1 - The anthropology of a dead world

Summary

This book is about how a particular sort of evidence, burials, can be used to write a particular sort of history, that of the social structures of classical antiquity. Most of what I say is based on a simple proposition: a burial is part of a funeral, and a funeral is part of a set of rituals by which the living deal with death. All very obvious, perhaps, but it has one major consequence for the historian. Whether we look at graves with religious, economic, social or artistic questions in mind, the analysis of burials is the analysis of symbolic action.

My argument is as follows. In rituals people use symbols to make explicit social structure, an interpretation of the meaning of daily life. Such structure should be central to any attempt to write social history, but on the whole ancient historians have neglected it. This is largely due to the nature of the written sources, which encourages other approaches. Burials are difficult to interpret, but they can be used to augment the written record, giving us for the first time a dynamic account of social structure and how it changed in antiquity.

These are big claims to make in a small book. Most works of ancient history take little account of graves; even the excellent collection Sources for Ancient History only gives seven pages to the topic. When historians do look at burials, it is usually in a ‘bits-and-pieces’ manner, picking out the spectacular or the supposedly ‘typical’ to illustrate arguments based on texts. It is widely assumed that the rigour which philological historians bring to their sources is only required by archaeologists for dating and classifying material.