Leiden University Student Repository

Rijk, Tom de 2018

Changing Views on Roman Funerary Rites

Research master thesis | Archaeology (research) (MA/MSc)

open access

In the Roman imperial period in the region of Tongres, Cologne, and Trier the inhumation burial ritual started to be used as the dominant funerary practice and thereby replaced the cremation burial...Show moreIn the Roman imperial period in the region of Tongres, Cologne, and Trier the inhumation burial ritual started to be used as the dominant funerary practice and thereby replaced the cremation burial. This transition to the use of inhumation burials had first occurred in Rome and it had also been in use in the east of the Roman empire before inhumations were used in Rome. Therefore, interpretations of this spread in burial practices over the empire had focussed on ex oriente lux cultural diffusions from the east to the west and several explanations saw the shift to the inhumation burial in the Roman empire as the result of emulations of Rome. Other empire wide theories were centred on relating the inhumation burial practice to early Christianization, the oriental mystery religions, the Crisis of the Third Century, ethic migrations, persistent local rituals, and the maintenance of the intact body. Whereas most of these explanations interpreted the inhumation burial rite on a regional scale this research tried to also incorporate a more local approach by re-examining the developments in funerary rites in the case-study sites Tongres and Cologne (as well as a sample of other cemetery sites with early inhumation burials). As it was also aimed to study the funerary rites at the regional scale the general developments in funerary rites in the research region were described and overview maps of sites with early inhumations in the research region were presented. Furthermore, following the recent scholars’ interpretations of the inhumation burial rites in terms of the maintenance of the intact body and a possible new meaning of the burial ritual it was attempted to interpreted the inhumation burial ritual along the lines of the concept of fractal personhood (and how this could be constructed in the funerary rituals). The interpretation of the inhumation and cremation burial rituals as two diametrically opposed rites or as exclusively connected to either the individual or dividual self did not seem to correspond with the results from the research region which indicated less rigid views of what the funerary practices could look like may have been prevailing. Possibly, the newly developing urban contexts of Tongres and Cologne where many different people and ideas of funerary practices came together made these places relatively receptive contexts towards other funerary ideas. Hence, the cremation and inhumation rites can be viewed as possibilities among the variability in funerary practices, which could have been selectively used to best fit the specific social situation, aims of the burying groups, and identity of the deceased.Show less