The body and objects

The role of grave goods is a complicated issue and cannot be pre-defined, but has to be determined contextually (Ekengren 2013). Objects have to be investigated in terms of why and how they are used in graves to understand their meaning.

This is not an easy task, and although some objects may be easier to read than

Funerary practices and the body 75 others, multiple meanings may be attached to each object or emerge from the ritual practices in which they are used. Renate Meyer-Orlac (Meyer-Orlac 1982) differentiates between three categories of objects in graves: the first is that of objects associated with the dead body, including clothes, wrappings and adorn-ments. The second category comprises ‘grave gifts’, objects added for several rea-sons, including that they were the deceased’s possessions, were rendered polluted or taboo through contact with the deceased or the event of death, or they were intended for use by the deceased, practically or symbolically. Further options for interpretation include that objects represent the mourning community or are deposited to gain prestige, express grief or as a visitor’s present. They may be meant as a gift to the deceased or for members of the community that had died ear-lier, or objects to ward off evil (and prevent the return of the deceased). The third category comprises features of the tomb, including furnishing and decoration.

This is particularly relevant when graves are constructed as an analogy of houses.

Starting from the body, it is useful to consider its appearance in life. Physical appearance is key in signalling and communication identity, even without words.

A person’s appearance is composed of the physical body, body modifications and alterations, and further additions, including dress and jewellery (Bergerbrant, Jør-gensen and Fossøy 2013). In addition, a person’s gait and movements, as well as objects that are habitually carried, can contribute to the way people define and accentuate their corporeal reality. In this sense, objects can be understood as extending the body and the scope of its capability and reach and become part of the cognitive system (Malafouris 2008). After death, some traces of physical appearance remain or are left unchanged; others are embellished, changed, added to and subtracted from by the burying community.

Analytically, it is further useful to distinguish the elements that make up a clothed person. Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (Sørensen 1997) differentiates cloth, the textile itself, clothing, the garments cut and made from cloth and costume, which includes the entirety of clothing, dress fittings and ornaments. Textiles are rarely preserved in graves, but their quality, colours and patterns already encode meaning. In the Villanovian cemetery of Verucchio (von Eles 2002, Stauffer 2002), for example, red textiles were found in high-status male graves, suggesting that the idea of this colour signalling power and status goes back a long way. Textiles found in the salt mines of Hallstatt (Plate 9, Grömer 2016, Grömer et al. 2013) demonstrate the high standard of spinning, weaving, dyeing and patterning tech-niques. The patterns include stripes, block checks, chevron, diamond and swastika motifs, as well as meanders, which have parallels on contemporary pottery, but are also depicted on representations of dress. Patterns on ceramics have been found to have regional significance (Brosseder 2006) as well as encoding other levels of nested identities, including differences within burying communities. The empha-sis on patterning in ceramics and the preserved textiles makes it likely that cloths played a major part in communicating identity.

The next level up in the appearance of a person is clothing. The cut of the dif-ferent dress elements is even more difficult to reconstruct from burial evidence, as often only textile fragments are preserved, but again, pictorial sources can

complement our knowledge. Dress fittings and jewellery completing the costume are, in contrast, a frequent occurrence in graves. The particular combination and location of the objects on the (inhumed) body may reveal how they were used, how they were combined with clothes and what kind of appearance they produced.

Dress elements in early Iron Age graves are most often made of bronze, but par-ticular rich graves include gold objects, and iron is used to replace bronze for some object types. The succession of materials over time could be demonstrated through the horizontal stratigraphy at the cemetery of Statzendorf, Austria. At this site, bronze harp fibulae (Harfenfibeln) are used in the older cemetery part in the north, and the same type occurs in iron in the southern section of the cemetery (Rebay 2006: 168). Although the basic form and style of the artefact remain the same, both the production technology and the visual impact must have differed considerably.

4.3.1 Head

A multitude of different shapes of hats, caps and helmets are attested for men from pictorial sources. Hats made of organic materials do not often leave any traces in graves, as they normally do not have any metal parts. Fragments of a hat made of birch bark from Hochdorf and Dürrnberg Grave 352 (Moser 2010: 56–60) seem to indicate a conical shape, such as shown on the stele from Hirschlanden (Zürn 1964a). Caps of fur, in beret and conical shapes from the salt mines of Hallstatt (Popa 2009), might function primarily as protective gear, and it is not clear if these types of hats were commonly worn outside the mines. Helmets are occasionally found in graves in the southeastern Hallstatt area, especially when the warrior identity of the deceased is particularly emphasised. They come in a surprising range of varieties in the early Iron Age (Egg 1986b), including wickerwork hel-mets plated with bronze calottes (for example, Smrjeta, Slovenia), double-crested bronze helmets (for example, Kleinklein, Austria) and helmets of the Negau type (for example, Novo Mesto-Kandija, Slovenia). These are interesting as they cre-ate a different outline of a person, depending on whether viewed from the front or in profile. The appearance of a person wearing a helmet is further changed by including crests, which, according to the images, might reach far on to the war-rior’s back. Four different types of helmets are shown in the parade on the situla of Bologna-Certosa, Italy (Lucke and Frey 1962: pl. 64).

For women, virtually all depictions indicate that a woman’s head and hair were typically covered by a veil. Veiling is, as contemporary political discussions indicate, a significant alteration of appearance. Small bronze pins are sometimes recovered from around the face of a woman in a grave and indicate the wear-ing of a headdress, a hair band or veil. A particularly good example is Grave 56 from the Magdalenenberg, Germany (Spindler 1973: 18–21), in which 16 bronze pins with bronze and amber heads were arranged in a symmetrical pattern with alternating materials. In this case, the buried individual was a woman of adult age (20 to 40 years at death), and the co-buried child (which may be her own) might point to her status as a married woman, perhaps a woman who has already given birth. Lenerz-de Wilde suggested a differentiation of married and unmarried

Funerary practices and the body 77

Figure 4.6 Pins arranged around the face in Grave 56 from the Magdalenenberg (after Spindler 1973: 19, fig. 2)

women on the basis of their headdress (Lenerz-de Wilde 1989) for the Magdale-nenberg. If pins and rings located at the ears and temples really indicate marital status, this means that a third to a quarter of all women remained unmarried (Bur-meister 2000: 90). The combination of objects pointing to a specific headdress is most common on the late Hallstatt Magdalenenberg, but extends into southwest-ern Germany more generally, though in other areas bronze objects in graves are less clearly connected to headdresses. Rings made of sheet gold appear to have been braided into long hair at the Dürrnberg near Hallein, Austria (Moser 2010:

42–46), and Grave 353 even contained an elaborate headdress composed of sev-eral sheet gold balls. How and if these pieces of jewellery were combined with a veil or covered by it remained unclear.

Bronze rings, often made of a bent double wire, are commonly found in the ear and temple region in women’s graves, but are also very common items in East Hallstatt cremation graves. They, too, are markers of age and gender, and are commonly depicted (for example, on the conical vessel from Sopron-Váris, Fig. 7.2, Gallus 1934: pl. 16.2).

4.3.2 Neck

Different types of necklaces are found in early Iron Age graves, including solid bronze, open rings and string necklaces with beads made of glass, amber, jet and other materials. Multiple items may be found on the neck of one individual.

Solid neck rings are used for both men and women, with regional differences. For example, neck rings are typical female items in northern Württemberg (incl. the Magdalenenberg) during early Ha D, but they are not gender specific in southern Württemberg at the same time; in late Ha D rich men wear gold neck rings (Bur-meister 2000: 71, Bur(Bur-meister 2003).

Colourful necklaces composed of beads are typically found in women’s graves, although single beads appear in male graves from Ha D2 in Württemberg. They

are further an attribute of girls and younger women; women over 40 are no longer associated with these colourful items. This led Ludwig Pauli to believe that they might have had an apotropaic and protective character for women before and of childbearing age (Pauli 1975). Beads of glass and amber are also a characteristi-cally female item in the northeast (Rebay 2006: 194). In the southeastern Carniola group, glass and amber beads were particularly abundant so that a local produc-tion centre is assumed. The most common colour for glass beads is blue, followed by white and yellow; different glass colours are also combined in multi-coloured beads with wave or dot-and-circle motifs. Even beads in the shape of ram’s heads were made, both in glass and in amber (Križ 1997a: 37). Skeletal preservation is extremely poor in this area, so it is difficult to assess how they were associated with the appearance of men and women; it seems, however, that sets of beads are more common in female graves. The co-occurrence of bead necklaces and weap-ons is commonly interpreted to indicate the double grave of a woman and man.

4.3.3 Torso

Dress elements such as dress pins and fibulae are commonly found on the upper body, including the shoulder region, and were used to fasten garments. The types of garments are difficult to reconstruct from the position of dress elements alone.

In addition, we might not only assume different layers of clothes, perhaps depend-ing on the number of items a person owned or the season of death, but also wrap-ping in funerary shrouds and textiles, which might have been fastened with the same types of objects. On the basis of the depictions, it is safe to assume tunics of varying lengths and arm lengths for men, as well as different shapes of skirts and trousers; several finds of trousers, garments covering both legs separately, are known from the bogs of northern Europe (Grömer 2016). That they were also used in central Europe is evidenced by images sketched on a vessel from Sopron-Várhely, Hungary (Gallus 1934: pl. 9), and a bronze belt plate from Molnik, Slo-venia (Egg and Eibner 2005: fig. 7).

Women’s clothing is often reconstructed as a peplos (Grömer 2016), a long, tubular cloth folded at the shoulders and fastened with a pair of dress pins of fibulae. The top of the tube was folded down and might appear as a separate item.

The peplos may be held together at the waist with a belt. Cloaks are also known from imagery for both men and women. They are essentially large pieces of cloth worn over another layer of clothing, fastened at the neck or the shoulder with one dress pin or fibula. A nice example of a floor-length cloak was discovered at Mit-terkirchen, Grave X/2 (Pertlwieser 1987), a double burial of a man and a woman.

The woman wore a leather cloak fitted with thousands of bronze buttons sewn on to the upper body section and the section below the knees.

The way fibulae are worn might be age and gender specific in certain regions or places at certain times. In late Ha D Württemberg, for example, women generally wear three fibulae, whereas a pair worn on the shoulders characterises boys from the age of 10 and men; further, fibulae on the Magdalenenberg tend to be slightly larger for men than for women (Burmeister 2000: 71, 91). On the Dürrnberg near Hallein men and women wear the same types of fibulae, but often only one piece

Funerary practices and the body 79 (Moser 2010: 50). Women have a pair on the upper body and an additional one on the right shoulder – to fasten a cloak or a second layer of clothing (Moser 2010:

38). Double-spiral dress pins, distributed in the Inn-Salzach area in early Ha D, are not gender specific per se, but, whereas a count of one or two can be paired with weapons, three are only found in female graves (Trebsche, Pollak and Gruber 2007: 74–75). Interestingly, although they are sometimes arranged on the upper body (where they seem not particularly practical), they are also found deposited next to the body, on wooden boards or in wooden chests. In the northeastern Hall-statt area, the practice of cremation makes an investigation of (gendered) dress items even more challenging. It seems, however, that dress pins were used by both men and women to fasten garments at the shoulder, whereas fibulae, especially the common Harfenfibel, are more commonly a component of the female dress (Nebelsick 1997, Rebay 2006: 194).

Belts structure the appearance of the body by dividing it in the middle. Textile and leather belts that do not survive are sometimes evidenced by metal hooks and rings used for fastening; sheet bronze belts and composite belts made of sheet bronze or iron plates and various layers of leather and textiles are increasingly used throughout the Hallstatt period. Sheet bronze belts, leather belts with bronze applications and bronze belt hooks are, in late Hallstatt Württemberg, restricted to women of adult age, but in late Ha D, men started to wear them as well (Bur-meister 2000: 89). On the Dürrnberg, both men and women wear belts during the Hallstatt period (Moser 2010: 40), a pattern that continues farther east. Belt plates from Slovenia seem more typically associated with male graves; unfortunately, associated skeletal remains are rarely preserved (Knez 1993b: 25). The iconog-raphy of the belt plates decorated in situla style points to the male sphere and includes images of war, sex, hunting and fishing (for example, Brezje, Plate 12, Turk 2005: fig. 83, Molnik, Egg and Eibner 2005: fig. 7, Magdalenska gora, Lucke Frey 1962: pl. 41b, Novo Mesto-Kapiteljska Njiva: Križ 1997b: app. 4).

Male appearance, especially in the role of the warrior, is emphasised in graves containing sheet body cuirasses. In the late Bronze Age, finds are known from France to Slovakia. Fragments of one of the oldest sheet bronze corselets, dating to approximately the twelfth century ^bc, were found cremated in a burial mound at Čaka, Slovakia (Točík and Paulík 1960). In the early Iron Age they are restricted to a small area in the eastern Hallstatt zone. Five examples have been found at Kleinklein, Austria (Egg and Kramer 2013, Hansen 2007), two at Stična (Božič 2009) and one at Novo Mesto in Slovenia (Gabrovec 1960); one is known from Hungary with no closer identification of the site (Hansen 2007). Shaped after the naked upper body, shiny and golden, they mimic muscle lines and depict nipples.

Defensive body armour serves a dual function: the protection of the body from physical harm in close combat and, as a side effect, the accentuation of the body surface underlining the desired nude appearance of the warrior.

4.3.4   Arms and legs

The extremities were frequently adorned with bracelets of different shapes and forms. Arm rings were worn on the upper and on the lower arm. Leg rings appear

around the ankles and are normally solid rings of bronze, more rarely of iron.

Women frequently wear several pieces per arm and leg (Fig. 4.7), which must have created a quite distinctive sound while moving. Again, it is less the types than the number and whether they were paired or not, which points to gendered patterns of wear. In late Hallstatt southern Württemberg, two or more pairs of arm and leg rings are typically female (Burmeister 2000), but in late Ha D, the rings become inte-grated in the typical set of male jewellery. The recently discovered ‘Celtic Princess’

from the Bettelbühl necropolis near the Heuneburg wore three jet arm rings on the

Figure 4.7 Grave 33 from Riedenburg-Untereggersberg, Germany. Individual 1 on the right is an adult woman buried with a bronze neck ring, two pins, three arm rings on each arm, three spiral wire rings and an iron belt hook. The burial of Individual 2, an adult male, is disturbed. The grave chamber further contained numerous pieces of pottery (Nikulka 1998: 244, fig. 81, courtesy of Frank Nikulka).

Funerary practices and the body 81 right arm and four on the left, as well as two bronze rings on each ankle (Krausse and Ebinger-Rist 2012). Dürrnberg women frequently wear three rings per arm and leg (Moser 2010: 40). The sets can reach considerable weights: the 12 leg rings of Grave 117 together weigh about 5.4 kg (Pauli 1978: 152). The diameter of the bracelets can sometimes help to distinguish children’s from adult’s graves.

Arm rings in the northeast seem to be more common for women than for men (Rebay 2006: 194). Smaller rings found in the foot area of the grave can some-times be interpreted as components of leather shoes or boots. A pair of ceramic lasts found in a settlement pit near Sommerein, Austria (Neugebauer 1980), is proof of sophisticated shoe manufacturing.

4.3.5   Personal items

Personal items other than clothing include items for body care and grooming and objects used for everyday activities and habitual practices. Very interesting insights into personal and medical care are provided by ceramic rings of 55 to 85 mm in diameter found in the lower pelvic area of female skeletons of the early Iron Age. They can be interpreted as pessaries, devices that can be used to treat prolapse of the uterus. So far, 11 rings could be interpreted as pessaries according to their placement, but it is likely that many more can be added once their use is better known. The skeletal remains associated with the pessary from Stuttgart-Mühlhausen, Germany, also indicate changes to the pelvis that might have been caused by trauma during pregnancy and childbirth (Fig. 4.8, Scherzler 1998).

Tools for textile work are another group of objects often found in women’s graves.

Loom weights, spools and sewing needles can be found, but especially spindle whorls are testimony of spinning as a habitual, embodied practice; spinning might

Figure 4.8 The location of the ceramic pessary on the skeletal remains of a 20- to 30-year-old woman in Grave 8, Viesenhäuser Hof, Stuttgart-Mühlhausen (after Scherzler 1998: figs 2 and 3, © Landesamt für Denkmalpflege im Regierung-spräsidium Stuttgart)

be done as a sideline job whenever possible, particularly in the winter months. As grave goods, spindle whorls are not particularly common in late Hallstatt Würt-temberg, although they do occur in late Ha D in northern Württemberg (Burmeister 2000: 71). In the northeastern Hallstatt area, they are very common grave goods for women. The spindle is one of the items that stays close to the body throughout life, death and beyond: many spindle whorls show traces of fire, which suggest the spindles were cremated with the body, as well as collected and deposited together

be done as a sideline job whenever possible, particularly in the winter months. As grave goods, spindle whorls are not particularly common in late Hallstatt Würt-temberg, although they do occur in late Ha D in northern Württemberg (Burmeister 2000: 71). In the northeastern Hallstatt area, they are very common grave goods for women. The spindle is one of the items that stays close to the body throughout life, death and beyond: many spindle whorls show traces of fire, which suggest the spindles were cremated with the body, as well as collected and deposited together