Images of Deviant Burials December 9, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Medieval , trackback
When Beach was in his early twenties he used to spend hours, and they were happy times, looking through detailed archaeological graphics of Anglo-Saxon and Roman cemeteries. At one point he used to take them to bed and fall asleep with Winchester A or Circencester 1982 Season open on his chest. There is something, well, peaceful about seeing so many sincere men, women and their brats as bone inked out expertly to scale: ‘Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman/ At yonder heaving hill would stare:/ he blood that warms an English yeoman,/ The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.’ Some get their memento mori from walks in the graveyard, some from pictures of the vanished relatives, Beach would invite you to invest a hundred dollars on archaeology studies of the burial rites of our ancestors.
This leads Beach to a little treasure that has just fallen into his hands: Deviant Burial in the Archaeological Record (ed) by Eileen Murphy (2008). The present post is not a review as honestly Beach has not read the book yet: but he has returned to his bad old habits of looking at dead bones and the contortions of those who are now ‘ashes under Uricon’. As the title suggests these particularly refutations of immortality are special categories: the executed, vampires, witches and other (ahem) marginal categories… Still they are fascinating to look at. Beach shares at the top of the post a woman supposedly buried alive from Yorkshire in the early Middle Ages. There is the front piece of a head rudely separated from its body. There is a bizarre burial of a man from Roman Cambridge with a pot on his foot (!!!)… Deviant burials, indeed.
Flicking through the book Beach was reminded of how he prefers line drawings to the real thing. There is something vulgar about the skeleton itself. Written erotica is far more powerful than drawn erotica: perhaps a similar logic applies to death shivers?
Other interesting funerary images: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
