Cooney Death in Irish prehistory

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80205-011-0
Verlag: Royal Irish Academy
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 456 Seiten

This is a book about life and death over 8,500 years in Ireland. It explores the richness of the mortuary record that we have for Irish prehistory (8000 BC to AD 500) as a highlight of the archaeological record for that long period of time. Because we are dealing with how people coped with death, this rich and diverse record of mortuary practice is also relevant to understanding how we deal with death today, which is just as central a social issue as it always was.

Gabriel Cooney is emeritus professor of Celtic Archaeology, School of Archaeology, University College Dublin. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and has served on the Council of the RIA.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cooney, Gabriel

Weitere Mitwirkende

Mchale, Conor

Leseproben

1.

Engaging with prehistoric life and death

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about life and death in Ireland over 8,500 years. ‘Life’ is a word that is in constant use; it is familiar, vital and central to everyday discourse. Archaeologists talk of their task as being to reconstruct life in the past. ‘Death’ is just as important, however, and recognition of our mortality is central to being human, but talk of death often makes us uncomfortable. In Quicksand, Henning Mankell says that ‘nobody wants to die, whether they are young or old. Dying is always difficult.’1 Today it has become the norm to see death as both personal and distant; usually confronted in the case of the demise of family members, friends, or ourselves, or brought into focus by warfare, accidents or events with a high death toll, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In reality, death is just as constant and central to society as life, and that has been the way over the 10,000 years of definite human presence on the island of Ireland.

In this 10,000-year story, only the most recent 1,500 years are recorded historically, the rest is what is termed ‘prehistory’, for which we rely on the archaeological record of material remains to inform us. In Ireland, prehistory covers the time from around 8,000 BC— the date for the first definite evidence of human settlement on the island—to about AD 400.2 The changes associated with the coming of Christianity and the related literary culture around the latter date are seen as marking the beginning of the historic period. Our record of the personal and social lives of people before that are the material remains that have survived over the millennia to be documented as the archaeological record. The most direct record of prehistoric people are their own physical remains, predominantly bones. These provide a material, spiritual and emotional link between the present and the past. Moreover, their discovery confronts us and necessitates inquiry into matters of life and death. The excavation of ancient, or indeed more recent, human burials unsurprisingly generates public interest. One way of understanding this reaction and engagement is to see the excavation of graves and cemeteries as a counter-point to the sense of loss we experience on the death of a loved and missed family member or friend, given that the point of departure is the funeral or burial, most often in a cemetery. In some senses archaeological excavation brings the dead back to life; as human remains are revealed we have contact with people long dead. This also brings our human fascination with death into focus. Joanna Sofaer puts this very well in The body as material culture: ‘we instinctively recognise their bodies as we recognise our own; they are essentially us’.3 [FIG. 1.1, PL. 1.A].

FIG. 1.1.
An Early Bronze Age burial of an adult male at Annaghkeen, Co. Galway.

PL. 1.A.
Archaeologists excavating an Early Bronze Age cist burial at Tevrin, Co. Westmeath in 2019.

BRINGING THE DEAD BACK TO LIFE

Physical evidence of people and of how they were treated in death provides us with important insights on life in the past. The empathy created by this kind of direct, human encounter and the issues it raises prompt the questions archaeologists are most frequently asked. Who lived in Ireland thousands of years ago? Where did these people come from? How did they live and die? What were they like? Did they have religious beliefs?4 The treatment of people when they died, the complexity of their mortuary rites, their deposition and burial and the character and diversity of the evidence we recover from their graves or other resting places are the central foci of this book. We recover this information through excavation, aided by analytic approaches and collaborative work with colleagues from a range of disciplines. These lines of inquiry provide us with insights—ordinary and extraordinary—into the lives of people whose names we will never know. On the other hand, these insights can provide such a detailed understanding that we may come to know these people as individuals and can recognise and discuss specific incidents or events in their lives. For example, we can detect in skeletal remains what would have been life-changing bone fractures or patterns of daily, repeated physical work that resulted in alterations in bone structure.

As well as acknowledging the importance of these insights and their implications for our ability to talk about personal lives and deaths, we can go further and use this information as a basis for understanding and interpreting societies. The treatment of the dead in prehistory is one of the major sources of evidence we have for past cultural practices and the character of society in many parts of Europe. But with the exception of archaeologists, most people today are probably unaware of the rich and varied evidence we have for the complex ways in which the living responded to death, or how people thought about and constructed formal social relationships with the dead in prehistory.5 There are a number of reasons for this lack of awareness. In part it is a result of the way we as archaeologists often write about the past. While we recognise the importance of mortuary practices and incorporate them into narratives, we tend to focus on site-, regional- or period-based discussions rather than drawing out the burial record itself as a major theme across time and space in understanding lives and societies.

It is worth contrasting the central place that death is given in the narratives that archaeologists write about the past with the largely marginalised role that death is given in major historical accounts of modern society in Ireland. Social or historical analyses of modern Irish society tend to consider death from the perspective of the personal, family and social impact of specific deaths, or particular kinds of tragic deaths, rather than seeing and examining death as a key, integral, ongoing part of social life, as archaeologists do.6 When death is discussed in sociological terms it is most often in the context of changing patterns of mortality over time. Is it because we have such a rich documentation of the lives of people today and in the recent historic past that we tend to underplay the wider social significance of mortuary practices, except in the case of tragic deaths, the deaths of public figures and commemorations that have a political context? This general lack of discussion might, at least in part, also reflect what Philippe Ariès described in his analysis of changing historical attitudes to death as the tendency of modern, Western societies to regard death as invisible, deniable, largely hidden away from everyday experience.7 Death tends to be seen in personal or abstract sociological terms rather than as the major, unifying existential issue facing us all, regardless of belief. [PLS 1.B AND 1.C]

In reality, however, we are constantly reminded of the wider social and cultural import of the treatment of the dead in Irish society today. There have been significant changes in mortuary practice in recent years that both reflect and indicate wider social and religious changes. There has been a marked increase in the rate and provision of cremation, for example, but we have also seen a return to popularity of the custom of waking the dead, even if this is often an attenuated version of what was the traditional practice.8 It is said that one of the culturally distinctive features of Irish life today, in an increasingly globalised and homogenised world, dominated by internationally shared patterns of behaviour, is the way in which death is socially acknowledged. As Thomas Lynch, the poet, writer and undertaker, put it in Booking passage, the Irish know what to do when there is a dead body in the room. Funerals are attended by an extended circle of family and friends and are a complex weave of grief, celebration of the life of the deceased and social gathering. It is acknowledged that one of the major social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland was the disruption of this way of marking death. As society in Ireland becomes more culturally diverse, it has become more obvious that the rituals and customs by which the death of people is acknowledged and celebrated are deeply embedded in cultural practice. Responses to death in twenty-first century Ireland demonstrate that we see it through a filter of particular religious and social beliefs and traditions. This also explains the mixture of familiarity and shock with which we view images of the funerals and mortuary customs of people who have different belief systems. In recent years we have all too often seen the different ways in which Islamic, Jewish, Christian and other victims of conflicts in Afghanistan, Ethopia, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen are treated in death.9

PL. 1.B.
Zen Buddhist cemetery, the temple of Ryosokuin, Kyoto, Japan.

PL. 1.C.
The Erico Production coffin-making workshop in Accra, Ghana.

Interpreting mortuary practices as a basis for understanding societies provides us with an opportunity to compare past practices with the treatment of the dead and of death in Ireland today, and to reflect on death as an event and process both in our personal lives and in a wider social context. The rich archaeological and historical record for mortuary practices provides us with the opportunity to better understand people and societies in...