by Chris Fowler
Single-event collective interments or entombments perhaps held votive significance and/or dealt with difficult deaths or the deaths of unusual persons. Where bodies were placed in chambers in close proximity with those of others recently deceased, including through successive single deposition in tombs, these people were defined as sharing close relationships and forming a community. The mixing of bones from different bodies within tombs might mark affinities or intermarriages between people from different moieties or lineages (Fowler 2001; Lucas 1996; Richards 1988; Sharples 1985). Many tombs provided such opportunities for manipulating the long-dead, but at some point most tombs were closed, abandoned, or even burnt down.
In Ireland, children were seldom treated to the funerary rites of adults, and rarely cremated. This suggests that children were different categories of persons—perhaps, as in some contemporary communities, closer to the ancestors and thus less in need of dramatic purification and transformation. Categorical distinctions between children and adults may have been more widespread. It is hard to gauge the extent of some practices, such as exposure to carnivorous animals or the curation or circulation of human remains (whether in venerating loved ones or ancestors or as trophies of violence and/or the result of religiously—or emotionally—motivated head-hunting), though we can discern how often such practices preceded the deposition of bones. Most bodies were probably dissolved into the broader landscape, perhaps left for animals or cremated and scattered. Corpses and bones were arguably manipulated in mourning and transforming the dead, and in tracing and transforming social relations, including, in some cases, with the ancestral dead. As distinctive enduring parts of the person that could only be extracted following death, bones were sometimes key material media of social relations. Some bodies and bones had to be stored or disposed of with special care. The retention of body parts may have had various effects and significances within complex value-systems, from the violence of killing and trophy-taking to the reverence of a sacred relic.
This chapter has dwelt on relations with the dead, but others have attempted to consider other Neolithic embodied experiences—at pre-existing monuments (e.g. Thomas 1993; Richards 1993; Tilley 1994), or during the construction of earthen barrows and stone long cairns (McFadyen 2007; Richards 2004). Some have discussed the comparative effects of different ways of treating the dead (e.g. Fowler 2003, 2004a, 2004b; Harris 2006), but there is more to be said about the evocative impact of leaving bodies to decay (or become partly preserved) in tombs, cremating a corpse and gathering the remains, collecting the remains of a corpse exposed to wild animals, disarticulating, or burying a decaying body. Where personal objects did not accompany the dead, we have to ask where they ended up and what roles they played in funerary rites and/or in extending personhood and commemorating the dead. To make further sense of Neolithic bodies and persons it is necessary to contextualize mortuary evidence alongside the routines of daily life (Jones 2005). Marrying improved information about occupation sites with that from mortuary deposits will be crucial in that endeavour.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Anne Teather and Oliver Harris for allowing us to cite their unpublished PhD theses, and Oliver Harris, Dani Hofmann, and Jan Harding for comments on draft text.
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