Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [48]
The World of the Dead
As is so usual in studies of late antique barbarians, cemetery sites are considerably better known than are settlements, a fact that raises all sorts of problems because what people take to their graves does not always reveal what they did or thought in life. All the same, the whole Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov region stands out from the rest of the barbaricum for the striking variety of its funerary customs. Some cemetery sites contain both cremation burials, whether in an urn or straight into a hole in the ground, and inhumations, some of them in wooden chambers, some in more or less elaborate graves with or without stone coverings. In general, we can observe a trend throughout the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov region away from cremation and towards inhumation, but cemetery chronology is too uncertain for us to press that point. Grave goods vary just as much as do burial typologies. With very few exceptions, the sort of enormously rich ‘princely’ burials – loaded with gold and silver and known throughout western and north-central Europe – are absent from the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone.[85] Most Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov graves were unfurnished, some were furnished with pottery alone, some with fibulae (brooches – either one or two). Many bodies were belted, since belt buckles appear in large quantities, and some belts were decorated with hanging ornaments known as pendentives. Weapon burials are even rarer than they are in the Rhineland and upper Danube but by no means unknown. Grave goods might be positioned in different ways in different types of inhumation, while in cremations grave goods were sometimes burned along with the body, sometimes deposited intact with the ashes. In a few inhumations, the body was arranged on a raised platform within the grave, and a very few bodies show signs of deliberate cranial deformation in the skulls of the deceased. Both these latter habits are characteristic of steppe-nomad customs known from earlier and later periods, and quite common further to the east.[86]
These variations in burial type are perhaps the best sign of the diverse cultural traditions that made up the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. Everyday artefacts also show a mixture of nomadic, Roman, northern European, and local traditions, but the diversity of burial ritual in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov is truly extraordinary. That raises questions on many different levels. Unsurprisingly, differences in burial customs have generally been interpreted in ethnic terms, some rituals and artefacts ascribed to one ethnic group, some to another. But that is problematical. The material culture of the living population was relatively uniform across the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone, however many different cultural traditions lay behind it. By contrast, the material culture of the dead was highly differentiated both within and between cemetery sites. In other words, cultural differences are not uniformly distributed across every social context in Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture, but are confined to the specific context of burial ritual. What is more, no one has been able to demonstrate that the particular ornaments singled out for burial with a dead person were widely used while he or she was still alive. For that reason, although the differences in burial ritual may well reflect different beliefs about the afterlife, there is no evidence that funerary customs and objects differentiated people except at the brief moment during which the body was displayed before its cremation or interment. That fact helps us to interpret Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov burials in a more nuanced fashion than a strictly ethnic reading requires.
Funerary Ritual and What it Tells Us
The ways in which burial ritual communicates clues about identity has been rigorously examined in the Frankish world, and some of that research can be applied to the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone as well.[87] Burial ritual is, at least originally, a reflection of beliefs about the afterlife, but it