• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 352 0

is also a social ritual for those who remain alive to bury the dead person. Although the materials deposited in tombs are all that we have left to study, they were not meant for us. Rather, they are the surviving traces of a ritual that was viewed and experienced for only a short time by the people who took part in it. This burial ritual not only commemorated the deceased and prepared his or her way into the afterlife, it also helped delineate the social relationships among the people who came together to bury the dead. In other words, contemporary observers both inside and outside the dead person’s family would read and interpret burial ritual for the social signals it conveyed. Thus, people buried with more and better goods may have occupied a higher social station than those with less – or at least their living relations will have been asserting the higher status of the deceased, and therefore their own higher status, as the heirs or family of the dead. In the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone, there seems to be a correlation between richer grave goods and the alignment of bodies with the head to the north, and this too may have had a status link now lost to us.

However, the sheer heterogeneity of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov burials is such that purely status-based explanations seem inadequate. Beliefs about the afterlife must also come into the picture, beliefs that differed widely between neighbours. Whether one was burnt or buried, with a sword or without, raised on a wooden platform or deposited straight into the earth would seem self-evidently to reveal different expectations about what was going to happen in death. The question that has most exercised scholars, of course, is whether these differing beliefs reflect ethnic difference, whether we can tell Goths from Gothic subjects on the basis of how they were buried. The answer is complicated by the fact that there are really two separate questions. At some point, the wildly divergent burial customs we meet in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone must have derived from populations with different beliefs about the afterlife. This impression is re-enforced by the parallels that exist between burial rituals in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone and those elsewhere in Europe and central Asia. But the fact of differing derivation – even differing ethnic derivation – does not mean that burial ritual continued to have an ethnic meaning within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. This is especially true because, thanks to patterns of material preservation, we have no evidence that the population of the zone marked such differences in any context other than that of burial ritual.

That fact suggests that rituals representing different beliefs about the afterlife, which had at one time corresponded to ethnic origins, had no ethnic content within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. This suggestion may well seem implausible to those who believe that burial ritual is a primordial depository of ethnic beliefs. But it is in fact not at all far-fetched. We know for a fact that groups of people within the same society can have incompatible beliefs about what happens after death without thereby ceasing to share social and ethnic common ground. The best ancient example is the Roman empire itself. There, elite Romans of the second through fourth centuries shared a single material, literary and aesthetic culture, as well as the legal status of Roman citizens, but their religious and philosophical views differed enormously and came from the most various provincial and ethnic traditions. The differences in burial ritual within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture should be interpreted as a parallel to this contemporary Roman reality.

Why the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov Culture is Gothic

The Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone was, in this view, a complex cultural world in which many different historical strands had mingled. It may have been much smaller in scale and less socially varied than its imperial Roman neighbour, but it was not fundamentally different in