Boulestin B. & Duday H. (2006) – Ethnology and archaeology of death : from the illusion of...

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Ethnology and archaeology of death:from the illusion of referencesto the use of a terminology

Bruno Boulestinaaaaa and Henri Dudayaaaaa

There exist a real divide between ethnology and the archaeology of death that arises fromthe impossibility to pass directly and without subjective interpretation from observations madein the field to the construction of practices and then on to the thought processes that guidedthese practices. This difference has important consequences for archaeological and funeraryvocabulary that comes from a typology referenced essentially from ethnological observations.The authors propose to reconsider the use of certain terms so that they conform more to thetools necessary in our research.

KEY-WORDS: funerary archaeology, funerary ethnology, primary burial, secondaryburial, funerals

Funerary archaeology has developed extensively in recent years, earning a rightfulplace in archaeological research. Paradoxically, the very concept of burial has hardlybeen discussed up to now and it is still difficult today to give a simple definition.1

A consensus on the vocabulary and criteria of identification are lacking and mistakesmay well be frequent even in the mere recognition of a burial, either in excess or byomission. Of course, funerary rites all over the world are based on two importantelements: treatment of the corpse and organisation of the separation, but thegreat variability of these elements results in a polymorphism of actions that makesthe existence of a burial in archaeological excavations sometimes far from obvious.Obviously, identification becomes all the more difficult when the sites or remainsare poorly preserved.

1 This difficulty appears clearly enough in the following quotation: “A burial or tomb is an impre-cise and thus very convenient word, which refers either to human bones or to the structure thatcontains them” (Gely 1993: 172). This remark applies not only to archaeology: nowhere in the works ofthe principal ethnologists or sociologists concerning thanatology, and more particularly funerary ritu-als, could we find the slightest reflection on the concept of burial, and in certain circumstances the useof the word seems to pose a problem for some.

a Laboratory of Anthropology, University of Bordeaux I, France

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Added to the difficulties of identification is the interpretation of funerary practices.The material evidence is indirect: position of skeletal remains, grave arrangement,disposition of associated artefacts. This data is then correlated with the originalactions, leading to propositions that are obviously interpretative hypotheses rather thancertain deductions. The situation is not unique to death and the general archaeo-logical argument consists of classifying the different propositions according to theprinciple of “economy of hypotheses”: the “least costly” hypothesis in terms of prag-matic criteria is thus presented. However, founding our arguments on a logic ascribedto a past population is in itself a dangerous proposition, acceptable in circumstancesof technical or material restriction, but rapidly losing sense when restrictions disap-pear in the presence of religious obligations: a funerary site cannot be interpreted inthe same way as a workshop.

Archaeologists in the funerary domain have long since worked out a typology,supposedly modelled on ethnological observations, in order to infer the practices ofpast populations from documented historical or contemporary models. Archaeo-logical and anthropological papers are thus sprinkled with words such as “primary”or “secondary”, “collective” or “multiple”,2 which are supposed to describe not onlythe grave, but also the funerary practices for which the grave is the only remainingevidence. Describing a burial as “primary” or “secondary” does not refer to an intrinsicproperty of the structure, but presupposes what the associated funeral might havebeen (in this case either “simple” or “double”). This vocabulary has been in universalcirculation for more than a century and yet, both in the identification of burials andin the classification of funerary practices, it is at best delicate and at worst perilous touse. In both cases, it is incompatible with the logic which should govern any scien-tific process. The terms used are in fact dissociated from ethnological data and,above all, the direct interpretation of archaeological observations in terms of ethno-logical practices often requires the aid of absolutely unconfirmable hypotheses.

If we want our research to have sense, it is absolutely necessary that it accordswith social, cultural and/or religious reality, in order to understand the actions and,if possible, ways of thinking of past populations: it is thus necessary to reconsiderthe basic terminology used in funerary archaeology on which all our argumentationis based. This entails a better definition of certain notions a more restrictive useof some terms and even the replacement of some words by others more in keepingwith archaeological realities.

2 Whereas an individual burial can often be determined by an objective observation, the countingof the subjects and the relative chronology of the burials usually requires an interpretative process.After Jean Leclerc (1990), French researchers working on Neolithic burials use the term “multipleburials” with reference to graves containing several individuals deposited simultaneously (or withina very short period), and “collective burials” to those in which the deposition of the corpses followedone another at relatively long intervals.

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I. THE PLACE OF ETHNOLOGY

IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

In historical times, authoritative references are those of texts relevant, with moreor less exactitude, to the population concerned by the excavations. The interpre-tation of field data, although slowly evolving, still remains largely based on literaryor iconographic sources (Philpott 1991; Alexandre-Bidon and Treffort eds 1993;Georges 1997; Alexandre-Bidon 1998). Nevertheless very early on, in the second partof the nineteenth century, prehistorians – particularly those working on thePalaeolithic – appropriated observations made by ethnologists (although with regardto this period it would be more fitting to speak of travellers or ethnographers). Theprocess can be explained of course by the lack of texts – comparisons had to befound elsewhere; its development was encouraged by the idea, absolutely naturalat the time but bearing a racist taint today, that there existed “primitive” peoples,“primitive” in their cultural and morphological aspects. To explain actions revealedby excavations of sites of “primitive man”, the easiest solution was to look for equiva-lents in today’s “primitive peoples”.3 Mutatis mutandis, this process was largelyperpetuated and achieved its peak with processual and post-processual archaeo-logy, leading to David Clarke’s “Interpretative theory” (1973) and Lewis Binford’s“Middle-range research” (1977; 1981: 21ff ). The observations made on contemporaryhuman groups thus resulted in a “blossoming” of interpretations in archaeologicalpapers: ethnology obviously played for prehistorians the role which history hadplayed for Antiquity and Mediaeval specialists, whereas protohistorians stood unde-cided. In funerary archaeology, the resort to ethnological examples in France is rela-tively measured whereas, in English-speaking countries, the majority of the researchrelies on the so-called Binford-Saxe approach: its main aim being to reconstruct thesocial organisation of the living from funerary practices (for a summary of thisresearch see, for instance, Chapman 1987). This approach may be justified in termsof palaeosociology and in the study of techniques, but it seems to us much morequestionable in terms of religious palaeoethnology: although deduction from sys-tems may be reasonable, it is illusory to recreate the thought which underlies this orthat behaviour. In fact, there are absolutely essential differences between textual andethnological approaches. Texts concern a population which the archaeologicalremains are testimony to (protohistory is completely different and thus hesitatesbetween the two attitudes) and the information they yield can be interpreted straight-forwardly provided the texts are not misused. On the contrary, ethnological referencesare very far from archaeological populations, often in space (“exotic” ethnology is

3 A reading of the Dictionnaire des sciences anthropologiques (Bertillon et al. 1882) provides “won-derful” examples of this reasoning.

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usually referred to) and always in time. As far as funerary archaeology is concerned– but this could be extended to other fields – the hypothesis of a direct filiation ofrites (i.e., continuous transmission, allowing a return from the current ethnologicalinquiry to past populations) is hardly ever mentioned and remains pure speculation.The resulting assumption, i.e., the “assumed (uniformitarian) similarity” of theanalogical reasoning models built by processual archaeologists (Gifford-Gonzalez1991: fig. 1), is thus not without consequence. In addition, we should questionthe unicity of the relationship between an observed process and its material conse-quences: this problem, crucial but rarely taken into account, has already been dis-cussed elsewhere (Boulestin 1999: 178).

Generally speaking, ethnology cannot bring archaeologists ready-made solutions,but only give examples of the relationships between an activity and the tangiblesigns it creates. It gives a range of possibilities rather than models that can be imple-mented immediately. Compared to the study of activities more closely linked tomaterial circumstances, funerary archaeology strives to explain the spiritual dimen-sion of past populations; hence we must question the causal relationship betweenthought, belief or religion and the behaviour they determine. Is it reasonable toadmit that there could be a one-to-one relationship, each belief conditioning every-where and at any time the same gesture and each gesture always answering the samethought? It is what some people pretend to think, claiming that ethnology is theonly possible explanation for a fact recognised on an excavation site.

It is essential for archaeologists to be aware of the interpretative limits inherentin their field of investigation. We observe only the material signs of acts (mainlyconcerning manipulations of the corpse or skeletal remains), of which recent devel-opments in funerary archaeology may allow a better understanding, but alone theobservations made during the excavations would never let us fathom the beliefs thatunderlay them. This remark could seem a truism to some, but confusion frequentlyoccurs between practice and rite, resulting from a syncretism between analysis andinterpretation. Of course, the aim of funerary archaeology is neither the classifica-tion of bone remains nor the search for richer and better preserved artefacts thanthose in settlement sites.4 Nevertheless, to extrapolate from funerary practices to theknowledge of rites implies that we are able to go from an act to the thought whichmotivated it: this is impossible without resorting to other sources of information.And if it is legitimate, though sometimes questionable, with historical sources,either texts or oral tradition (Garanger 1980), it becomes perfectly hazardous in thecase of comparative ethnoarchaeology.

4 Considering the treatment of the different elements of the burial in published papers, one oftenhas the feeling that the dead are placed as secondary offerings near vases, weapons, jewels and architec-tural structures.

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II. BASIC VOCABULARY USED IN THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DEATH

There is thus a gap between what we can deduce from excavation and the princi-ples identified by ethnologists through observation of rites. The vocabulary of deathused everyday refers implicitly to existing or recently disappeared cultures: the termsused or borrowed from our everyday language or from ethnology do not only recountobserved facts or even behaviour, but are also generally defined on the basis of con-cepts. These bad habits are not without consequence.

We will discuss here neither the causes of death nor their impact on a population(palaeodemography), which is the concern of biological anthropology. We will onlyconsider what is usually called “field” anthropology, a necessary part of funeraryarchaeology.5

The concept of burial: from sociology to archaeology

In a procedure based above all on the study of burials, it seems essential to beginby examining the sense of the French word “sépulture” (i.e. burial). The Frenchdictionary Petit Robert (Robert 1992) gives two definitions:

1 – archaic or literary: a burial, mainly in terms of the formalities and ceremoniesattached to it;

2 – the place where the body of a dead person is put (grave, tomb). Desecration,violation of grave.

The French dictionary writers Pierre Larousse (1872) and Émile Littré (1872) ac-cept four more or less identical definitions:

5 The expression “field anthropology”, although commonly used among French researchers, iscertainly one of the least appropriate to describe the excavation and study of burials (Duday 1997). Wecan add to previously discussed reasons the fact that this expression has already been used, sinceBronisław Malinowski, for another reality altogether (de L’Estoile 1998). Neither are the expressions“funerary archaeology”, used here, or “funerary anthropology” perfect: the word “funerary” usuallyrefers to that which concerns the funeral (cf. infra), but in a more recent definition, it also applies tothat which concerns graves (Robert 1992), and these expressions, at least the first, seem in fact moreacceptable. On the other hand, this term is extremely restrictive. Even if the study of burials begins inthe field by observation, it cannot stop there and avoid a more general theoretical reflection, as shownin this paper. De facto, as already underlined (Duday 1997), the archaeological approach to burialscalls on data far beyond this discipline, and includes those of biological anthropology, ethnology andsociology (which has itself developed a real anthropology of death, Thomas 1975). Rather than anarchaeology of burials, we must aim at that which Anglo-Saxon authors call a true “archaeology ofdeath” (Chapman 1987), which does not simply study the funerary facts, but also takes into accounttreatment of the dead which does not belong to a funeral, if only because we are usually unable todifferentiate between the two. Without being a full discipline, thus archaeology – which we may call“archaeothanatology” – would then constitute at least a branch of palaeoanthropology, with funeraryarchaeology being one of its aspect.

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1 – burying, inhumation (Larousse), act of interring a dead person (Littré);2 – the place where a dead person is laid down (Larousse), the place where the

dead are buried (Littré, for whom it is only the fourth meaning);3 – death, end of life;4 – the right to be buried.In the Dictionnaire de Préhistoire, Jean Leclerc and Jacques Tarrête (1988) gave

a more archaeological definition of the word “sépulture”, more appropriate to ourresearch: “the place where the remains of one or several dead bodies have been laidand where there are enough signs for the archaeologist to detect in this deposit thewill to accomplish a funerary act; (...) the structure elaborated for this funerary act”.Leclerc later commented on, developed and explained this definition (Leclerc 1990).It thus refers to the place of burial, but there is an essential difference to the defini-tions in Robert, Larousse or Littré which also referred to place of burial: the ideaof intention – what Alain Gallay (1987: 28) called “intentionalité positive” (positiveintentionality) – is added and also the necessity that the deposit be a funerary act.

Generally speaking, a burial is first of all a defined place, with material or virtuallimits, the virtual limits undoubtedly systematically eluding archaeologists: in currentarchaeological language “funerary” is often used to describe a “space” or “structure”.This definition excludes all those cases where the remains of a dead person are spreadover unlimited space (i.e., Indira Gandhi’s ashes scattered into the air or corpsescommitted to a river or the sea), and, even more, those for which this space cannotbe defined (i.e., the Tibetan funerary rite or funerary cannibalism). Indeed, it seemsdifficult to consider the sea or the digestive tract of vultures, or even of men them-selves, as a burial, unless metaphorically.

The second decisive element of a burial is the presence of the remains of oneor several dead people. This seems obvious, yet ethnologists often wonder how toconsider funerary structures with no corpses (Thomas 1980: 46–8). This problemhas been discussed recently (Boulestin et al. 2002) and will not be dealt with, butour opinion is that such structures should not be considered as burials sensu stricto.6

We prefer to keep the word burial for structures containing human remains and forthose which no longer contain remains but for which we are absolutely certain thatthey did at some time.

The intentionality of the deposit, which is essential for Leclerc and Tarrête,rules out all accidental “news items”, where the corpse is “lost”: a drowned bodysunk in the mud, bodies carried away by a mudslide, buried in volcanic ash(Pompeii), or in a glacier (Ötzi), fallen into a crevasse, etc. There are also borderlinecases, when accidental deposits become retrospectively burials: the Titanic, whichthe victims’ descendants consider a real tomb, or some mineshafts sealed off by

6 We suggest calling them “fictitious burials” by analogy to the “fictitious funeral” which theyusually accompany (Boulestin et al. 2002).

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(firedamp) explosion. These extreme situations are, of course, anecdotal and marginalto the concept under study: they are absolutely atypical as burials. They do show,however, that if intentionality is an essential part in the concept of burial, it is notso much the intentionality of the deposit than the intention to turn this deposit,whatever it may be, into a burial. Although largely the case, this notion of intention-ality (of the deposit) is nevertheless not systematically necessary and is certainly notsufficient (cf. infra). In fact, we do not consider it useful in the definition of a burialas it becomes redundant when the necessity of a funerary context, the last elementmentioned by Leclerc and Tarrête, is considered. This element provokes reflectionfor it is naturally much more difficult to establish after a long time.

Firstly, let us return to the definitions of some currently used words. In Paul Robert(1992) and Pierre Larousse (1872) the adjective “funerary” has two meanings:

1 – that which belongs to a funeral;2 – that which recalls the death of somebody, commemorates the dead (tomb-

stone, vault or shroud).Robert combines this last meaning with the following definition: “that which is

relative to tombs”. Littré (1872) only mentions the first meaning, covering all uses ofthe word. For the French word funérailles (funeral), Larousse and Robert again agreeand accept only one meaning: “all the ceremonies performed at the death of a personand during his burial” (Larousse 1872); “all the ceremonies performed to honoursomeone’s remains” (Robert 1992). Littré makes a distinction between two meanings:the second is a poetical word for death; the first, “pompous burial ceremonies”, isslightly different from that given by the other authors. Littré specifies, in fact, thatthe two French words funérailles and obsèques (funeral rites), the plural showing thata complex whole is meant, both refer to the different ceremonies which accompanya burial, “but with the difference that ‘obsèques’ is a general term that can be usedfor the most modest, as for the most sumptuous, burial; whereas ‘funérailles’ impliessumptuousness and splendour”. Of course, archaeologically this slight differenceescapes us, because there is usually a complete lack of information on the pre-sepul-chral phase. We note that the funeral refers to the period of the material treatmentof the dead person’s remains (corpse, bones, viscera, etc.) and not only to the periodended by their final deposit (Leclerc 1990). It is clearly the meaning accepted byethnologists (Thomas 1980: 89 ff ), even if the funeral is obviously not limited to thistreatment (Thomas 1985: 61 ff ).

In fact, the concept “funerary” covers far more than that which belongs to thefuneral; sociologists and ethnologists consider that the funerary rite encompasses allthe stages of the rite of passage that it actually is. It thus corresponds to the classicalsuccession “separation, margin, integration or aggregation” (Van Gennep 1909: 209 ff;Thomas 1980: 89 ff; 1985: 169 ff ), three almost-universal stages, although diverselyexpressed. We will not deal here with the mechanisms, even general, of these rites of

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passage, which are often long, complex and have several aspects. We will only studythe stage of integration, which closes and hence marks the end of the burial period:it usually corresponds to the end of mourning and signals the re-birth, the deadperson joining the world of his ancestors and the mourners returning to the world ofthe living. This stage, which is much less important nowadays in Western societies,used to be marked by a commemorative ceremony, the “end-of-year meal”. In othersocieties, it still remains very important (see for many examples Jean Guiart ed.1979). In the succession of the rites of passage, the place of the funeral is ratherstandardised. A sole burial takes place during the stage of separation, as does the firstburial in a double-burial ritual. In this case, the second burial usually marks thestage of integration, even if there are sometimes specific commemorative ceremoniesto signify the end of mourning.

Several remarks ensue from these reflections. Firstly, the funerary period is clearlylimited. Even if it varies from a few days to several years, it begins with the death andends with the integration. When burials are double, they can either follow oneanother rapidly or be separated by a very long time. The funeral itself (i.e., the directtreatment of the dead person’s remains) usually represents a small part of this time,so that it cannot be considered alone as representative of the whole burial rite. Thispoint is of course essential to our reflection: in the field of the funerary rites weperceive only the funeral and certainly only a very small part of the funeral at that. Itis unlikely that we recognise the majority of even the material elements which comewithin the scope of a mortuary rite but do not belong to the funeral. Calling thearchaeology we pretend to practise “funerary” may sound rather presumptuous…

If we return to our first definitions, it is perfectly true that the notion of burialimplies a funerary context, or, more exactly, the context of a funeral: whether provi-sional or final, the burial can only be conceived in relation to the funeral, whichitself refers to a stage in the rites of passage. In the same way, the different stages ofthe burial rite are themselves closely related to the real evolution of the dead body, asalready underlined by Robert Hertz (1928: 6). A burial without funeral is thus diffi-cult to imagine. Even in the case of the aforementioned accidental deposits, burialceremonies are usually held a posteriori, which in most cases “validates” the concept.7

But we must keep in mind that funerals can have extremely different aspects: theycan either be sumptuous or expressed by a single prayer or sign of the cross, particu-larly when the time for more elaborate ceremonies is lacking.

On the contrary, we can perfectly admit a funeral without burial, particularlywhen the burial is not defined. This remark leads us to provisional burials, the first

7 There are exceptions to this rule of validation a posteriori. Consider, for instance, the Titanic:the place has been appropriated as a burial by the descendants without, as far as we know, any truefuneral. But this case is obviously an exception.

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stage in double-burial rites: during the first burial, the dead body can be inhumedsensu stricto (etymologically, that is, buried in the ground), or be kept in a definedcontainer, but it can also be exposed (see Thomas 1980: 176 ff ). In this last case,ethnologists and sociologists seem to hesitate over the status of the provisional deposit:shall we admit that the first funeral does not systematically imply the existence ofa burial, the final burial (second funeral) being the only one, or shall we, on thecontrary, consider that the exposure of the corpse is indeed a provisional burial,which implies enlarging considerably the meaning of “defined place”? This questionrequires too much development to be considered here, but will have to be discussedin the future, even if its incidence in archaeology is relatively small.8

The funerary context is thus essential to the definition of burial and only it canallow the exclusion of deposits of human remains which are intentional but notsepulchral: these are called “relegation” deposits (which will also one day have to becorrectly defined), bodies hidden after a murder, dishonoured corpses, corpses or partsof corpses exposed as trophies, bodies sacrificed as offerings, etc. (Thomas 1980: pas-sim). Whether the body is used, damaged, reified or idealised, the lack of burialreflects primarily the lack of a funeral and, more generally, the lack of any funerarycontext. In such circumstances, the function of the deposit is more for the use of theliving than for the protection of the dead. Here, another function of the burialbecomes apparent: it is conceived for the dead person, partly at least with a positiveconnotation,9 even if it has indisputably a role to play for the living.

We have mentioned cases where the funerary context is completely lacking; wemust now say a word about the acts which take place outside the funerary periodand after it, to be more precise. As we have already said, this period ends with thestage of integration, usually marked by the end of mourning. Another period followswhen, very often, the worship of the dead individual’s memory begins. Differentlyexpressed commemorative rites become attached either to the remains themselvesor to long-lasting substitutes, such as a tomb, a monument, an effigy, a flag, per-sonal belongings of the dead person or even an oral or written evocation of his life.

8 This subject has been touched upon by Jean Leclerc (1990) even more generally when he com-pared “true” burials, i.e., final ones, whatever they may be, with the provisional “method”. It shouldbe noted as well that Louis-Vincent Thomas (1980: 190 and passim) hardly ever speaks of provisionalburial, but rather of inhumation or interment.

9 In particular, this is a role that empty “burials” do not play and one of the reasons that they arenot considered “fictitious burials”. The lack of this role when the dead are exposed during the firstfuneral, which is usually purely ostentatious, sends us back to the previous question concerning thedefinition of provisional burials. On the other hand, this concept of burials (and more generallyfunerals) considered as structures (or ceremonies) made for the dead leads us to wonder about thefunction of certain sets or parts of complex sets. In the case of the “Roy Mata collective burial”(sic, Garanger 1980), one can ask not only, if it is indisputably Roy Mata’s burial, but also if it is reallya burial for the dead who accompany him, even if the funerary context cannot be questioned.

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Whatever its form, this worship of the dead no longer belongs to the funerary ritual:chrysanthemum pollen discovered in our cemeteries should not, because it reflectsa practice which takes place after the funerary period, in the future be qualifiedas “funerary”. Similarly, human remains which are regarded as sacred a posteriori– relics in the Christian world, as well as ancestral skulls in traditional societies –escape the funerary context. No one would consider the places where such remainsare exposed as burials: they are now part of the worship of the dead and have beenre-appropriated by the living, because their original qualities are supposed to givetheir bones beneficial powers for future generations.

Treatment of the bones which remain outside the aforesaid contexts, such as thelate exhumation of the bones followed by a re-inhumation and/or arrangement (i.e.,reduction processes, transfer to the communal grave, frequent in our cemeteries, aswell as the almost-timeless use of ossuaries,10 can also be excluded from the funeraryritual. Among such practices, said by Louis-Vincent Thomas (1980) to be of “collec-tive preservation”, it is difficult to distinguish between those of ritual ideology andthose of practical necessity. This preservation is based, in fact, on the refusal simplyto eliminate remains which are still significant and inspire respect, as well as on thenecessity to make room for new corpses in a limited area (Alexandre-Bidon andTreffort 1993: 256). As mentioned by Philippe Ariès, some ossuaries “display” the bonesand enhance this function by selecting the most representative parts of the body(mainly skulls and the bigger long bones) and displaying them “artistically”.

These preservation practices remain outside the funerary context: they do noteven belong to the funerary ritual. If we stick to the previously-given definition,then the resulting structures (ossuaries, communal graves, re-inhumation structures)are not burials. Many researchers agree on this point, even if some continue to callan ossuary a “collective burial” (Thomas 1985: 214):11 this use of the word ossuarywould lead to a complete revision of the concept of burial by foregoing the necessityof a funerary concept and, for us, would have no sense. But even if they are notconsidered funerary, these practices do not concern dehumanised human remains.They are in no way treated “as sediment”. On the contrary, the concern for theirpreservation is based mainly on the respect they arouse: it is much more a “period ofmemory” than the “period of forgetting” mentioned by Jean Leclerc (1990). It is

10 We do not take into consideration here ossuaries belonging to national cemeteries (cf. La Gruerie,Douaumont, Villeroy in France), which contain the remains of soldiers killed in action. These areexceptional monuments and their status, be it funerary and/or memorial, as well as the social expres-sion they represent, could be much discussed. Some key ideas on the subject are to be found inYves Pourcher’s (1993) or Jean-Charles Jauffret’s (1997) works. The same remarks apply to the transferof these soldiers’ remains.

11 We must emphasize that the word “ossuary” does not correspond to the same reality in Europeand North America.

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actually quite difficult to give a definition of this “period of forgetting”, for thisnotion has several meanings. Leclerc himself differentiates between individual andcollective forgetting and other degrees could also be distinguished: forgetting familyties, the ties to an ethnical or religious community, or even to our species. The livingstill consider an anonymous dead individual, at least for some time, as coming fromsuch and such village, as French, Catholic or simply as human. Despite their age, dowe not consider the remains we excavate as more than just objects to study? Beyondforgetting and memory, the notion of filiation finally appears, the sensation thata link across time, either real or illusory, unites the dead, whose bones we contem-plate, and the living beings we are.

This sometimes leads to paradoxical situations: it is not rare for a human groupto appropriate the bones of recently or long-gone dead, entirely strange to theirgroup, and to perform a new funeral complying with their own rites.12 Thesere-inhumations perfectly fulfil the definition of a burial, as they do in the minds ofthose who perform them, but do they have sense? They certainly do for our contem-poraries and for the ethnologist studying present societies, but, for the archaeologistworking on past populations, it is simply a cultural act, concerning the respectfultreatment a posteriori of remains recognised as human, and obviously has nothing todo with the funerary rites of the group to which the dead actually belonged. A newand absolutely essential notion thus appears: if our study of burials is to treat veri-tably of funerary practices in past populations, the acts we can detect must havebeen planned in advance in the original funerary ritual and have been compatiblewith the activities of the dead person’s contemporaries.

After this long but useful reflection about the very concept of burial, we muststart again and reconsider our first question. What, in fact, is a burial? We can finallyanswer: “A place consecrated by a funeral where the remains of one or several deadbodies have been laid”. This definition admits that the deposit can be either volun-tary or accidental, provisional or permanent and that the dead can be animal orhuman, the essential notion being that of consecration by a funeral in order for thesite to be considered a burial. As we have already underlined, a funeral can itself haveseveral aspects, from a symbolic gesture or a single prayer to the most sumptuousceremonies. The “archaeological” definition given by Leclerc and Tarrête thus seemsquite pertinent and does not need to be changed. We can simply note that theintentional aspect of the deposit, not compulsory but generally the case, appearsclearly and that it refers to “funerary” acts and not to “funeral”, which, as we havealready said, does not really matter.

12 The example of Crow Creek perfectly illustrates the subjective character of such appropria-tions: the re-interment of fourteenth century native Americans was “supervised” simultaneously byCatholics, Episcopalians and Baptists for the Christian cults, and Sioux and Arikara for the nativeAmerican cults (Zimmerman and Alex 1981).

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We must never avoid the question of the funerary context, even if the answer issometimes very difficult to give. The funerary nature of the deposit is obvious inmost cases, but not always, and we must not speak too quickly of “burial”, even if itis difficult to show that it is not a funerary deposit. We must be particularly carefulin the case of burials of very young babies (perinatal), “burials” in silos, “relegation”or “mass” burials, certain monumental structures (see, for instance, Auzay in France,Birocheau et al. 1999), human remains found in Gallic sanctuaries (do they representthe heroized dead or are they trophies, which would imply the notion of a depriva-tion of burial?), burials in Neolithic enclosure ditches or in some Iron Age pits etc.,to speak only of periods with which we are familiar with. This question is also perti-nent to earlier periods (see, for instance, Perlès 1982; Vandermeersch 1982). As far ascollective structures are concerned, it is often difficult to know whether the piles ofbones found in them represent true burials or ossuaries.

The concepts of “primary” and “secondary” burials in funerary archaeology

The notions of primary and secondary burials are frequent in publications onfunerary archaeology. Their use has been universal for a long time and can be sur-prising, as is often the case for commonplace expressions.

The origin of these expressions and their introduction to archaeological vocabularyremains enigmatic. In France, these concepts appeared apparently at the end of thenineteenth century and used expressions which are no longer employed: one-degreeor two-degree burial (Cartailhac 1889), or first-degree and second-degree burials(Tournier and Baux 1903). At the time, their use was sporadic13 but, paradoxically,their meaning is rarely defined and the authors never refer to an original use: thenotions they cover are sufficiently well-known to need no superfluous explanation.English-speaking authors use exactly the same terminology (primary and secondaryburials), these expressions having appeared slightly earlier (Yarrow 1881: 116, 137).14

We cannot imagine that the same expressions appeared in the vocabulary at thesame time and independently on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: a lexical loanwould seem likely. Although French travellers described multiphase burials since thebeginning of the eighteenth century (Lafitau 1983: 169), it is more likely that theseexpressions first appeared in the works that nineteenth century American scientists

13 In particular; the expressions primary and secondary burials do not appear where they couldbe expected, in some French publications from the end of the nineteenth century: the Dictionnaire dessciences anthropologiques (Bertillon et al. 1882), La France préhistorique d’après les sépultures et les monu-ments (Cartailhac 1889), or a note by M. Pigorini (1885).

14 Our acknowledgements to P. Willey (Department of Anthropology, California State University,Chico), who brought this reference to our attention and gave us the text. This work is interestingbecause of its age, but also because the expression “secondary burials” is used in connection withcremations, long before the first publication of Robert Hertz’s essay in 1907 (see Hertz 1928).

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dedicated to the funerary rites of native Americans. But how and by whom werethey introduced at the same time in France is still to be discovered. Contrary towidespread opinion, the terms “primary” and “secondary” burials do not originatein the classical ethno-sociology which developed at the beginning of the twentiethcentury: the concept of double burials appears only in 1907 in Robert Hertz’s fun-damental essay Contribution à une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort(Hertz 1928: 1–83). Moreover we note that neither ethnologists nor sociologists everuse these terms: they belong only to archaeology.

Their meanings differ from one author to another, which is problematic. In theCambridge Encyclopaedia of Archaeology, the following definitions are found:

– “primary inhumation: initial burial of a deceased person”;– “secondary inhumation: practice consisting in transferring the remains, ini-

tially buried or exposed, of the deceased person elsewhere to the tomb or theossuary” (sic).

Gabriel Camps (1979: 436) describes secondary inhumation as the “setting ina final burial of already defleshed bones taken from a provisional burial (primaryburial) or an exposure area”.

For Tim White (1991: 272):– “a primary interment is a burial in which all of the bones are in an anatomi-

cally ‘natural’ arrangement”;– “a secondary interment is a burial in which the bones of a skeleton are not in

‘natural’ anatomical relationship but have been gathered together some timeafter complete or partial disarticulation of the skeleton and then buried”.

Finally, Douglas Ubelaker (1989: 170) defines the primary burial as “an articu-lated skeleton, buried in the flesh (sic)”, and the secondary burial as “an interment ofdisarticulated bones”, with the following précising: “secondary inhumations consistof non-articulated collections of bones” (Ubelaker 1989: 20).

These four examples suffice to show the discrepancies due to a hesitation betweenethnological and archaeological criteria and the resulting confusion. The first twodefinitions (Cambridge Encyclopaedia and Gabriel Camps) originate in ethnology:they refer to actions or practices, but not to their results. Camps also gives a precisionwhich does not exist in the Cambridge definition: the final burial concerns alreadydefleshed bones. He considers that the word “primary” refers to the provisional burialin the case of double burials. This meaning, which is repeated by Leclerc (1990), iscertainly more logical, but it is not at all that commonly admitted. The same word alsodescribes the burial in a single funeral – the author speaks of a “final primary tomb”(Camps 1979: 438) – which corresponds more or less to the Cambridge Encyclopaediadefinition. We can easily imagine the problems generated by this ambivalence…However, many authors maintain this confusion when they talk of incomplete pri-mary burials and partial secondary burials for the intentional removal of some bones.

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Tim White’s and Douglas Ubelaker’s definitions sound a priori more archaeo-logical: they are based on a material interpretation of actions (bones articulated ornot) which are directly perceptible in the excavation. These authors add, moreover,that the lack of articulation, either partial or total, in a secondary burial resultsindeed from the burying of bones already disarticulated, which again brings us tothe behaviour of past populations.15 But everyone is capable of understanding thatthe words “primary” and “secondary” cannot be used to describe, at the same timeor alternatively, the position of the bones when they are discovered and the stateof the human remains when they were laid to rest. We also note that the mannerin which Ubelaker describes a primary burial does not take into account the caseswhere the corpse was “buried in the flesh” but where no anatomical articulationremains without disturbance (for instance, if the corpse decomposed on a funerarybed which later collapsed).

Finally, we find ourselves between two frames of reference, one concerning ob-served archaeological facts and the other concerning the funerary acts which inducedthem, the latter requiring prior interpretation of excavation data. We all associate,more or less apparently, both elements in our reasoning. Thus, we accentuatethe links between the place of decomposition of the corpse and the place of finaldeposit, which can be either the same (primary burial) or dissociated (secondaryburial), as well as the criteria which allow us to differentiate them in the field (Duday1995: passim). Claude Masset (1987: 113) also indicates that a secondary burial “con-sists in laying the corpse down successively in two different places”, but specifies that“the corpse is therefore buried as bones”.

Moreover, the study of funerary rituals in present populations is still partly basedon Robert Hertz’s works (1928) although his ideas are questioned nowadays, particu-larly by English-speaking authors (see, for instance, Metcalf and Huntington eds 1991,for the different contributions). Following his observations on the Dayak in Borneo,he was the first to recognise the “double burial” process and to introduce at thesame time the notions of “provisional” (or “temporary”) and “final” burial. Ethno-logists compare these double or two-phased burials to the simple funeral, when thecorpse is laid down directly in its final sepulchre; burial in this “immediate funeral”is permanent straightaway.

There should, therefore, be no equivalence between the ethnologist’s “provisional”and the archaeologist’s “primary”, or between “final” and “secondary”. Primary orsecondary, the burials we excavate are almost always final, but correspond to burials

15 It is interesting to note the slight difference between the word “disarticulated”, used by the twoAmerican authors, and the word “defleshed”, used by Gabriel Camps, in parts of definitions otherwiseequivalent. The archaeologist is indeed able to observe the consequences of disarticulation directlyand constantly, but not those of defleshing.

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which could have been immediate or delayed. We are much more rarely confrontedwith provisional deposits never brought to their final resting-place, such as thatwhich in French is called pourissoir (i.e., “decomposition areas”; Farago-Szekeres andTernet 1997), or that in which the final burial concerned only a selected part of theskeleton, that part representing the whole body (Thomas 1980: 191–2). It is never-theless difficult to consider the real nature of such assemblages. When the bonesintended for reburial have been removed, is the provisional burial – now partial– still considered as a burial by the group that performed it, or did the remainingbones become reified waste? As Jean Leclerc suggested, should we choose the expres-sion “provisional (‘transitory’ may be more appropriate?) method for the treatmentof the corpse” instead of “provisional burial”?

The aforementioned inconsistencies have other causes as well. In funeraryarchaeology, excavation of burials gives information about the approximate degreeof decomposition of the corpses when they were laid in their graves, but none at allabout the time that passed between death and the deposit. We will not recall thecriteria used and presented several times (Duday et al. 1990, and quoted references).Decomposition varies enormously according to different factors (geographic andclimatic, but also cultural; whether or not the corpse is treated or protected, itsdirect environment, etc.) and cannot be directly correlated to the time passed sincedeath (Bass 1984; Rodriguez and Bass 1985; Guillon and Roustide 1987; Mant 1987;Galloway et al. 1989; Duday et al. 1990: 33; Maureille and Sellier 1996). Moreover,even if the state of the corpse influences the funerary treatment, as Hertz alreadyremarked, it is not necessarily taken into account, nor does it always representthe principal criterion in determining the passage from one phase of the ritualto another. In double burials, the degree of decomposition of the corpse may varya lot at the moment of the second burial, as may the time passed since the firstburial, but the two elements are not necessarily linked. These differences obviouslyprevent us from restoring the duration of each phase of the funerary ritual fromexcavation data, and the rare cases which let archaeological data be confronted withethno-historical data (see, for instance, Ubelaker 1974) show perfectly how suchattempts can lead to misinterpretations.

All this, of course, concerns the funerary period. To affirm that we are dealingwith a secondary burial, we must prove that the acts inferred from field observationsactually refer to this period, in other words, that the secondary burial is indeeda burial. To conclude on this point, we should be sure of both:

1 – the time, as we have seen it;2 – the space, as it was seen by those who made this deposit: a space we consider

today as a coherent unity could in fact have been divided into differentfunctional areas by perishable (hangings, etc.) or virtual partitions, whichwould radically change its meaning.

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Evidently, these two parameters are not easy to grasp. Nevertheless, the distinc-tion between a real final burial and a reduction process16 or an ossuary is madeat this double level. Should the place of decomposition be conceived as a uniquespatial entity, it is only a provisional “burial” and the bones in it are either reifiedwaste or a particular form of reduction. On the contrary, should it be consideredas a multiple entity, it can also contain delayed final burials, if the collection of theremains took place during a second funeral, or an ossuary, if the arrangement tookplace outside the funerary period.17

III. FOR A CLEARER VOCABULARY IN THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DEATH

Generally, when speaking of the treatment of human remains, there is thusa major gap between the facts described by ethnology and the manner in which weperceive them from archaeological data only. This applies to the study of burials inparticular: they cannot be identified in either matter or form without the immaterialconcepts, of which the material clues (anatomical, artefactual or archaeological) thatwe have at our disposal cannot give a direct account. The vocabulary we use shouldallow us to express the facts we observe and the different stages of the laborious pathwe take to cross the gap between archaeology and ethnology, but the words usedpresuppose that this gap is already surmounted. This vocabulary is interpretativerather than descriptive, and presents as a priori the essential conclusions of thereasoning process it is supposed to accompany, making it thus incoherent. Thedifficulty arises from the fact that our definitions usually start from a presupposedbehaviour which possibly leads to the disposal of remains in a burial, whereas ourreasoning process takes the opposite way.

16 The reduction process is defined as the collection and the gathering of the bones of an indi-vidual within his burial or, more widely, within the space of the first deposit. This practice is usuallyperformed to allow the deposition of a new corpse without violating the principle which forbidsthe placing of one corpse above another one (Tardieu 1993: 233). In this case, the place of depositobviously remains a burial, but the secondary deposit in it corresponds to a method of treatment/preservation similar to ossuaries; it is thus outside the frame of the mortuary ritual and cannot itselfbe qualified as a burial. Excavating such a burial no longer records funerary practice, at least for theindividual who underwent the reduction process. The foreplanning of the actions is an essential notionhere and taking it into account may cause us to revise certain interpretations, for instance, the captionof fig. 5 in Duday et al. 1990: 45.

17 Here again it is not an absolute rule: some Slavic populations, for instance, perform the delayedfinal burials in situ, in the grave where the corpse has decomposed, and the burial is thus both provi-sional and final. In such cases, however, we may consider the burial as straightaway final (for so it wasplanned), containing successively a provisional inhumation and a final burial.

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As Jean Leclerc (1990) soundly remarked: “Recognising a burial is never a simpleobservation; it can only be an interpretation of the remains,” and we cannot andmust not avoid a certain subjectivity, implicit in this interpretation, otherwise wecan do nothing. Once again we claim to “practise” an archaeology of death whichgoes beyond a simple registration of osteological observations in the field. However,it is essential to reconsider the vocabulary used by this archaeology, not by makingit as independent as possible from ethnological data, but by assigning each term tothis or that phase of a process which progresses from the description of the factsto the restitution of the gestures (practices), and from the restitution of the gesturesto the perception of the religious thought (rites).

The first level consists of field observations and leads us to specify the numberand kind of bones found and the relations between them: existence or not of ana-tomical articulation (strict or labile, total or partial, etc.), position of the skeleton, ifarticulated, piles of bones possibly chosen according to their dimensions or form(bundles of long bones, etc.). At this stage we can also describe modifications to thebone surface. The vocabulary will be borrowed mainly from that of anatomy, whichhas defined most of the necessary terms and codified them in an internationalnomenclature. At this level, the comment “undetermined” is usually due to a lackof observation or registration of field data, but also, sometimes, to excessive damageof the skeletal remains on the site.

The purpose of the second level is the restoration of the actions which led to theconstitution of the deposit (which we call “practice” when the deposit is intentionaland which send us on to the third level of the interpretative process, which will bediscussed in the next paragraph), the aim being to go from the discerned actionbackward to the circumstances and/or gestures which induced it. Going from one tothe other assumes first an interpretation concerning only material elements (withoutconsidering at all the meaning given to their actions by those who made them), butwhich must take into account two distinct phases. The first step consists of restoringthe original arrangement of the deposit (i.e., the way it looked when it was consti-tuted) from field observations, hence taking into account changes that have occurredsince the human remains were deposited. This discussion focuses on taphonomyapplied to the corpse, to the skeleton, to each of the bones, as well as to any elementforming the archaeological assemblage, from which will be inferred, in particular,all the remarks concerning the position of the corpse (no longer the skeleton), theenvironment in which the decomposition of the corpse took place (open or filledspace, etc.), the filling dynamics of the space freed by the disappearance of the softtissue, the actions of carrion-eating animals and their predators, possible disturbanceand the modification, either natural or artificial (for example, cut marks) of thebones. The second step, following naturally the first, aims at determining the state

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of the human remains when they were taken to the place from which they wereexhumed. Only here can we distinguish between primary and secondary depositsand we propose the following definitions:

– primary deposit is the deposit of a corpse, or part of a corpse, made when theskeletal elements are still in total anatomical articulation;

– secondary deposit is the deposit of remains made when the skeletal elementsare partially or completely disarticulated.

The words primary and secondary thus refer only to the state of the corpse, orparts of the corpse, at the moment of deposition, this state being perceived onlythrough the relation between the skeletal elements (it would be vain to even considerknowing the state of the most labile soft tissue). It is sometimes possible to concludedefinitely, but in most cases we remain uncertain, and this leads us to propose a newcategory: “deposit of undetermined degree”, with reference to the vocabulary of nine-teenth century authors.

It will be noted that, up to now, we have only used the word “deposit”, with orwithout intention (one often speaks of sedimentary deposits). The word “burial” canonly appear at the third level, that of interpretation, pretending to connect a gesturewith the thought which induced it. We previously insisted on the necessity ofa funerary context (which is much more precise that the simple assertion of a volun-tary deposit). The overall context of the site (organised cemetery or necropolis) makesthis subjective interpretation obvious in most cases, but far from always! Here again,it will often be necessary to foresee a particular category for undetermined deposits(as opposed to funerary deposits, i.e., burials, and non-funerary deposits, such asreductions, ossuaries, dishonoured or heroized corpses): hence, there will be primarydeposits, secondary deposits and deposits of undetermined degree, which can them-selves be either funerary (burials) or non-funerary, or undetermined. The perceptionof time and space that we ascribe to past populations plays a decisive part at thisstage of the reasoning process, as does the foreplanning of the actions we discoverand the context in which they were made.

Thus, articulated bones usually correspond to a primary deposit, but a primarydeposit does not mean that the bones will be found articulated. Indeed, the lack ofarticulation does not necessarily mean a secondary deposit. A primary deposit canresult from a real burial, straightaway final, but can also correspond to a delayedburial, if the second funeral took place when the corpse was only slightly decom-posed, to a “news item” (body hidden after murder, drowned in sludge or buried ina mudslide or rockfall), to a relegation deposit, a sacrifice or a trophy. A secondarydeposit can, in the same way, correspond to a delayed burial, but also to a reduction,to an ossuary, to relics, to an a posteriori re-inhumation, all possibilities which do notbelong to the funerary period, and can, as the primary deposit, also refer to riteswhich do not belong to the world of death at all.

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These few propositions are not revolutionary for they do not introduce newterms. Nevertheless, to us they seem to clarify comprehension, because the use of eachlexical element is linked to the steps of a reasoning process, based on field observa-tions and their interpretations, and no longer on a more or less defined mixture ofethno-sociological considerations and archaeological facts.

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