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10.01.08, Alduc-Le Bagousse, ed., Inhumations de prestige ou prestige de linhumation?

10.01.08, Alduc-Le Bagousse, ed., Inhumations de prestige ou prestige de linhumation?


In 1986 an international colloquium held at Créteil (Université de Paris XII-Val de Marne) explored the varieties of "privileged burial" as an interpretative paradigm in late antique cemeteries in the western provinces and post-Roman kingdoms. [1] Whether one considers, Jean-Charles Picard noted in his introduction, stately mausolea and sculpted marble sarcophagi in the necropolis along the roads leading out of Roman cities, or the barbarian "chieftain" laid to rest, along with weapons, personal ornament and costly grave-goods, in wooden "funerary chambers" under heaped-up tumuli in the rural zones of the Gallic and Germanic provinces, or in Barbaricum beyond, the archaeology consistently suggests that certain burials were privileged over others. [2] But "funerary privilege" is a slippery and unstable notion, particularly during the centuries when Christianity was asserting ever-greater influence over life-ways and death-ways alike. As Yvette Duval stressed in her concluding remarks, ad sanctos burial and relic veneration created a very different kind of funerary privilege, whose archaeological traces can only be understood with the help of epitaphs and other texts. [3] In 2007, to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the Centre Michel de Bouard-CRAHAM, a new colloquium at the Université de Caen-Basse Normandie returned to the funerary terrain with a tighter geographical focus (France, not the Roman west) and enlarged chronology (4th through 15th century). The editor defines the approach thus: "Existe-t-il dans le domaine funéraire un distinguo réel entre la notion de sépulture priviligiée, telle qu'elle avait été discuté à Créteil, et celle de l'inhumation prestigieuse, généralement associée à la notion de pouvoir et d'autorité...? Qu'est-ce qui fait le prestige?"

The sixteen papers in this volume are divided among three thematic sections which also, to a great extent, work forward chronologically. The five in the section entitled Inhumation privilégiée ou sépulture de prestige are all concerned with late antique or early medieval sites.

These range from a Late Roman urban necropolis in Normandy (Lisieux) to rural Merovingian cemeteries in Belgium and eastern France and a monastery near Valenciennes. All reflect the dynamism of French archaeology in recent decades, thanks to enhanced resources and state-supported professional teams conducting mandated salvage excavation, with post-excavation follow-up. The editor and her co-authors D. Paillard, L. Buchet, J. Blondiaux and C. Niel discuss a group of eleven contemporary graves within a Late Roman urban necropolis in Lisieux, remarkable for the care and expense lavished on them. Seven bodies were placed in lead coffins (rare in Normandy; no doubt imported from Britain or Brittany), themselves housed in elaborate wooden "funerary chambers." Four of these chambers housed wooden coffins. The relative chronology of this important and well-excavated cemetery (970 graves with over 1150 skeletons), is tight enough to place all these burials within the same quarter century (350-375), a brief moment favorable for funerary ostentation in this urban milieu. Physical anthropology reveals a heterogenous group of individuals: two infants, three females (one a handicapped teenager, one a woman about 34 suffering from severe arthritis and osteoperosis), two males. Why for them the privilege of burial in a lead coffin? Perhaps their grieving survivors took advantage of an item briefly available on the market, which then disappeared as the political and economic climate deteriorated.

Three papers consider funerary "privilege" along the margin, to the east, where the traditions of romanitas were more directly affected by the customs and tastes of the new military elites deriving from Barbaricum. The three burials excavated in 2002 at Saint-Dizier (Marne) offer the basic features of the Merovingian tombe de chef: situated apart from nearby vestiges of settlement and necropolis, they were housed in an elaborate wooden chambre funéraire and richly furnished with grave-goods (weapon panoply for the man, jewelry for the woman, bronze ware for both). Further south, at Hégenheim overlooking the Rhine near Basel, funerary ostentation took the additional form of a tumulus, six to seven meters in diameter, erected over six of 41 graves so far identified. Wooden burial-chambers and rich grave-goods further confirm the privileged status of these individuals. Dating to the sixth century, these burials are cultural markers of a new military elite, serving Clovis and his Merovingian successors, rooting itself into the landscape. A greater appreciation of the degree of luxury displayed in her funerary toilette by a queen of that day is now afforded by up-to-date scientific analysis of the organic remains from the Aregonde burial, under the basilica of Saint-Denis: silk imported from China and worked with gold braid in Persia, brooches with garnets from India and Ceylon. By comparing two rural cemeteries in Wallonia which together cover the whole Merovingian period (late 5th into the 8th century), R. Vanmechelen and O. Vrielynck show how the funerary expression of social prestige varied significantly, in time as well as from place to place. The earliest phases at Bossut-Gottechain offer the kinds of well-weaponed and richly ornamented elite men and women buried in wooden-chambers that set them clearly off from the more modest burials (often in hollowed-out tree-trunks), but later, notably in the 7th century phase, burials are more modestly equipped, and privilege no longer stands out so sharply. It was at that later moment that burial began at Haillot, with three graves set in the center of enclosures created by circular ditches suggesting that they were originally topped by tumulus mounds, like Hégenheim. Although this site suffered much plundering, the surviving data suggests that grave-goods had become much less important by this time, with the expression of ostentation shifting to the funerary monument itself, whose domination of the landscape is suggested by upslope siting and the clustering of satellite burials. The example aptly illustrates a fundamental shift commented upon by Michel Lauwers and Cécile Treffort in their excellent concluding essay which reviews the colloquium: great variability of funerary practice before the Carolingian period with frequent emphasis on the individual in the tomb; the medieval emphasis will shift to the funerary monument itself, now firmly located within a Christian context (polarisation ecclésiale, in their phrase).

If the Late Antique/Early Medieval usefully build on perspectives proposed at the Créteil colloquium, those from the following sections forge ahead into the central and later Middle Ages, offering fresh case-studies and new dimensions of reflection. Hamage, excavated systematically from 1991-2002 and as yet unpublished, was a female monastery which flourished from the mid-7th through the late-9th century. Its excavator, E. Louis, and the physical anthropologist J. Blondiaux discuss here the relationship between the graves of the nuns (there were also, as it turns out, a few men) and the funerary church. The anonymous poverty of their individual burials reflects the proud humility of their religious choice. The pride is easily overlooked because usually archaeologically invisible (an exception proving this rule was the contemporary burial of the Abbess and ex-queen Bathilde at Chelles) [4] but these women were doubtless of the same kindreds used to boasting prestige through ostentatious grave-goods. Now it is a consecrated burial place that makes for prestige. These vary in character, as we learn from papers in the second section, Lieux de sépulture et expressions de pouvoir, which opens with two examples from the south of France. At Jau-Dignac and Loirac, on the left bank of the Gironde river, I. Catron and D. Castex of the University of Bordeaux have since 2001 been excavating Merovingian burials (from around 600 to the mid-8th century) within and around a rectangular building which they interpret as a family mausoleum. The site would have been visible, even ostentatious, in the landscape, and the fact that it reused the ruins of a fanum would have added to its prestige. No definite evidence has emerged, however, that this family memoria in the ancient tradition had taken on the function of a private Christian chapel, as has been argued at other sites. A. Thomann takes us east to the Rhone river (Saint-Estève-le-Pont) where excavations from 1999-2002 revealed two funerary sites within 50 m of each other. To the south lies a funerary church whose construction is dated back to the 5th century. Carbon 14 readings for burials recovered within and around it, using a variety of tomb types (stone sarcophagi, coffer graves, tile graves, "anthropomorphic" pits cut into bedrock) yield dates ranging from the later 7th into the 9th century. There is evidence of grouping: most sarcophagi are together just south of the building while the tiles are to its north; there are a few privileged burials inside. The churchless cemetery to the north (cimetière rupestre) was homogeneous in regard to tomb-type ("anthropomorphic" pits), quite without grave goods but (say C-14 readings) contemporary with the other. The skeletons of the people buried here (a normally balanced population of men, women and children) showed many signs of the hard physical labor expected in a peasant milieu. The population in and around the church to the south, however, was quite different. Not only did the skeletons show significantly fewer signs of physical stress, but most were pre-adults (72, to 41 adults). Of particular interest was SP6028: located right at the focal point of the church (at the east end of the choir, right in the central axis) was a small pit in which some of the bones of a mature woman had been assembled. This was plausibly a rare archaeological example of the translatio of the reliquae of an unknown saint: the privilege and prestige here is all in the location.

Alain Dierkens' far-ranging paper "Quelques réflexions sur la présentation des sarcophages dans les églises du haut Moyen Age" serves as an excellent introduction to the third major theme of this volume Mémoire et mise en scène funéraire. Carefully sifting archaeological and historical data, Dierkens argues convincingly that the sarcophagi of two significant religious figures in early Carolingian Austrasia, Chrodoara (known only by her decorated sarcophagus with epitaph, found at Amay in 1977) and Willibroard (the Anglo-Saxon missionary who died in 739) were soon transformed, in effect, into reliquaries: the sarcophagi were placed against the church altar and set off by a barrier to function as sites of veneration which could be integrated into the liturgy. The choice of an antique sarcophagus as particularly suitable to house an important burial, studied in this chapter in regard to Charlemagne's tomb, became a vogue in the following centuries. P. Chevalier's study of how the remains of two early abbots of Cluny, Mayeul and Odilion, were in the 11th century brought together in one prominent tomb (composed of parts of two Merovingian sarcophagi) set in the center of the nave of a chapel at Souvigny (Allier) makes fascinating reading. In subsequent transformations this sarcophagus itself was moved down into a crypt directly accessible by a stair, over which was erected a sculpted stone monument depicting the two Abbots as gisants, their hands folded in prayer. The relics themselves were placed in reliquaries, but the empty tomb remained accessible for veneration up to the French Revolution. Other papers explore the funerary habits, during the latter part of the Middle Ages, of bishops, royalty and noble lineages. A multi-disciplinary project, begun in 1997, which co-ordinated excavation with documentary research and architectural restoration at the former Priory of the Hospitalers in Toulouse has led N. Pousthomas-Dalle and L. Macé to reconstruct the family funerary monument of an important family of milites urbani, plausibly identified as close to, perhaps kin to, the last Counts of Toulouse. Another example of the aristocratic use of funerary ostentation which adroitly integrates Christian doctrine with family prestige is provided by R. Marcoux's study of the Saulx lineage in and around Dijon in the 13th and 14th centuries, with a series of inscribed grave slabs as the principal evidence. Dynastic prestige was by that era such that even a disgraced ex-Capetian queen who ended her days in the Cistercian nunnery at Maubuisson was very honorably buried under the chapter room, whereas queens and princesses associated with the new Valois dynasty now joined the male royalty at Saint-Denis. The point that such "sépulture de prestige" was a matter of dynastic obligation rather than individual preference is underlined, as M. Gaude-Ferragu shows in her wide-ranging study of the funerals and tombs of later medieval royal ladies, by the choice made by a number of them to have their heart removed for burial elsewhere, as did Jeanne de Bourgogne, whose will (1336) stipulated that this be sent home to Citeaux. The final paper, by P. Charlier and P. Georges, brings the resources of forensic anthropology to bear in considering the technology of embalming bodies, removing entrails, and transporting hearts in the late Middle Ages.

Overall, this is a rich, well-balanced and well-presented collection of papers, well worth the still reasonable price. The quality of the illustration is good, and a bibliography follows each chapter. The concluding essay by Michel Lauwers and Cécile Treffort is a particularly fine example of this tricky genre, avoiding the pitfall of seeking to summarize or epitomize the papers and offering instead useful lines of reflection. Comparing this volume with the Créteil colloquium, it is obvious not only that the former offered a very fruitful paradigm for integrating archaeological research with other sources in the interests of expanding the reach of social and cultural history, but also that the Caen colloquium demonstrates how much has been gained since that time by the enormously expanded scope, scale, and professional quality of excavations (and the follow-up laboratory analysis) in France over the past quarter century. How suitable and satisfying that the research center named in his honor should host a conference which so aptly justifies the vision of its founder, Michel de Bouard.

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Notes:

1. Y. Duval & J-Ch. Picard, eds., L'inhumation privilégié du IVe au VIIIe siècle en Occident: Actes du Colloque tenu à Créteil les 16-18 mars 1984 (Paris, 1986).

2. Ibid., p. 9-12.

3. Ibid., p. 251-3.

4. B. K. Young, "Exemple aristocratique et mode funéraire dans la Gaule mérovingienne," Annales E.S.C., 1986/2, 379-407.