05 king 2004 grave goods as gifts in early saxon burials

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Grave-goods as gifts in Early Saxon burials(ca. AD 450600)

JOHN M. KING

Independent Research,Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the possibility that Anglo-Saxon grave-goods,rather than having been the life possessions of the deceased, may havebeen gifts to him or her, thereby directly effecting a relationshipbetween the survivors and the donor. This cautions against life-mirror approaches to burial data that assume a reflective correspon-dence between the wealth of the deceased in life and in death. It alsotakes a Deleuzean approach to signs, emphasizing them as a meansof directly producing something, social relations in this case, ratherthan as a means of communication and as symbols to be decoded.Different lines of evidence are explored to determine, first, if anygrave-goods were more likely to have been gifts and then to establishthe possible scope of such actions, so that we might have some confi-dence that we are dealing with a practice, rather than with idiosyn-cratic, isolated instances.

KEYWORDSAnglo-Saxon archaeology burials cemetery archaeology gifts grave goods material culture

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 4(2): 214238 DOI: 10.1177/1469605304041076

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215King Grave-goods as gifts

INTRODUCTION

Death is a social even socializing event, prompting culturally specificactions directed at (re)producing relationships, thereby assuring continuityin the face of social disruption. This paper explores the Anglo-Saxoncustom of including grave-goods in burials and, by construing those goodsas gifts (to the deceased individual and indirectly to their family or otheraffiliated group), argues for their direct role in such social reproduction.

Background on the Anglo-Saxons

Following the Roman withdrawal from Britain (ca. AD 410), the EarlySaxon period runs from the beginning of the influx of Germanic peoplesinto southeastern England, some time around AD 450, to St Augustinesmission and the beginning of the conversion to Christianity, just prior toAD 600. The conversion is a convenient demarcation between the Earlyand Middle Saxon eras and is far from arbitrary. During the fifth and sixthcenturies, the inclusion of grave-goods is commonplace, whereas after 600it becomes restricted to fewer, richer, burials. Cemeteries in use during theEarly Saxon period generally go out of use in the seventh century andcremation burials, more common in Anglian than Saxon areas, arediscontinued. The objects themselves appear to reflect a deeper social shift;they no longer vary regionally in terms of style or artefact type, but seemto indicate a national, elite material culture (cf. Lucy, 2000 for a recentreview). For these reasons, this study is restricted to the fifth and sixthcenturies.

The nature and scale of the above mentioned influx itself is far from clearand debate continues over almost every aspect of it; was it an invasion, alarge-scale migration, a steady dribble of immigrants, a revolt of mercen-aries, or all of the above (Dark, 1994; Hamerow, 1994; Hines, 1989)? Allwe know is that for whatever reasons, Romano-British material culture isreplaced by ceramic, glass and metalware that closely resemble comparableobjects in Northwest Germany and Southern Scandinavia (EsmondeCleary, 1989; Hines, 1984, 1994) and that Anglo-Saxon place-namescomprehensively displace British nomenclature in a way that neither theearlier Roman invasion, nor the later Norman managed to do (Gelling,1993).

Traditionally, following Bedes eighth-century account of the settle-ment, Angles concentrated north of the Thames Valley, while that valleyand the areas south and west of it were occupied by Saxons, with anamalgam of peoples dominated by Jutes setting up shop along the Channelcoast in Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Identifying ethnicity inthe cemetery remains has been a central preoccupation of Anglo-Saxon

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216 Journal of Social Archaeology 4(2)

studies virtually from their onset, although there is an increasing awarenessof the problematic nature of the concept (cf. Lucy, 1998: 424 for a recentreview). On the other hand, although Bede is no longer taken as gospel,there do appear to be material-cultural zones paralleling those divisions(Hines, 1999). Angles and Saxons, then, are not understood here asbounded, self-conscious, internally coherent groups, and neither, by allaccounts, were the native Romano-British, meaning that this period wasnecessarily a time of accommodation between groups divided by language,distance, origin, and cultural practice. Whether this accommodation, in agiven place and time, was effected through overlordship, mutual assimi-lation, tolerant separation and alliance, or by any combination of or vacil-lation between these, England was what we would consider a multi-ethnicenvironment (Dark, 1994; Gelling, 1993; Higham, 1994; Hines, 1989, 1994).

Commensurately, the production of social relationships and novel socio-political identities within and across ethnic boundaries will have been acentral concern and somewhat problematic. Such circumstances will havedemanded effective strategies of social reproduction. This paper makes thecase for one such strategy the placement of mortuary gifts in the grave.

Alternative interpretations

As the bulk of our data for this period comes from the recovery of grave-goods, we must closely examine any presuppositions concerning the natureof mortuary data. For the Anglo-Saxons, the general assumptions havebeen, first, that these goods belonged to the person in the grave during hisor her life, and, second, that we can therefore use them as a life-mirror(cf. Hrke, 1997, contra such approaches) to draw inferences about thedeceased. These assumptions have in turn given rise to two dominantinterpretations. One, an economistic analysis, equates goods with(assumedly convertible) wealth, which is then equated with social status sothat we get the following, often unquestioned, conclusion: rich burial = richperson = person of rank and power = ranked society (see Scull, 1993, for arecent phrasing of this). A second approach treats grave-goods as symbolicrepresentations, manipulated by the surviving family members to make astatement about a purportedly pre-existing social position, role, or value(Geake, 1997; Pader, 1982; Parker-Pearson, 1982; Richards, 1987). Whilesymbolic and economistic treatments differ markedly in their treatment ofgrave-goods, they both rest on the assumption that goods in the gravebelonged to, or were presented as having belonged to, the person interred.

Rather than having been such life possessions, the contention here is thatgoods placed into the grave were often gifts. If this is the case then we canand must pursue other interpretations of the impact of funerary actions onAnglo-Saxon society. As gifts and ritual are both means to socialreproduction (Weiner, 1992), a point to which I return in the conclusion,

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reproducing both the template of a relationship in general and a givenrelationship in particular, then we ought to consider prestations in a ritualsetting as especially productive. Furthermore, although beyond our scope,it is important to understand that any such funerary prestations, here aselsewhere, may have articulated with other gift-exchange cycles (Strathern,1981; Weiner, 1988) which, together, would have served to produce therelationships that constituted the Anglo-Saxon social world (see Bazel-mans, 2000; Hrke, 2000, for later gift-cycles).

Gifts and social reproduction

In what follows, I use the terms gifts and prestations interchangeably. Aprestation is simply something given, whether as gift, debt repayment,offering, tribute or what have you. I refer to gift, also, in the same sense assimply being something given, in part because a full discussion of the natureof gifts is beyond our scope and in part because even if we can demonstratea case for gift giving at funerals, the archaeological record cannot hope totell us where in a flow of gift and counter-gift any particular object falls,and whether that item was a tribute, a means of cultivating debt or discharg-ing it.

I must briefly elaborate on the distinctions between this socially repro-ductive approach (Weiner, 1980) and the economistic and symbolicapproaches. Prestations in a gift-giving world do not perform the taskswhich we understand as wealth. Namely, they neither convert to othergoods, nor do they serve as a medium for accumulation. As a gift receiveddoes not buy other things goods or labour it does not serve to distancethe purchaser from those who provide goods or services, as is the case withcommodities wherein the purchase terminates the relationship. Gifts workin the opposite direction by drawing people together (Godelier, 1999;Gregory, 1982; Weiner, 1992). Neither do gifts facilitate accumulation, asthe obligation of the recipient to give in turn is fairly constant, meaning thata gift received does not rest.

What gifts do, then, is to (re)produce relations. MacIntyre (1989),discussing mortuary prestations on Tubetube Island, uses the local term,opening a path to describe in part what a gift does. In other words, arelationship, or pathway, is opened between people as soon as a gift is given,which can only be closed by a directly equivalent counter-gift that termi-nates the relationship. Maintaining that pathway/relationship entails giftsand counter-gifts that avoid equivalence (Weiner, 1988, 1992).

The immediacy of impact differentiates this approach from the symbolic,in that the effect of giving is direct. It does not, apart from the participantshaving a sense of what is appropriate and what would constitute equival-ence, entail a search for meaning and a need to decode symbolic structures.This is a direction taken by, among others, Gell (1998) and Meaney (1981)

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in their analysis of the direct impact of material objects, and Gil (1998)looking at the immediate effect of signs in ritual contexts.

It may be helpful in this context to define what one means by bothsymbol and sign. In this, I follow Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze, 1990,1994; Deleuze and Guattari, 1984, 1988) and take a symbol to be repre-sentational in that it refers to something (in general) that already exists. Asign, on the other hand, produces something specific.

For example, Mary and John place wedding rings on each others fingersin the appropriate ritual/legal context. As a symbol, this refers to marriagequa marriage, or marriage in general, in the abstract, but as a sign this actionproduces a specific, concrete, actual relationship between John and Mary.To look at the immediate effect of signs or sign bearing (significant) actionsis what Deleuze and Guattari (1984) termed an affective semiotic.

In archaeological terms, then, this paper differs from symbolicapproaches in that it is not concerned to establish meaning, but to inter-pret the evidence in terms of immediate intent and effect. To the extentthat we can demonstrate the use of grave-goods as prestations, then wehave evidence for the intent to directly (re)produce a relationship, even ifwe shall never know whether the action was in that instance effective.

Below we shall look at some instances of prestational grave-goods. Thisis not to be read as evidence in itself for the practice having been commonfor the Anglo-Saxons, but rather as an indication that the possibility ofmortuary prestation deserves consideration in our case. Without contem-porary documents for this period, the archaeology must stand on its own.Von Hesberg gives us the historical Roman practice of carrying gifts to thedeceased in the funeral procession. The mourners sometimes, not always,placed these onto the funeral pyre or into the grave (von Hesberg, 1998:2224).

In the ethnographic literature, the giving of gifts, like the practice offeasting, is quite common at funerals (e.g. Weiner, 1988). Where this entailsobjects being placed into the grave or on preinhumation display piles, thereare instances where some or all of the gifts may be quietly reclaimed(Battaglia, 1992; Lepowsky, 1989), or passed on to other third parties(Goody, 1962) and in only a few cases left in the grave for burial. In someinstances, as for the LoDagaa of Goodys study (Young, 1989), gifts to thedeceased tend to be spontaneous gestures. In other cases, such as that onTubetube Island, Papua New Guinea, certain artefacts (in that case grassmats) are produced for this purpose, and the gift is not just directed to theperson of the departed but to his or her family group as well (MacIntyre,1989; cf. Weiner, 1988, 1992). Again, all of this is by way of saying that itwould not be outlandish, or ethnographically unique were the early popu-lations of Anglo-Saxons to have engaged in similar practices.

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Implications

It must be understood that the argument here is not that all grave-goodswere prestational. This paper attempts to determine if, on the balanceof plausibilities, some of them were in order to demonstrate, first, thatprestation did occur and, second, to gauge the possible extent of the behav-iour. In other words, if only a handful of instances can be put forward, thenit would indicate a spontaneous and sporadic event on the order of theLoDagaa example and could be treated as a diverting novelty. If, on theother hand, it is widespread, then we can make a case for mortuary presta-tion as a socially reproductive practice, deserving careful consideration.

To interpret grave-goods as either prestations or life possessions of thedeceased can be, in many instances, an arbitrary judgement at best. Atworst, it risks being an unexamined assumption. This cuts both ways,however. While it would certainly be rash to claim that all grave inclusionswere gifts to the deceased and/or their group, on the other hand, I canoffer no diagnostic feature of the Anglo-Saxon evidence, which wouldconclusively argue for specific objects or assemblages having been lifepossessions.

Furthermore, we are on balance more likely to underestimate the inci-dence of prestation by reading gifts as possessions, rather than the reverse.Even in the case of items worn on the person, or which would have formedpart of the functional kit of an individual (such as knives or brooches), thereis nothing incontrovertible; someone had to dress the corpse and could haveadded (or subtracted) items of dress to fit the emotional and/or social needsof the moment. Furthermore, someone had to place objects in the grave,and could as easily give one as deposit an item owned by the departed,whether in a bag, on the body, or on a string of beads.

For purposes of this discussion, however, let us allow that objects inwhich the corpse was dressed (like brooches or buckles) and other norma-tive inclusions (such as shields and spears) in standard positions (Figure 1)were life possessions. Furthermore, following the example from Egils Sagaabove, it seems reasonable to assume that most inventories may well be acombination of possessions and prestations.

THE CASE FOR PRESTATIONS

Having said that, and allowing for the impossibility of proving possessions,it still remains to demonstrate the possibility of prestations. To do this, thefollowing categories of evidence are examined below: (1) incongruouspossessions which are unlikely to have belonged to the individual in thegrave; (2) duplications of artefacts. Later inclusions which therefore are

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plausibly considered to have been gifts; (3) finds adjacent to but outside ofa coffin; (4) unburnt inclusions in cremations, where items are unlikely tohave adorned the corpse on the pyre; (5) finds in the upper fill of aninhumation burial; and (6) unusual positions, where a common inclusion,

Figure 1 Map of sites

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such as a brooch, is recorded outside its normative position in the grave.The examples below do not represent an exhaustive list of all possibleinstances of prestation, but are considered to be sufficient to make theargument. These are intended to establish, first, whether prestationoccurred at all and, second, the possible extent of the practice.

Incongruous possessions

This section is concerned with grave-goods which are unlikely to havebelonged to the individuals in question. It is argued here that these objectsmost likely belonged to individuals other than the interred and are there-fore prestational. Of the 22 burials of fetuses and neonates (2 months oryounger) at Great Chesterford, Essex, four contained grave-goods, includ-ing fully 20 percent (3 of 15) of the fetuses accorded separate burials. Whilethe neonates might have been buried with something analogous to a chris-tening present, in the case of fetuses, it stretches credibility to considerthese grave-goods as having been the life possessions of the unborn.

The remainder of the evidence in this section concerns knives or othersharp objects found in the graves of infants and very small children. AtAlton, Hampshire, grave 19 is that of a 4-year-old child, buried with a knifeand beads. At Apple Down, Sussex, cemetery 1, a 3- to 4-year-old child wasburied (grave 100) with a knife only. At Berinsfield, Oxfordshire, grave 64contains the remains of an infant between 12 and 18 months of age atdeath. Of the many inclusions in the grave, one is a flint scraper. Grave 2,of a 5-year-old and grave 47, of a 4-year-old, contained knives. AtBroughton Lodge, Nottinghamshire, a 3-year-old was buried with a knife(grave 53), as was an infant at Edix Hill, Cambridgeshire (grave 13). Statedmost baldly, either these sharp objects were the possessions of the childrenbefore their demise, or they were the possessions of someone else. In thiscase, it strikes one as implausible to think of knives as part of the livinginventory of a toddler and more credible to view them as prestationalobjects.

It has been suggested (M. Biddle, personal communication, 1998) thatknives may have been indicators of personhood, which, given theirubiquity in Early Saxon cemetery populations, is certainly a reasonableargument (Hrke, 1989). It was further suggested that they may have beengiven at birth to be held in trust, as it were, until the child came of age andwere subsequently placed in the grave upon early demise.

I should argue against this objection on the grounds that the inclusionof knives in the burials of very young children does not constitute usualpractice, which we could reasonably expect if birth presents were custom-ary. While knives are a normative inclusion for the general population, theyare unusual in the graves of those five and under; other artefact types, suchas beads or pots, are far more common. Hrke (1989) has indicated that

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some 8 percent of knives found in Anglo-Saxon graves were buried withjuveniles, but he was looking at those under 14 years of age, whereas I amlooking only at those aged 5 years or under.

Great Chesterford is a useful cemetery to consider here as it has anuncharacteristically large database of 74 juvenile burials, including fetuses(cf. Crawford on child burials). Of the 21 burials of children aged from 2months to 2 years, only one contained a knife, while ten were buried withbeads and six with pots (one with both beads and a pot). Two burials wereclassed as 23 years of age, one with a pot and one with beads. There areanother five graves where the deceased is described as being 36 years old.Two of these graves contained beads, three had containers and only onehad a knife. Knives, more common in the 68-year-old category, aresufficiently unusual in the graves of those 5 and under that it is unlikelythat they were normal possessions of those individuals. This is furthersupported by the fact that where they occur, they tend not to be found intheir usual position. Holding such items in trust, for which activity thereis no positive evidence, would seem less likely where the incidence of inclu-sion is so low.

Duplicates

This category of evidence is based on the premise that gifts to the deceasedseem more likely to be duplicated than would selections from the indi-viduals life-inventory, especially where these are placed in different loca-tions in the grave. Rather than putting like with like, different locationsimply that the participants thought of these objects as belonging to differentcategories and distinguishing between possessions of the deceased and giftscertainly seems plausible.

For example, at Spong Hill, Norfolk, a knife and beads are duplicatedwithin and without the coffin in grave 24, and there is the possibility ofduplicate knives in inhumation grave 31. At Mill Hill, Kent, grave 81produced a pair of tweezers at the waist with an additional pair (along withshears) in a decorated, rectangular container of maple wood, placed bythe head. Grave 2 at Nassington, Northamptonshire, had vessels at both thehead and the foot, while grave 35 had two pots, one behind the head andone by the side. Grave 12 at this cemetery contained two skeletons andthree pots. In grave 46 at Broughton Lodge, there was a square-headedbrooch and three (rather than the normal two) annular brooches, alongwith fragments of yet other brooches. At Little Eriswell, Suffolk, in grave45 we have a cluster of beads at the throat, as one would expect, andanother overhead on the floor of the grave. This is not an exhaustive list,but it serves to indicate that duplications do occur.

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Grave-goods outside coffins

This category is limited to evidence from Spong Hill, as burial in coffinswas common there, relative to other sites in this study. There are 12 possibleinstances of items having been set into the grave on top of, or outside of,the coffin.

Grave 13 had a pot outside the area of the coffin while a knife and spear-head were inside. Grave 24 had an iron weaving batten and other itemstogether in a corroded lump apparently above the coffin lid: beads, girdlehangers, knife, strap ends and a ring with textile traces (bag?). Within thecoffin had been placed another knife, a bowl, scattered beads, a square-headed brooch and two annular brooches. Along with multiple objectsinside the coffin, grave 27 contained a single pot apparently outside of it(Hills et al., 1984: 76).

Grave 31 is somewhat confusing. The head of a spear was found outsidethe coffin while the ferrule was inside. Hills has suggested that the spearwas broken on placement as the ferrule lay flat, while the spearhead restedat a steep angle. In addition the area of the coffin contained one knife anda possible second, two buckles, red deer teeth, a childs bone and variousiron objects, with a shield placed (and propped up with flints) outside andagainst one wall of the coffin. It was not spatial considerations that led tothe external placement of the spearhead and the shield the coffin hadroom for both.

In grave 32, we find a similar anomaly. A spearhead is placed on top ofthe coffin although its length does not preclude its having been placedinside with the other goods. The only items in grave 34 were repair-stripsfrom a wooden bowl south of the area of the coffin. With a sword, shieldfittings, a pot, a bowl, a bead and a buckle resting within the area of awooden chamber/coffin, grave 40 gives us another example of a spearheadoutside and a ferrule lying level inside, and again if we are to take it thatthe spear was broken on burial this tells us nothing about why parts wereplaced both inside and outside the coffin.

In grave 41, an iron ring is outside the area indicated for the coffin, whilevarious iron fragments, bronze fittings and bronze rings had rested on topof it. Those goods inside included a shield, knife, buckle, a bronze sheetand various iron fragments around the shield. Grave 42 has two pots outsidethe area of the coffin with other goods inside. Grave 51 has a shield bossand grip inside along with a knife and a buckle, while a pot was apparentlyplaced on top of it. A spearhead was well above the rest of the assemblagewhile a ferrule lay flat at the top of the other goods, but Hills makes nostatement as to whether the ferrule was within or without the coffin and itis not possible to determine that from the illustrations. In number 55, theonly enclosed object is an iron chisel while there is a pot outside the areaof the coffin and a knife placed on top of it. In grave 56, the person was

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buried with two annular brooches, a bronze sheet, a bronze object andbeads, while a pot was placed above the coffin. The pot is included herealthough it was sufficiently high in the grave fill that it may well constitutea late inclusion (see below).

Discussion Why would some possessions have been outside and somewithin the coffin, especially where there was space inside to accommodatethem? Are there categories of artefacts which were always placed eitherinside or outside? Apparently not, as the same type of objects are foundboth within and without the coffin.

Perhaps visibility is desired for the object(s) outside the coffin. This isreasonable, but why would it not apply to those objects inside as well,objects which may also have been visible before the coffin lid was secured?An increased desire for visibility implies an audience. It also suggests giftgiving, inasmuch as the need to have witnesses to an act of prestation (andits implied social affiliation) could be greater than the need to show off thepossessions, often humble, of the deceased.

As with duplicated inclusions, one explanation for objects being placedinside and outside of the coffin would be that those items were categori-cally different in their ownership prior to the funeral. That is to say, thatsome may have belonged to the deceased and that others were gifts. It isinteresting, in this context, that in most of the instances cited above theassemblage within the coffin is richer than that outside it.

Late inclusions in cremations: unburnt artefacts

The preceding three sections have, it is hoped, demonstrated the possibilityof prestation in inhumations. This section seeks to determine if prestationis consistent with cremation data, in order to establish a sense of how wide-spread a practice it may have been in this period.

Cremations contain objects which have been subjected to heat andothers which have not been, which is not totally unexpected, for asMcKinley (1994a: 91) points out, even in modern crematoria objects cansometimes emerge unscathed. The odd survival ought to be random,though, and if it were we should not need to concern ourselves with it.However, we find categories of artefacts that seldom, if ever, show heatdamage, and so have evidence for systematic inclusions of material notpresent on the pyre. Furthermore, as glass has a relatively low meltingpoint, the frequent occurrence of unmelted beads would also point moreto intentional actions than to random survivals.

It could be argued that different types of artefacts were placed on thepyre in different locations and would thus be more likely to come through.This, too, would be intentional, but I would argue that there is no locationon a pyre that could be counted on to prevent heat damage to an article

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all, or nearly all, of the time. While there are variations in the temperaturein various parts of the pyre, for example away from the body and itscombustible fats, the whole pyre is burning after all. Materials more vulner-able to heat, such as glass, almost always show signs of melting. While theodd one may fall through or off the pyre, if we were to find unmelted beadswith any frequency, we might consider the possibility that they were placedin the urn later.

We know from the Spong Hill evidence that some bodies were crematedwith items on them, as we have instances of metal fused to human bone.Therefore, in the case of cremations we can be justified in offering a conces-sion similar to that of inhumations, where worn objects or usual kit foundin their normative positions can, for our purposes, be considered to havebeen life possessions. To wit, where an object has accompanied its owneronto the pyre, we should consider these to have been personal possessions,too. At Spong Hill, worn objects such as brooches and ivory ring bags arefound to have been subjected to heat nearly always and always, respec-tively (McKinley, 1994a: 91). It would follow that post-cremation inclusions,where these can be demonstrated, are possible candidates for ritual presta-tions.

Certain limitations in the evidence and in the research to date must benoted here. The site reports reviewed for this paper, including those atSpong Hill, are not consistent in their description of articles as having beensubjected to heat or not. Often this is apparent from the illustrations butnot always, and not all urn contents are illustrated. Animal bones are neverdrawn, nor is the total assemblage of beads. Beads are, as argued above,an important strand of evidence here and animal bones, presented aboveas possible indications of food prestations, would also be germane. Wherethese are sufficiently described in the text of the catalogues, or adequatelyillustrated, I have incorporated them in the arguments to follow. However,not all lumps of molten metal can be identified with any confidence, evenafter radiography, and, while generally present, are not included here asevidence, although their existence should be borne in mind.

Having said this, certain patterns do emerge. Great Chesterfordcontained some 33 cremations, with one clear example of unmelted beads five of them are found in cremation 5. Cremation 7 has both an appar-ently melted iron buckle(?) (not illustrated in the report), which would beworn, and an unburnt iron bar. Cremation 20 has unmelted bronze tweezerson a knotted ring. At Apple Down, two cremations have melted beads,while three have metal objects which do not appear from the textualdescription or the illustrations to have suffered melting: the object in 43Ais a garnet in its setting; 142 has a broken Roman brooch which, as it isRoman, was not necessarily an item of adornment; 140 contains a Romancoin worn smooth, a descriptive statement that could not be made had thecoin suffered any heat damage. At Alton, with 46 cremations, cremations

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1 and 31 have brooches, an object generally worn, which have beensubjected to heat, while 1 also contains a glass bead apparently undamaged.Where the beads in cremations 33 are melted, those in 10 and 13 are not.A miniature iron toilet set in cremation 27 is corroded, but has not appar-ently been subjected to heat. A bone comb, bronze pin and needle, allunburnt, are found at the top of the pot in cremation 24, with a heat-fusedmass beneath it.

At Spong Hill toilet sets (tweezers, shears and/or razors), whetherminiature or functional, or iron or of copper-alloy, were, according toMcKinley (1994a: 91), usually undamaged by the cremation process. On theother hand, brooches there have usually been subjected to heat or werebroken. Hills et al. (1984: 67) suggest that the broken examples weredamaged neither by the cremation itself nor by post-depositional events,and speculates that they may have been older, possibly heirloom articles,which were ritually broken and [prestationally?] inserted in the urns. Mostof the buckles illustrated are also somewhat misshapen, which I take as anindication of heat damage, while illustrated beads show both melted andunmelted examples.

Unburnt animal bones in cremation burials may be possible gifts. A meatjoint of sheep or goat occurs in cremation 4 at Berinsfield, along withcalcined bird bone. Spong Hill presents us with a far more complex pictureof animal bone inclusions and co-cremations, but suffice it to say that appar-ently uncremated meat joints appear there as well. McKinley argues forfood offerings as a fairly regular component of the cremation (McKinley,1994a: 9192, 1994b; Richards, 1987: 125).

As we see from the above sample of cremations, a definite patternappears, with toilet sets or related articles (such as triangular combs orcomb fragments) and plausible heirlooms being those items most likely tobe found unburnt, with articles of apparel such as brooches and bucklesusually showing some degree of heat damage, while beads, which could beworn or inserted, appear in both categories. This ritualistic regularitysuggests both a division between artefact types which are most and leastlikely to have accompanied the individual to the pyre, and post-conflagra-tion insertion of some sort. Alton cremation 24 is a clear case of unburntobjects, which were not placed on the pyre. These lay above others, whichwere equally clearly part of the cremation debris. In other words, theunburnt objects were placed in the urn after the bone and other materialhad cooled, been collected and then placed in the urn. Such patterns arenot likely to emerge from the random survival of an object about whichMcKinley (1994a) has spoken.

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Discussion That beads occur in the same burial which are both damagedand not damaged by heat suggests a division within an artefact typebetween those items which were possessional and others which, it wouldfollow, may have been prestational. This is not to be taken as given,however. We must allow that a post-conflagration insertion does not in itselfequate with a ritual prestation. McKinley (1994b) draws the distinctionbetween pyre goods and burial goods based on the Spong Hill evidence.Certain types of objects may have been ritually appropriate inclusions onlyafter the cremation and not before, regardless of who owned them.However, it seems to stretch the argument for grave-goods as life posses-sions to suggest that the beads belonging to a given individual were dividedup, with part of them to be burned and part of them to be inserted later. Ifsuch a formal division normatively occurred, melted and unmelted beadsought almost always to appear together in the same urn, which they do not.On these grounds, a similar argument could be made that any division ofthe life inventory, even one by artefact type, would seem a less plausibleinterpretation. In short, post-cremation insertions of burial goods arelikely and this practice, in turn, is suggestive of ritual prestation.

Late deposits in inhumations upper-fill finds

Finds located higher than the level of the rest of the grave assemblage,where this position can be argued to have been deliberate and not the resultof disturbance, do suggest prestation, again, inasmuch as it seems less likelythat life possessions would be divided, interring some now and some later.As such finds are not frequent enough to argue for a standard ritual practiceof delayed insertions, I take them to be late inclusions, consistent with theirhaving been made by people who took some time to arrive.

The following objection ought to be considered first: can one distinguishbetween intentional placements and stray objects in the backfill of thegrave? Not always, but the effort has been made to filter out cases wherethere is clear evidence of disturbance. Nor do I deal with instances ofpottery sherds found higher in the fill, as these are more problematic andmore likely to have been random inclusions in the backfill. Having saidthat, Hills et al. (1984: 7) have speculated that sherds in the fill aresufficiently common at Spong Hill that they may have been intentionallyinserted, given the deliberate inclusion of other broken objects (pots,spears and brooches). Hills is not alone in this interpretation. At Edix Hill,grave 47, the sherds are taken as probably deliberately deposited. In grave7 at Oakington, Cambridgeshire, fragments of pottery were deposited bythe left shoulder, with tweezers and a knife immediately below them. Moreconvincingly in this regard are sherds found at Wakerley where joiningfragments from vessel 2 were found in graves 5 and 48, while others fromvessel 13 were discovered in the fill of graves 19 and 80. These are not

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adjacent graves, which reduces the possibility of the finds being randomsurvivals of a shared backfill. For the purposes of this paper, though, I haveerred on the side of caution and discounted pottery fragments as strayobjects, especially in a case such as Spong Hill, where the cemetery issituated on a former Romano-British site and many of the sherds areRomano-British.

Berinsfield provides three instances of upper-fill finds. Grave 35 includedan iron strip bent into an arm ring. It was higher in the fill by several centi-metres, but was directly over the position of the left forearm where it wouldotherwise have been worn, as if the contours of the body were still visiblewhen the object was placed. This suggests that the grave was initially onlypartly backfilled in anticipation of later deposits to come. Grave 128 had aknife quite high up, beside a spearhead that angled toward the surface ofthe grave. This spearhead, part of an entire spear whose butt-end rested onthe floor of the grave, would likely have been visible when the knife wasplaced in the grave, again meaning that the grave may have been partiallybackfilled quite deliberately. Grave 6 revealed a copper alloy belt fitting inthe upper fill of the central part of the grave, again roughly where it wouldhave rested on the body.

At Great Chesterford, a pot in grave 107, an infant burial, rested 15 cmabove the floor of the grave, near the skull. In grave 92, there is one broochto the right of the skull and 23 cm above the floor of the grave, with asecond, matching brooch on the chest, where it would have been worn, butwhich is, unusually, face down. Grave 126 yields a similar find, but thatplacement is clearly owing to disturbance and so disturbance may bepossible for grave 92, as well. A collection of black potsherds in grave 140,which may have been a complete pot, were found at a higher level, betweenthe skull and the spearhead on a horizontal plane. In 122 and again in 96,we have a spear, which appear to have been a late insertion. In 122 thespearhead is 15 cm above the grave floor while the ferrule is at twice thatheight, whereas the head and ferrule in 96 are at the same level 8 cmabove the floor of the grave.

At Spong Hill, there are eight late inclusions in a cemetery with 57 in-humations (4, 8, 14, 18, 23, 26, 41 and 56). All but one of these are pots,the eighth, grave 41, being a spear that was apparently broken as the angleof the spearhead is quite sharp while the ferrule is lying flat. In two of thecases of a late inclusion pot, graves 4 and 14, these rested on a ledge abovethe main grave cut.

Other instances in this study occur at Sleaford, Lincolnshire, where grave211 had a small iron axe listed as having been about 6 inches above thebody, and at Castledyke South where, in grave 29, there was a linear,organic stain, that traced a path from above the left hip-joint to above theright knee. At the hip end were two glass beads and traces of copper alloywere found along its length. Both the size of this inferred object and its

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relatively formal placement would seem to make it unlikely that this hadbeen an accidental inclusion from the fill.

Unusual positions

A distinction between pyre goods and grave-goods does not prove thatgifts account for any specific assemblage, neither do the anomalouspositions of the objects. They are, however, certainly consistent with presta-tion and further serve to illustrate the possible scope of such practice. Theobjects discussed here are all on the same level as the rest of the assem-blage, so the terms above and below indicate directions toward the heador foot of the grave.

Grave 97 at Beckford, Hereford and Worcestershire, cemetery B,contained an adult female accompanied by brooches, which is not unex-pected, but they are not positioned on or near the chest area, as is usual,but are piled one on top of the other beneath the skull. Such an anomalyis open to several interpretations, of course, but one is that the broocheswere prestations. At Didcot, Oxfordshire, grave 16, a silver arm ring, whichwe would normally assume was worn and therefore possessional, was foundinstead above the skull. In Little Eriswell, grave 14, two finger rings restedon the pelvis rather than on the hand. In grave 14 at Oakington, a bag ringand chatelaine are beneath the skull rather than in the usual position at ornear the waist. Knives are found out of position at Orpington, Kent (grave73), where one was recovered by the left shoulder of the skeleton, and atBrighthampton, Oxfordshire (grave 23), which had two knives on thebreast. Lechlade, Gloucestershire, returned several examples of anomalouspositions. Grave 13, that of a toddler, included a worn and damaged broochlying face down on the pelvis; grave 25 had a toilet set on the left shoulder;grave 59 included a brooch placed overhead; in grave 66, a spindle whorlwas placed on a stone, which itself overlay the right hip; grave 89 had twospindle whorls stacked above the skull. At Great Chesterford, grave 135included three small-long brooches, but one was found outside the leftpelvis under the right hand, not on the chest as would be usual.

Gift wraps Grave 15 at Apple Down contained one brooch, a cast annularone, not at the chest as usual, but in a complex along with bucket mountsand a single, amber bead, as if it had been placed inside a bucket, whichwas itself inserted into the grave. Other instances of such packaging occurelsewhere. Mill Hill provides two examples in grave 91, with bronzetweezers being covered by leather and wood, and grave 59 had a pair ofiron tweezers covered with textile remains. At Fonaby, Lincolnshire,unstratified find 16 is a small-long brooch that had been placed in a box.Grave 18 at Lechlade contained a bronze-rimmed container of wood orleather that held a comb, a pendant, a spindle whorl, an iron object and a

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flint flake. Such gift wrapping is indeed highly suggestive of prestation,although as always, this is not the only interpretation open.

Beads Alton grave 27 had a number of objects clustered around the waistof the skeleton, as if in a purse, but the bronze toilet set rests on the knees(the body was laid on its side with the knees drawn up). We find otheranomalies in this grave, such as the bronze Roman scabbard mount at theback of the ribs. The body itself was apparently pillowed on something asit rests at a 35-degree angle to the grave floor. Beads, normally strung as anecklace, were strewn about in the grave. This may be owing to disturb-ance, however, but grave 22 at Little Eriswell provides a similar case with10 beads described as scattered underneath the body, which cannot beattributed to plough damage.

Alton 37 is another example of strewn beads 51 of them scattered alongthe right side of the body from chest to knees. The other objects in thegrave are in usual positions, which argues against the bead scatter beingattributable to general disturbance. Grave 19, also at Alton, has beads scat-tered above and about the body, but showed signs of severe plough damage,which is sufficient to account for that distribution. At Castledyke Souththere are nine amber beads below the feet in grave 134, while at Bifrons,Kent, grave 41 also has a series of beads below the feet with another seriesabove the head. Lechlade has cases of beads strewn about the head (grave30), beads between the thighs (grave 59) and a cluster of beads overheadwith another in the usual position at the throat. At Brighthampton, a pileof 10 Roman coins and a cluster of beads rested in the lap. Spong Hill, grave24, has a scatter of beads similar to those described here, but as this scatteroccurs inside the area of a coffin, post-depositional disturbance would seema less likely explanation.

Perhaps the best examples of beads as possible gifts come from Edix Hilland Bergh Apton, Norfolk. At Edix Hill, the body in grave 93 had a singlebead placed in its mouth. In grave 82 at Bergh Apton, we find a pot andeight beads resting on a ledge above the grave (apparently of a child thereare no surviving bones) and not with the corpse at all. This placementcannot reasonably be attributed to disturbance.

In this regard, we must bear in mind Dickinsons (1993) caution thatisolated beads might be all that remains of something onto which they weresewn. Some instances of placement, such as the Bergh Apton exampleabove, would, however, still invite the possibility of their having beenprestational, whether placed as beads or as part of a larger object. Others,especially those in a position consonant with a normal item such as a bag,need to be interpreted more cautiously.

Coins At Great Chesterford, grave 136, an infant burial, held nine Romancoins, which were found in four groups (of 1, 2, 1 and 5 coins) at the foot

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of the grave. If these were life possessions, we could expect to find them ina position consistent with their having been contained in a purse. Dividingthem into four groups is an odd thing to do if the coins had belonged to theperson in question, anomalous for an infant in any case, but it is exactlywhat we could expect as prestational activity, with one pile per donor.Sleaford provides similar instances; grave 232 has a single coin placed atthe feet and grave 85 has six coins (the catalogue says seven) piled neatlyin two heaps on the hand.

One last anomaly, though not a positional one, could be included here.At Lyminge, Kent, knives broken in antiquity were included in graves 5and 35. These would have been of little utility if they were, prior to death,in the inventory of the deceased. Surely one can anticipate their havingbeen discarded or recycled while the occupants of the graves were stillliving. Clearly, their inclusion points to interpretations other than theirhaving been the functional possessions of the deceased.

CONCLUSIONS

The evidence presented in this paper points to the likelihood that presta-tion did occur as a relatively common component of burial ritual; the inclu-sion of goods in the graves of fetuses admits of no other reasonableinterpretation. For knives in the graves of infants prestation is, I think, thepreferable reading of the evidence, while duplicates, inclusions outside ofcoffins and finds in the upper fill are at the least consistent with thoseobjects having been gifts. The unusual positioning of standard grave itemsand the inclusion of unburnt items in cremations are, again, consistent withthe interpretation, serving to indicate the possible scope of the activity. Thebreadth of data that can be explained by recourse to formal, reproductive,mortuary gift giving points to its having constituted, if not universalpractice, then certainly something more than an idiosyncratic phenomenonand, as such, makes a reasonable case for the possible role of grave-goodsin the (re)production of Early Saxon social relations.

What, then, are the implications for future research? If we accept thatat least on some occasions grave-goods were gifts, it means that we can onlyapproach issues of ethnicity or social structure indirectly. For instance, letus assume for the sake of argument that all grave-goods are gifts. While wecan no longer, I think, foster the equation of rich grave = rich person orfamily, a rich assemblage might nonetheless indicate an individual or group(war band, family, etc.) sitting at the nexus of a gift-exchange network. Asto questions of ethnicity, Hrke (1990) has noted that for adult maleswealthier assemblages and burials with weapons tend to coincide and thatthe occupants of these graves are, on average, uniformly taller than those

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males buried without weapons, suggesting that the former may have beenGermanic individuals. If, again, we presume much of the content of thesegraves, including weapons, to have been prestational, then we can read thisnot as ethnic domination of wealth, but perhaps as Germanic descent linesresting at the centre of a network of socially reproductive exchange. If theselines were socially central, then it follows that their ideas, cultural norms,and language might also have constituted a central point of reference in amulti-ethnic environment, and that it was important to establish relation-ships with them.

Even if we do not assume that all grave-goods were gifts, but do acceptthe argument from the ethnographic record that mortuary exchanges inter-sect with other gift-exchange cycles, then what we may have in Early Saxongrave assemblages is, to some extent, an archaeological record of repro-ductive exchange. My own research to date (King, 2001) suggests that theseexchange cycles may have been instrumental in the formation of regionalidentities in the pagan period and that developments in those cycles mayaccount for some of the changes in burial practices noted for the seventhand eighth centuries.

Furthermore, to read the act of gift giving as directly productive suggeststhat the interplay of grave-goods with symbolic codes may be less immedi-ate, and more subtle, than we sometimes take it to be. It may also be moredynamic, in that these actions were taken with an eye to the future, tomaking something new in the social landscape, rather than just referring topre-existing roles, statuses, identities or relationships. It also suggests thatsign-bearing actions may be read in terms of what they produce rather thanas media of communication in terms of social effect rather than in termsof abstract meaning and ideational templates and places the creation ofsocial and even political relationships at the heart of the interpretativeproject.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Liam Kilmurray for his reading and comments on this paper, as wellas various people who gave me their time and thought on this topic during my timeat Oxford: Chris Gosden, Helena Hamerow, Heinrich Hrke, Barry Cunliffe,Pernille Sorensen/Kruse and the late Sonia Chadwick Hawkes. I must also acknowl-edge the material support of the Overseas Research Student program, and of theSocial Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada during the researchperiod.

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Gazetteer of sites

Alton, Hampshire. Inhumations: 50 Cremations: 46 (Evison, 1988).Apple Down, Sussex. Inhumations: 196 Cremations: 30, inferred (Down and Welch,

1990).Beckford, Hereford and Worchester. Inhumations: (a) 24, (b) 106 Cremations: (b)

4 (Evison and Hill, 1996).Bergh Apton, Norfolk. Inhumations: 65 (Green and Rogerson, 1978).Berinsfield, Oxfordshire. Inhumations: 114 Cremations: 4 (Boyle et al., 1995).Bifrons, Kent. Inhumations: 97 (Godfrey-Faussett, 1876, 1880).

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Brighthampton, Oxfordshire. Inhumations: 69 Cremations: 13 (Akerman, 1857,1860).

Broughton Lodge, Nottinghamshire. Inhumations: 121 Cremations: 4 (Kinsley,1993).

Castledyke South, Humberside. Inhumations: 227 (Drinkall and Foreman, 1998).Didcot, Oxfordshire. Inhumations: 17 (Boyle et al., 1995).Edix Hill, Cambridgeshire. Inhumations: 149 (Malim and Hines, 1998).Fonaby, Lincolnshire. Inhumations: 54 Cremations: 28 (Cook, 1981).Great Chesterford, Essex. Inhumations: 161 Cremations: 33 (Evison, 1994).Lechlade, Gloucestershire. Inhumations: 219 Cremations: 29 (Boyle et al., 1998).Little Eriswell, Suffolk. Inhumations: 33 (Hutchinson, 1966).

Figure 2 Typical positioning of grave-goods in adult female and malegraves. On the female side (left) the items are: (1) pair of brooches, (2) largerbrooch, (3) knife, (4) bag ring, (5) cluster of beads. In the male grave (right) theobjects are: (1) spearhead, (2) shield boss (the metallic, central portion of theshield), (3) knife

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Lyminge, Kent. Inhumations: 64 (Warhurst, 1955).Mill Hill, Deal, Kent. Inhumations: 76.Nassington, Northamptonshire. Inhumations: 65 Cremations: 3 (Leeds and

Atkinson, 1944).Oakington, Cambridgeshire. Inhumations: 25 Cremations: 1 (Taylor et al., 1998).Orpington, Kent. Inhumations: 63 Cremations: 84 (Palmer, 1984; Tester, 1968, 1969,

1977).Sleaford, Lincolnshire. Inhumations: 233 Cremations: 8 (Thomas, 1882).Spong Hill, Norfolk. Inhumations: 58 Cremations: 2384 (Hills, 1977; Hills and Penn,

1981; Hills et al., 1984, 1987, 1994; McKinley, 1994a.

JOHN M. KING was educated at York University, Canada, and St CrossCollege, Oxford, where he submitted his DPhil. He is currently conduct-ing research in Toronto.[email: [email protected]]

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05 king 2004 grave goods as gifts in early saxon burials

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