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Toby F. Martin IDENTITY AND THE CRUCIFORM BROOCH IN EARLY ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND: AN INVESTIGATION OF STYLE, MORTUARY CONTEXT, AND USE Toby F. Martin The results, discussions and conclusions presented herein are identical to those in the printed version. This electronic version of the thesis has been edited solely to ensure conformance with copyright legislation and all excisions are noted in the text. The final, awarded and examined version is available for consultation via the University Library. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Sheffield, Department of Archaeology, December 2011 VOLUME II Chapter 5: Gender, the Lifecycle, and the Cruciform Brooch Chapters 2, 3, and 4 have established the broadest contexts of the cruciform brooch: stylistic, chronological, and spatial. However, the most meaningful archaeological information in terms of identifying social structure is provided by mortuary contexts. In the case of cruciform brooches these are both inhumation and cremation burials.1 The analysis in this chapter will be concerned with the biological factors of sex and age, and how they relate to social structure in terms of gender and stage in the lifecycle. This chapter will isolate the demographic of the population who wore and were buried with cruciform brooches. The major purpose of this analysis is to identify whether or not the cruciform brooch was associated with a particular demographic. The answer here is found to be affirmative: cruciform brooches are most frequently found in the graves of older women. The interpretation of this finding will lead into a discussion of where these individuals were situated in the broader social structure, and what their identity, as communicated by the mortuary ritual, may have meant in ideological terms. The running concern throughout this discussion will be the active nature of the mortuary ritual in constructing an identity for the deceased and how this may have reflected their role in life. The chapter will commence with the theoretical and methodological background to Anglo-Saxon burial and gender studies before going on to analyse the osteological data associated with cruciform brooches. This evidence will be interpreted in the light of the findings from Chapter 4 concerning ethnic identity. Therefore, these women will be seen to have possessed complex nested identities that took into account descent, stage in the lifecycle, and gender. 1 There is a single exception of a cruciform brooch from the fill of a sunken-featured building (West Stow SFB 1). 192 Approaches to Mortuary Archaeology The key paradigm shift in burial archaeology has been the recognition of burial data as not only representative of social structure, but also possessing a crucial role its construction. The fact that the archaeology of burial reaches us only by the intentional structuring of a mortuary ritual makes the data problematic, and means it can only be indirectly representative of social structure. Part of this realisation for archaeologists originated in the diversity of experience discovered through ethnography, which offered an initially bewildering scope for interpretation (Ucko 1969). A key to the application of new ideas in mortuary archaeology was found in the 1980s with Ian Hodder‟s urging that the meaning of symbols depends entirely on their context (Hodder 1987, 1). Therefore if we accept that the objects carefully selected to accompany the deceased in the grave hold some semiotic function, the meaning of these symbols depends entirely on the context of the mortuary ritual, and can be related to their symbolism in life only through theoretical interpretation. The former archaeological truism that the burial ritual of an individual directly reflected their role in life was consequently called into serious question (Parker Pearson 1982). The burial ritual may involve a transformation of the deceased‟s social role or identity, perhaps even representing an idealised social structure (Parker Pearson 1982, 112). It will become clear that this study believes cruciform brooches, in the vast majority of cases, to be the personal possessions of the individuals they accompanied in the grave. It was considered to be important to place them in the grave as they were part of the everyday clothing of the deceased, and as such had accumulated biographical meanings making them virtually inalienable from the deceased‟s corporeality (this idea will be explored in Chapter 7). It will also be shown (in Chapter 6) that these brooches and the garments they fastened were fundamental to the primary social perception of the deceased‟s corporeal and social identity. Removing or changing these garments in death may have occasionally occurred, but would seem to run counter to the very close relationships that are demonstrable between the clothes of these individuals and their persona. The inclusion of these items in the mortuary ritual was a powerful final expression of the identity of these individuals, and acted to create a lasting social memory of their social status, perhaps serving the function to elevate the status of the kinship group who carried out the funereal arrangements. 193 These points can also be suggested by more pragmatic data. As Chapter 7 will demonstrate, cruciform brooches were worn enough to merit a very high rate of repair, and were therefore likely to have been worn daily. As Chapter 3 has shown, their stylistic development occurs alongside changing fashions in other grave goods that are broadly measurable chronologically. Given the very tight 25-year phases that form the basis of the chronology, if these items were regularly handed down as heirlooms it is unlikely that any of this patterning would be visible. Nevertheless, this study contends that the importance of the cruciform brooch‟s presence in the grave may well have been to represent an idealised social structure, but one that was also matched by the cruciform brooch‟s meaning in life. A choice was still made to bury the deceased wearing this jewellery, and this is the fundamental point. Approaches to Anglo-Saxon Burial Evidence The history of Anglo-Saxon burial studies is now a well-chronicled subject (Härke 1997a; Lucy 1998, 5-20; Richards 1987, 10-14) that tracks the changing interpretation of material culture found in graves. The intellectual study of Anglo-Saxon burial originates in the interpretations of grave goods as simple indicators of religious faith by John Mitchell Kemble, a 19th-century antiquarian (Richards 1987, 10; Williams 2005, 9). Kemble‟s archaeology also established methods for the foundation of the culture- historical approach to Anglo-Saxon burials that drew parallels between continental and insular material culture. The most prominent among these Anglo-Saxonists were Edward Thurlow Leeds (1877-1955) and John Nowell Linton Myres (1869-1954). Their assessment of the material found in inhumation and cremation graves very rarely even took the mortuary, let alone ritual, context into account at all. Notions such as burial wealth and warrior status, though present in their accounts, did not constitute their main thrust of argument. The structure of society in these terms was assumed but neither sought nor tested. Processualism in Anglo-Saxon burial studies was a relatively short-lived episode, and was almost entirely limited to quantifications of grave-wealth. As Heinrich Härke has outlined, this was an approach largely derived from the culture-historical German intellectual tradition (Härke 1997a, 21). The traditional idea that the specific weaponry interred with men in the continental Reihengräberfelder directly represented their legal 194 status as free, semi-free, and unfree (as recorded in later legal tracts), was transformed by Christlein (1973) into a method of assessing grave-wealth, and hence the wealth of the interred individual (Härke 1997a, 19). The implicit assumption was that the deceased was consistently laid to rest with the same proportion of their material wealth (if not all of it). In the 6th-century Merovingian law tracts a warrior‟s weaponry constituted their hergewaete: possessions that could not be handed down to kin (Härke 1997a, 19). However, there is no equivalent sanctioning of specific grave goods in the Anglo-Saxon literature. The processual theoretical basis of this approach lies in the idea that social and ideological subsystems worked together to create the mortuary ritual, and the material culture present in the grave was a reflection of these interactions. Social status as a sphere of interaction would therefore be present in the grave as a measureable quantity by assessment of the material culture. In many ways the mourners who prepared the body and chose the objects that should accompany it in the grave were seen to be passively reflecting what they judged to be a more complex status with a more complex burial rite. The grave-wealth approach of Christlein was utilised by some British processual archaeologists. As has been already discussed in Chapter 4, Christopher Arnold (1988a) and Christopher Scull (1992; 1993; 1999) related changes in grave-wealth to the emergence of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the late 6th century. More germane to the present chapter is John Shephard‟s (1979) in-depth approach to social structure as represented in two different types of Anglo-Saxon cemetery: isolated barrows and barrow cemeteries. Shephard‟s methods were perhaps extreme: at one point an algebraic equation is put forward to provide a measure of social organisation in each cemetery (Shephard 1979, 69). Shephard found differences in the range and scale of grave-wealth between isolated barrows and barrow cemeteries. The different regions in which they occurred could therefore be characterised as more highly ranked or egalitarian respectively. Though these kinds of studies are frequently criticised, the basic method is still used. Nick Stoodley‟s (1999) otherwise sensitively post-processual and symbolic study of grave goods also uses the quantity and perceived quality of grave goods as a relative measure of social status.
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