Our understanding of past societies is completely or partly based on how they buried their dead. However, more attention is paid to the burial objects rather than the body. Therefore, understanding...Show moreOur understanding of past societies is completely or partly based on how they buried their dead. However, more attention is paid to the burial objects rather than the body. Therefore, understanding positions and what they could mean within a society and religion could help us better understand how these societies operated and what they valued. However, there is a lack of standardization and consistent, approach of intentional body positions during burial. This lack of standardization makes it difficult to compare data, especially concerning data across continents and scholarly methods. In this thesis, I will compare data from several seated burials from the La Tène period ranging from 450 to 100 BC in France and Britain. In order to understand their cultural significance and create a better understanding of seated burials on an intra-regional level.Show less
The Corded Ware and Bell Beaker complexes are European archaeological complexes from the third millennium BCE. The distinctive way their burials are organized – and subsequently categorized into ...Show moreThe Corded Ware and Bell Beaker complexes are European archaeological complexes from the third millennium BCE. The distinctive way their burials are organized – and subsequently categorized into (gendered) groups by researchers – is one of the most fundamental and prominent aspects of the discourse. In this thesis, I will be comparing the biological sex and archeologically assigned gender (based on the position and orientation of the body, and any grave gifts) of a group of sixty-three Bell Beaker burials from the Czech Republic. I aim to examine how the results from the analysis correlate with the traditionally perceived nature of CW and BB gender and sex. As the results of this analysis demonstrate, the way Bell Beaker sex and gender are perceived by the discipline is simply not in congruence with the evidence. Gendering graves on the basis of orientation and body position brings with it a considerable margin of error. The gendered division of grave gifts is highly contentious, and, similarly cannot be employed as a tool for gendering graves with a high degree of certainty. Traditional views dictate that there are two opposite styles of burial (one male-coded, the other female-coded). The, historically inert, assumption of the existence of such a binary, however, has caused researchers to make overly hasty judgements in their burial analyses. They work within the limitations set out by their predecessors, not calling them into question when faced with apparent “exceptions.” It encourages researchers to overlook, or forcibly gender, graves which do not conform to the binary, and to ignore complexity and nuance.Show less
