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SUMMARY:Frequent Hearses: The Archaeology of Funeral Ritual in Early Iron 
 Age West-Central Europe  - Bettina Arnold (University of Wisconsin Milwauk
 ee)
DTSTART:20250207T170000Z
DTEND:20250207T183000Z
UID:TALK227623@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jinoh Kim
DESCRIPTION:“On all the line a sudden vengeance waits\,\nAnd frequent he
 arses shall besiege your gates.”\n--To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady
 \n\nIt has been said that archaeologists excavate burials\, not funerals. 
 It is certainly true that the presence of a body\, or bodies\, whether pre
 served or implied by the presence of grave goods\, is the defining feature
  of mortuary contexts in prehistory. However\, in Early Iron Age west-cent
 ral Europe the grave itself represents just one inflection point\, a singl
 e stage in a process extending back in time to the period before the inter
 ment as well as after it. The four-wheeled and two-wheeled vehicles found 
 in late Hallstatt and early La Tène burials in the West Hallstatt zone an
 d other evidence for post-depositional activity in a select number of elit
 e graves are part of a complex\, multi-stage process that appears to have 
 been accompanied by mourning activity including the cutting of hair\, open
 ing of the grave to remove or insert objects or persons\, and depositing f
 ood offerings after the laying to rest of the dead. Some of these activiti
 es\, represented by evidence of burning and small stone altars on burial m
 ound surfaces\, appear to have gone on for several generations\, as this p
 resentation will demonstrate. Viewed as a process rather than an event\, t
 he funeral rituals of the early Iron Age in west-central Europe provide a 
 window into how people dealt with death in the past even in the absence of
  documentary evidence.
LOCATION:McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Seminar Room.
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