In Which The Grave Goods Are Buried

The current explanations for grave goods in danish Viking Age burials (c. 700-1050 AD)  hold that:

1. The grave goods would be thougt to be useful in the afterlife, that is, the deceased person would somehow bring the grave goods with him/her into ‘the other world’.
2. The grave goods reflect the social order the living society - the more lavishly furnished the grave, the higher the status of the deceased.

I will assert that a) this may not be entirely so straightforward, and b) that in a way this may be right, but for quite the wrong reasons. I shall start with the latter point.

The majority of persons found buried in Viking Age graveyards are often not equipped with any grave goods at all, or sometimes just a small knife, a whetstone or a few pearls. Most of the time we are indeed just talking about ‘dead bodies dressed up for funeral’, meaning that the knives and pearls are actually just a part of the dead person’s clothes.¹

Some of the more impressive graves are furnished with lots of stuff, notably weapons, riding equipment, furniture, boardgames and jewellery. Some of them contain animals like horses, dogs and hunting birds, some even ships and servants; some the bones of sheep and cow (i.e. food) and some of them are covered with barrows. It is the interpretation of these conspicuous ‘aristocratic’ graves which will have my attention in the following.

Upon further examination it turns out that actually very few of the people buried in the Viking Age would get anything useful with them to the presumed afterlife. This, so the explanation goes, is because the differences in grave goods - or indeed grave furnishings - reflect similar differences in the stratified society that was Viking Age Denmark.²

The Development of the Graveyard Through Time

In most litterature on the subject burial grounds are seen as ’snapshots’ of the living societies which produced them. I infer from this that the underlying assumption of almost any archaeologist who has so far studied the Viking Age society by means of burial grounds is that all the burials happen at one specific point in time. This is obviously not so. Even in cases where each burial can be dated (for example by carbon isotope dating or typological seriation of grave goods) in relation to other burials, the entire graveyard is still sometimes taken to be a mirror of a living society. This requires the archaeologist to close his eyes and ignore the obvious.

There is one simple observation which will demolish this kind of explanation: Time passes.

Graveyards, I claim, must be assumed to develop, spread and increase in size and in the number of burials over time. People die, they are buried, and thus the graveyard grows. From this simple observation follows that the Viking Age graveyard (in fact any abandoned graveyard) can be said to be the accumulation of burials happening between two very distinct points in time, namely the point of establishment of the graveyard and the point in time at which people decided to change the site of their graveyard for whatever reason.

Consider that a lot of the Viking Age graveyards in Denmark were situated on slopes or even hilltops and often centering around a barrow, either a contemporary ‘aristocratic’ burial mound or an older (often Bronze Age) mound. From this vantage point the graveyard would then most likely spread down through time and space, the older burials near the top, the most recent graves being dug closer to the foot of the hill.

Sadly, the lack of relative datings of the burials in most published Viking Age graveyards prevents us from establishing this pattern with certainty.³ It has however been observed in other periods of prehistory where grave goods have been more precisely dated.⁴

Now the interesting part is that most of the lavishly furnished graves, die Prunkgräber so to speak, are often located in or at the hilltop monument - be it as secondary burials in a Bronze Age mound or in their own mound proper. The typical pattern is that the quality and amounts of grave furnishings decrease rapidly, as we move downhill and away from the central ‘founding’ burial(s). It follows that these conspicuous central burials are also often the older ones in that particular graveyard.

But if we accept that the graveyard develops over time, as I have described above, we must also accept the disappearance of the upper strata of society with time. Or, as we move down the hill, we must discard the interpretation that the graveyard faithfully mirrors the living society.

Who Buries The Dead?

What really happens here is not the disappearance of a stratified society. Rather, I think, it is a marked decrease in the need to express social difference through the elaborate furnishing of burials as time goes by. The initial need to ’show off’ when establishing a new graveyard will begin to make sense if we consider:

1. Who is buring the dead?
2. What do they gain from spending huge amounts of food and commodities on the burial?

The dead do not bury themselves. This is as obvious as it is trivial, and yet it may pay to reconsider the implications.

Let us assume a stratified society in a state of internal and external competition. For whatever reason it is decided to commence burial at a certain place. Let us say that the local leader dies, old of age. Clearly he does not bury him self, but we can assume that his family, his heirs, will take care of the burial.

On one hand this is a period of potential crisis - a liminal phase in the words of van Gennep. But on the other hand it is a great occasion for said heirs to assert their inherited status. I will speculate wildly here, that they grasp this opportunity to invite their peers from other parts of the country to a splendid wake. Also I will assume that the local townspeople will be present to witness the spectacularly wasteful behaviour about to take place.

The reason for this speculation is, that the conspicuous consumption involved in burying their deceased ancestor requires a large crowd of spectators. A crowd that will be impressed by the wealth being destroyed during the feast and burial rituals, a crowd that will accept the claim of the heirs to their newly inherited status.⁵

If the heirs succeed in claiming this status by means of conspicuous expenditure, there will be no further need for other families in the local community to compete for lordship. There simply will be no question of who’s the big man.

But it needs to be done. If we imagine, that the heirs just sit back and ignore the opportunity to assert their right to status, other groups might grasp the chance to move up the ladder and compete for the title. So really the rightful heirs have no choice but to spend the ressources needed to destroy any potential competition.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Further, the burial of the deceased ‘big man’ in the above example coincides with the establishment of a new burial ground.⁶ So the heirs need not only assert their claim to rank and status towards their peers, but also they have to secure the new order in the local community.

Now that everybody has witnessed the transfer of status and power to the heirs, no further statements of status will be necessary. It is my argument that the need for conspicuous expenditure on burials decrease immediately once this new order is established. For as long as the current order is maintained, everybody will know their place in society and no one will have reason to question the superiority of the local lords. They in turn will have no need to continue the exaggerated consumption associated with establishing inheritance through the conspicuous dedication of expensive grave goods.

The grave goods reflect the social order of the living society only at a time when that very order is being questioned - the more lavishly furnished the grave, the higher the degree of crisis at the time of interment.⁷

Let us return now to the initial explanation of the usefulness of the grave goods in the afterlife.

We can look to Beowulf⁸ and get an idea of the importance ascribed to expensive grave goods in the period. But we can also look at the actual burials and most of the time the quality of the grave goods will not relate directly to a social structure. They will simply fail to convey a coherent picture of both social status and Viking Age ideas about the afterlife.

As we cannot demonstrate a continuous display of wealth in ‘aristocratic’ burials it follows that some of the ‘aristocrats’ are passing to the afterlife with all sorts of niceties - horses, ships, jewellery, dogs, food, ale, servants and the like - while others have to make do with little more than a knife and cloth pin.

How then, can we claim that the grave goods were indeed the equipment needed in the afterlife? To me they rather produce a picture of intentional expenditure directed towards the spectators at certain critical times.

At most other times, when things are peaceful, we can detect no serious social differences. There aren’t a lot of grave goods, and therefore not a great deal of useful commodities for the presumed afterlife.

Concluding Remarks

It might be that the ideals of aristocratic burial in Viking Age Denmark would have followed along the lines of the funeral pyres in Beowulf, the rationale being to honour the memory of the deceased with gifts and commodities for the afterlife. This might well have been the explanation employed by spectators at contemporary upper class funerals.

But the archaeological remains simply do not support the interpretation that the upper strata of society needed anything in particular on their travel to the afterlife - indeed we can’t even glean much useful information about this presumed afterlife from Viking Age burials, not even when we do make dubious speculations and anachronistic inferences from written sources.

The current established explanations hold that grave goods would have been useful in the afterlife, that the deceased person would somehow bring the grave goods with him/her into ‘the other world’. This explanations has little to offer for a period in which only few people were in fact buried with other goods than the fittings of their dress.

Further, the assumption that the few, but very conspicuously, furnished graves should reflect the social order of the living society will not stand to scrutiny. They may indicate the claims to rank and status put forward by the descendants or heirs of the buried person. The commodities expended at these burials may be a very real and tangible indication of wealth, influence and social stratification, but not for the reasons normally assumed.

Hit me with your comments!

Notes:

1. Ross Samson has argued against the term ‘grave goods’ and I accept his argument.  Also we can probably all agree that the ‘real’ grave goods are more related to the (memory of) the deceased person than to the grave itself, but I find it useful here to keep the term for the purpose of critique. For discussion, see for example Ross Samson: ‘The church lends a hand’. In: The Loved Body’s Corruption. Archaeological Contributions to the Study of Human Mortality. Glasgow 1999, p.120-144. [‚Ü©]
2. I am aware of other possible explanations, for example that the ‘common people’ would not enter the same afterlife in Valhall as the upper class and therefore had no need for warrior equipment and boardgames. This interpretation, however, begs the question why we do find quite a few well furnished women’s graves. Which is in turn explained by means of an ‘ Aristocratic Women’s Otherworld’ comparable to Valhall. This I find to be rather speculative, which will become clear in the following. Whatever explanation is chosen, the interpretation results in a (higly) stratified society. [‚Ü©]
3. But the opposite pattern is of course quite possible, although very unlikely: We can imagine a graveyard forming downhill and slowly creeping up the slope until at last the chieftain is buried in the mound at the very hilltop. [‚Ü©]
4. For one very clear example of this pattern see the burial ground at Ã…rupgÃ¥rd, Jutland, (500-100 BC) in Jørgen Jensen: Danmarks Oldtid. Ældre Jernalder 500 f.Kr.-400 e.Kr. (Vol. III). Copenhagen 2003, p. 57. [‚Ü©]
5. For the function of expensive grave goods see: Wade Tarzia: The Hoarding Ritual in Germanic Epic Tradition. The Journal of Folklore Research 26:2. 1989, p.99-121. For further discussion on how conspicuous consumption is supposed to increase your status see: Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York 1899. But once you take the red pill, there’s no going back… [‚Ü©]
6. This may be needed, for example, because the village is newly established or because power has recently shifted between competing kinships. Speculate at will. [‚Ü©]
7. This point has been made before by Klavs Randsborg and others with regard to crisis at the state level, but to my knowledge it has not previously been applied to the local graveyard level, nor has it been connected with the theory of conspicuous consumption. See: K. Randsborg: The Viking Age in Denmark: The formation of a state. London 1980. Martin Carver: Why that? Why there? Why then? The Politics of Early Medieval Monumentality. In: H. Hamerow & A. MacGregor (eds.): Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain. Essays in Honour of Rosemary Cramp. Oxford 2001, p.1-22. [‚Ü©]
8. the anglo-saxon poem about some early medieval guys living in a danish night club called Heorot, that is, not the motion picture of the same name [‚Ü©]