Burial mounds and flat graves are the most visible aspects of burial rituals in Bronze Age West-Frisia. The burial rituals for the barrow graves and the few flat graves that are found in the region...Show moreBurial mounds and flat graves are the most visible aspects of burial rituals in Bronze Age West-Frisia. The burial rituals for the barrow graves and the few flat graves that are found in the region are furthermore to a certain extent understandable for the archaeologists. After all, many inhabitants of Western Countries also bury their dead. A third element of the West-Frisian death rituals however, includes the distribution of separate human bones through the settlement. In this thesis, research is done according to the question of how the death rituals in eastern West-Frisia looked like during the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Thereby the focus will lie on this third element of human bones in the settlement contexts. For the answering of this question, a database was made which contains all Bronze Age human remains of West-Frisia that are found so far. Of these human remains several aspects were added to the database, including sex, age, dating, etc. Then with the help of these aspects, significant patterns were looked after. Remarkable was that the majority of the human remains from this database seemed to come from the settlements more often than from the barrows and flat graves. These human bones from the settlements almost always consisted of only skull fragments or long bones. Considering this, one could ask oneself whether this should not also be considered a regular death ritual in West-Frisia.Show less
The Late Mesolithic period is rich in human burials with unmodified and modified animal remains and animal burials. In contrast, the Early and Middle Neolithic period is less studied. The focus of...Show moreThe Late Mesolithic period is rich in human burials with unmodified and modified animal remains and animal burials. In contrast, the Early and Middle Neolithic period is less studied. The focus of this research is on the different relationships humans have with animals at the Late Mesolithic period throughout the Early and Middle Neolithic in South Scandinavia and the Netherlands. The relevance of this study is to understand the human-animal relationship before and after the introduction of the domestic animal: pigs, cattle and sheep. The research approach was to focus on animal and human mortuary practices using ideas from the personhood approach with a deposition typology. The deposition typology helps to divide all the animal remains in groups with similar characteristics. This method allows the exploration of different attitudes humans had towards animals. The results of this research indicate that animals played an important role in the mortuary practices as animals are present in all contexts. However, these practices change from Late Mesolithic to the Early and Middle Neolithic period as there was a decrease of animal remains in mortuary practices in South Scandinavia and an increase in the Netherlands. This dissertation illustrates the lack of studies there is about animal deposition and the need for further research on this topic.Show less
This thesis endeavoured to investigate whether ardmarks could be used as a proxy for field systems in prehistoric archaeology. It considered the assumption that the crystallization of field...Show moreThis thesis endeavoured to investigate whether ardmarks could be used as a proxy for field systems in prehistoric archaeology. It considered the assumption that the crystallization of field structure occurred in the Middle Bronze Age. To discover whether this was the case, this thesis tried to investigate whether social organization was also evident in the earlier field systems. The main question was how did social organization change from the Middle Neolithic to the Early Iron Age? To answer this, this thesis used ardmarks as a proxy for field systems. One of the main uses of ardmarks in current archaeological debate is to provide evidence for intensification. This thesis instead looked at the demarcations, organization of ardmarks, field systems, and how the ardmarks are currently documented to try to discover changes in field systems in prehistory. This study included 28 case studies ranging from the Middle Neolithic to the Early Iron Age. Two types of evidence were found that describe a change in social organization and therefore tenural function of fields in different phases of the prehistory. The first was the layout of the fields in the landscape and the second was the intensification of these fields. The Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age fields were set on the perimeters of landscape features; slope and tops of dunes were important focal points for the organization of these fields. The ardmarks show a pattern of parallel and perpendicular furrows to the slope. This emphasizes the natural landscape as a focal point for these fields and non-demarcated fields. Due to the local changes in natural landscape features, one could argue that these fields were set for the organization of the local settlement rather than a larger inter-organizational structure. However, in the Middle Bronze Age a shift of the layout of fields towards the lower places within the local landscape can be seen. Moreover, an increasing amount of enclosures in the form of ditch systems marks that this shift towards the lower lying areas was deliberate. However, in many case studies it is evident that the natural landscape was still influenced the layout of these fields. It is only in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age that the local relief of the landscape is disregarded for the structure of field systems. This is evident in the more dominant structuring of fields systems for inter-organizational purposes. However, this indicates that tenure was practiced in the Late Neolithic in a more local settlement scale, and that from the Middle Bronze Age it changed towards a larger organization than that of a single settlement organizational perspective. Therefore, we see a clear change in the use of fields in social organization on different landscape levels. In the end, this thesis showed that the organization of field systems changes considerably in chronology but also regionally. However, one should question if these field systems are a direct relation to tenure and chiefdoms, or rather changes in techniques and social organizational views of the land.Show less
