opposite in that they are not partible and are also not associated with burials (Jones 2002, 169). Brück (2006) has argued against Bronze Age studies making a definite division between people and objects; and instead considers from how objects may be extensions of the person or reminders of events in the life course. Brück (2006, 78) cites numerous cases where objects have been purposefully fragmented, this is interpreted as evidence of the destruction of objects which were associated with the deceased. The cremation of people is seen as a parallel practice; the low weights of some Bronze Age cremations are interpreted as possible evidence for the curation of parts of individuals which may have been circulated (Brück 2006, 81). The co-mingling of certain Bronze Age inhumations is given the same interpretation.
2.6 Conclusions
A review of past approaches has revealed a lack of progress in Bronze Age mortuary studies, with past focus being on artefacts, craniology and unusual examples of Early Bronze Age individuals such as the Amesbury Archer. Unusual burials such as this have formed the basis of assumptions which have been applied to the Bronze Age in the rest of the UK.
The idea of primary and secondary burials is a self-perpetuating theory which is partially created by an excavation bias: antiquarians were most interested in the central burials; this was where they predominantly dug. This theory cannot stand up under the variety of expressions of Bronze Age mortuary behaviour; a palaeodemography of these burials may add further fuel to challenge this assumption.
Unfortunately the primary/secondary burial model has formed an assumed basis for more recent research where the sequence of burials has been related to social structuring of different individuals using a simplistic interpretation of similarity and difference in aspects such as burial position (Mizoguchi 1993; Last 1998).
The processualist approach was focussed on the search for elites through the number and richness of the associated grave-goods in order to make economical and functionalist interpretations. Any rich graves, whether they contain adult males, females, and children, are solely indicative of elites. These elites are defined in purely economic terms; there is no discussion of other aspects, for example the social or
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ritual. With this approach kinship and marriage relations are also linked with the development of a prestige goods economy; social and family ties are seen as economic rather than emotional. Overall this approach led to a lack of investigation of the interaction between social life and individuals.
Post-processual approaches include a wider variety of interpretations and become more removed from the previous object-centred approaches, although artefacts have also been central within archaeological interpretations of both gender and age (Sofaer Deverenski 1997). Gender has often been assumed from grave-goods, child burials only seem to be discussed when they are associated with small ‘child-like’ objects;
such burials are usually not discussed in their site context. Although Brück’s (2009) gendered consideration of cremation weight is more promising, even in this case cremations are interpreted like artefacts; taphonomic factors should also be taken into account. Cremations are still the remains of people even if they appear to have become ‘objectified’ to non-osteologists.
Personhood while promising in interpretations of identity is at times applied liberally to interpret differences in burial practice (e.g. cremated remains) without considering the variety of possible reasons for this choice of burial practice. Also this approach is limited by its reliance on the comparison of prehistoric people to anthropological groups (Jones 2002; Fowler 2004). However, Personhood is useful in making us think differently about how past people saw themselves and others around them.
An archaeology of objects?
Whilst objects have agency, this develops from the interaction of people and things.
Objects are more than just functional but the opposite should not be taken to extremes; objects which are often used may have been favourites for the completion of certain tasks, objects may be gifts, offerings or group belongings.
The archaeology of the Early Bronze Age has for the most part been an archaeology of objects.
More recent studies have moved away from objects, but Bronze Age artefacts are still at times discussed outside of their context. Whilst artefacts are important they should not be interpreted within a vacuum, neither should human remains. Bronze Age
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archaeology should not be an archaeology of objects, but rather, a contextual archaeology.
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Chapter 3: Archaeology and Osteology: “a street poorly travelled in both