Death As a Process by John Pearce Jake Weekes

Author:John Pearce,Jake Weekes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Ancient / Rome
ISBN: 9781785703249
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2017-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Mortuary ritual and personal identity

It was argued above and in the introduction to this paper that a military identity was very important to the Batavian population. The Batavians supplied more troops to the auxiliary troops than any other tribe. Service in Rome’s armies was one of the Batavian ways of being Roman. Yet we can conclude that this military identity was not expressed in the grave ritual. In the early phase of the cemetery (AD 50–120), not a single piece of military equipment was deposited in graves, while at the same time large numbers of military items circulated in the settlements.

A similar situation occurs with the brooches. Several authors have argued the importance of fibulae for the expression of the bearer’s identity, including the number and type of brooches worn and the manner of fastening them. Apart from the Aucissa brooch, which was often worn by soldiers, we do not really know which brooch-types were worn by whom, but it is assumed that each age/gender/ethnicity/professiongroup will have had their own fibula-types or ways of bearing brooches. (Jundi and Hill 1998; Eckardt 2005).

Like military equipment, brooches are hardly found in the cemetery. Of the 19 pieces found, three served to close the cloth which held the cremated bone and the other sixteen were worn during cremation and were destroyed in the fire along with the other symbols of personal identity or individuality. If our idea is correct that the cremation ritual represented the negation of individual identity, it is not to be expected that items referring to this individuality will show up in the burial. Other items possibly connected to the expression of personal identity like toilet instruments, finger-rings, valuables, are also very scarce in the cemetery.

To conclude, it seems that personal identity was not expressed in the Batavian burial ritual. References to age, sex, social standing or profession are scarce, if not completely absent from the grave goods. Standardized sets of tableware refer to a meal in general, not to the deceased as a person. The function of the grave ritual seems therefore to be aimed at the transformation of the deceased into an (anonymous) ancestor.

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