The last laugh

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 378

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Sherds has often wondered why graves containing valuable materials were not more routinely robbed in the past – after all, recently filled graves are highly visible. Was it respect for the dead, fear of being caught, fear of the spirits of the dead and the revenge they might wreak? Perhaps grave goods were seen as being far too personal. It has been theorised that early medieval jewellery, for example, was made for the individual – given as a parental gift, perhaps, to a daughter on her marriage, or made for an individual by an itinerant bronze-caster to the wearer’s own specification.

Clearly Sherds is not alone in speculating along these lines, because a paper in the June 2021 volume of Antiquity looks at the evidence for the practice of reopening graves in the early medieval period. ‘Grave robbing’ is a misleadingly simplistic term for what they find. It implies illicit robbery or desecration for economic gain unconnected with the original burial rite. Instead, the authors argue that ‘the practice of reopening and manipulating graves soon after burial and the removal of selected artefact types’ was a widespread ritual practice.

Led by Alison Klevnäs, of Stockholm University, Sweden, the researchers looked at the ‘row-grave’ cemeteries dating from the 5th to 8th century and found all over western and central Europe. Such cemeteries are characterised by single inhumations arranged in loose rows orientated east to west. The clothed body is placed in a wooden container with dress accessories, jewellery, and weapons. Visual display prior to the closure of the grave is probably part of the ritual, but one that is followed at a later date by the reopening of the grave and the removal of some of the contents. The intriguing question is why are some objects retrieved and others left in the grave?

Microscopic metal flakes, soil stains, disturbed stratigraphy, and back-filling all provide archaeological evidence for the subsequent removal of objects that had been part of the burial assemblage. Some object types were almost always removed, particularly swords, seaxes (large single-edged knives), and brooches. Often, the more valuable items were left behind: for example, at one site in Kent, brooches were removed from the clothing of the deceased, but precious metal pendants and a necklace of glass beads, garnet, and silver remained in the grave.

Alison Klevnäs believes the pattern of removal is best explained as the recovery of significant heirlooms, leaving items personal to the individual behind. Supporting this theory is the fact that some of grave goods appear to have been in poor condition when removed – broken or partial swords, for example.

The authors conclude that grave reopening was practised over a number of generations and over a wide geographical area as part of a complex system of interactions between the living and the dead, not unlike that practised in the Neolithic. They also point out that many cultures today continue to interact with the remains of their deceased relations, sometimes on a specific day of the year, or by means of traditional festivals.

Coffin contents

Perhaps the most famous example in recent times of a grave being reopened for object retrieval was that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), who placed a bound manuscript of his love poems in the coffin of his late wife Lizzie Siddal, then decided to retrieve his manuscripts and publish the poems some seven years later. His public image suffered greatly as a consequence, and many of the poems had been rendered illegible through damp, decay, and the liberal application of disinfectant during the exhumation process.

Attitudes to furnished burial seem to have fluctuated back and forth over the centuries. Some female religious leaders were buried clothed and bejewelled in their beds in the early medieval period (see CA 281 and 343), but burial practices changed to become much simpler under Church influence in the 7th century. Furnished graves smacked of paganism, along with the idea that worldly goods should be laid in the grave for the use of the deceased in the afterlife. Simple burial in a shroud, in imitation of the burial of Christ, became the norm. Yet clerics themselves could be buried in their vestments and with croziers, chalices, or other symbols of their office, as was shown by the excavation of the graveyard of Old St Pancras Church to make way for the Channel Tunnel rail link.