Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T20:01:18.318Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Becoming persons, becoming ancestors. Personhood, memory and the corpse in Roman rituals of social remembrance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2009

Emma-Jayne Graham
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the role of social memory and the treatment of the corpse within the reconfiguration of personhood in the Roman world. Exploring the significance of ‘remembering and forgetting’, it emphasizes the importance of memory and the body as a context for the manipulation of post-mortem personhood and identity. An extraordinarily rich collection of archaeological and epigraphic evidence associated with the Augustan-period senator Marcus Nonius Balbus provides an almost unparalleled context in which to explore the significance of these observations. This particular example from Herculaneum demonstrates that the realignment of relationships during mortuary activities could produce a new sense of personhood for both the deceased and mourners that was constructed in the context of communal remembrance. Subsequent commemorative activities, focused on the material manifestation of these relationships and the ‘dividuality’ of the dead within the urban fabric, may consequently have acted to promote a new civic ancestor for the community of Herculaneum.

Keywords

personhoodmemorybodyos resectumHerculaneumidentity
Type
Notes
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , June 2009 , pp. 51 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barker, E.R., 1908: Buried Herculaneum, London.Google Scholar
Battaglia, D., 1990: On the bones of the serpent. Person, memory, and mortality in Sabarl Island society, Chicago.Google Scholar
Becker, M.J., 1988: The contents of funerary vessels as clues to mortuary customs. Identifying the os exceptum, in Christiansen, J. and Melander, T. (eds), Ancient Greek and related pottery. Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium, Copenhagen, 25–32.Google Scholar
Becker, M.J., 1995: Human skeletal remains from the pre-colonial Greek emporium of Pithekoussai on Ischia (NA). Culture contact in Italy from the early VIII to the II Century B.C., in Christie, N. (ed.), Settlement and economy in Italy 1500 B.C.–A.D. 1500. Papers of the Fifth Conference of Italian Archaeology, Oxford, 273–81.Google Scholar
Bender, B., 2006: Place and landscape, in Tilley, C., Keane, W., Küchler, S., Rowlands, M. and Spyer, P. (eds), Handbook of material culture, London, 303–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brück, J., 2001: Monuments, power and personhood in the British Neolithic, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, 649–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brück, J., 2004: Material metaphors. The relational construction of identity in Early Bronze Age burials in Ireland and Britain, Journal of social archaeology 4, 307–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruni, S., 1997: La via Appia Antica. Gli scavi tra Settecento e Ottocento, in Regina, A. La, Morandi, D. and Bruni, S. (eds), Via Appia. Sulle ruine della magnificenza Antica, Milan, 23–24.Google Scholar
Busby, C., 1997: Permeable and partible persons. A comparative analysis of gender and body in South India and Melanesia, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3 (2), 261–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campana, P., 1852: Di due Sepolcri Romani del secolo di Augusto scoperti tra la Via Latina e l'Appia presso la tomba degli Scipioni, Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archaeologia 11, 259–370.Google Scholar
Carbonara, A., Pellegrino, A. and Zaccagnini, R., 1999: Necropoli e territorio di Pianabella, in Pellegrino, A. (ed.), Dalle Necropoli di Ostia. Riti e Usi Funerari, Rome, 72–105.Google Scholar
Carroll, M., 2006: Spirits of the dead. Roman funerary commemoration in Western Europe, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chapman, J., 2000: Fragmentation in archaeology, London.Google Scholar
Connerton, P., 2006: Cultural memory, in Tilley, C., Keane, W., Küchler, S., Rowlands, M. and Spyer, P. (eds), Handbook of material culture, London, 315–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cubitt, G., 2007: History and memory, Manchester.Google Scholar
D'Ambra, E., 2002: Acquiring an ancestor. The importance of funerary statuary among the non-elite orders of Rome, in Højte, J.M. (ed.), Images of ancestors, Aarhus, 223–46.Google Scholar
Davies, P.J., 2000: Death and the emperor. Roman imperial funerary monuments, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, Cambridge.Google Scholar
De Kind, R., 1998: Houses in Herculaneum. A new view on the town planning and the building of Insulae III and IV, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Devlin, Z., 2007: Remembering the dead in Anglo-Saxon England. Memory theory in archaeology and history, Oxford (BAR British Series 446).Google Scholar
Edwards, C., 1996: Writing Rome. Textual approaches to the city, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Favro, D., 1996: The urban image of Augustan Rome, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Fentress, J., and Wickham, C.J., 1992: Social memory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Foot, S., 1999: Remembering, forgetting and inventing. Attitudes to the past in England at the end of the first Viking age, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series 9, 185–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, C., 2001: Personhood and social relations in the British Neolithic with a study from the Isle of Man, Journal of material culture 6, 137–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, C., 2004: The archaeology of personhood. An anthropological approach, London and New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frischer, B., 1982–83: Monumenta et Arae Honoris Virtutisque Causa. Evidence of memorials for Roman civic heroes, Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma 88, 51–86.Google Scholar
George, M., 2005: Family imagery and family values in Roman Italy, in George, M. (ed.), The Roman family in the Empire. Rome, Italy, and beyond, Oxford, 37–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, E.-J., 2006: Death, disposal and the destitute. The burial of the urban poor in Italy in the late Roman republic and early empire, Oxford (British Archaeological Reports International Series 1565).Google Scholar
Graham, E.-J., 2009a (in press): From fragments to ancestors. Re-defining os resectum and its role in rituals of purification and commemoration in republican Rome, in Carroll, M. and Rempel, J. (eds), Living through the dead. Burial and commemoration in the classical world, Oxford.Google Scholar
Graham, E.-J., 2009b (in press): Memory and materiality. Re-embodying the Roman funeral, in Hope, V.M. and Huskinson, J. (eds), Memory and mourning. Studies on Roman death, Oxford.Google Scholar
Graham, E.-J., Chamberlain, A., and Sulosky, C., in prep.: A probable case of os resectum in a Romano-British cremation burial from Lincoln.Google Scholar
Grévin, G., 1997: La Cremation à l’époque Romaine. Un os resectum dans le monument funéraire de Marcus Nonius Balbus à Herculanum. Appendice, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung (Bullettino dell'Istituto Archeologico Germanico, Sezione Romano) 104, 429–33.Google Scholar
Guadagno, G., 1978: Supplemento epigrapfico ercolonese, Cronache Ercolanesi 8, 132–55.Google Scholar
Hertz, R., 1960 (1907): Death and the right hand, translated by Needham, R. and Needham, C., London.Google Scholar
Hope, V.M., 1998: Negotiating identity and status. The gladiators of Roman Nîmes, in Laurence, R. and Berry, J. (eds), Cultural identity in the Roman Empire, London, 179–95.Google Scholar
Hope, V.M., 2000a: Contempt and respect. The treatment of the corpse in ancient Rome, in Hope, V.M. and Marshall, E. (eds), Death and disease in the ancient city, London, 104–27.Google Scholar
Hope, V.M., 2000b: Inscription and sculpture. The construction of identity in the military tombstones of Roman Mainz, in Oliver, G.J. (ed.), The epigraphy of death. Studies in the history and society of Greece and Rome, Liverpool, 155–85.Google Scholar
Hope, V.M., 2001: Constructing identity. The Roman funerary monuments of Aquileia, Mainz and Nimes, Oxford (BAR International Series 960).Google Scholar
Hope, V.M., 2007: Death in ancient Rome, London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, A., 2005: Lives in fragments? Personhood and the European Neolithic, Journal of social archaeology 5, 193–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, A., 2007: Memory and material culture, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk, T., 2006: Materiality, personhood and monumentality in early Neolithic Britain, Cambridge archaeological journal 16 (3), 333–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindsay, H., 2000: Death-pollution and funerals in the city of Rome, in Hope, V.M. and Marshall, E. (eds), Death and disease in the ancient city, London, 152–73.Google Scholar
LiPuma, E., 1998: Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia, in Lambek, M. and Strathern, A. (eds), Bodies and persons. Comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, Cambridge, 53–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKinley, J., 1997: Bronze Age ‘barrows’ and funerary rites and rituals of cremation, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63, 129–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKinley, J.I., 2000: Phoenix rising. Aspects of cremation in Roman Britain, in Pearce, J., Millett, M. and Struck, M. (eds), Burial, society and context in the Roman world, Oxford, 38–44.Google Scholar
McKinley, J., 2006: Cremation . . . the cheap option? in Gowland, R. and Knüsel, C. (eds), Social archaeology of funerary remains, Oxford, 81–88.Google Scholar
Messineo, G., 1995: Nuovi dati dalla necropoli tra Via Salaria e Via Pinciana, Archeologia Laziale XII 1, 257–66.Google Scholar
Messineo, G., 1999: Dalle necropoli del suburbio settentrionale di Roma, in Pellegrino, A. (ed.), Dalle Necropoli di Ostia. Riti ed Usi Funerari, Rome, 110–27.Google Scholar
Messineo, G., 2001: Dalle necropolis del suburbia settentrionale di Roma, in Heinzelmann, M., Ortalli, J., Fasold, P., and Witteyer, M. (eds), Römischer Bestattungsbrauch und Beigabensitten in Rom, Norditalien und den Nordwestprovinzen von der späten Republik bis in die Kaiserzeit (Culto dei morti e costumi funerari romani. Roma, Italia settentrionale e province nord-occidentali dalla tarda Repubblica all'età imperiale), Rome, 35–45.Google Scholar
Mitchell, J.P., 2006: Performance, in Tilley, C., Keane, W., Küchler, S., Rowlands, M. and Spyer, P. (eds), Handbook of material culture, London, 384–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montalto Trentori, L., 1937–38: Scoperte archeologiche del secolo XVIII nella vigna di San Cesareo, Rivista dell'Istituto Nazionale d'Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte 6, 289–308.Google Scholar
Mustakallio, K., 2005: Roman funerals. Identity, gender and participation, in Mustakallio, K., Hanska, J., Sainio, H.-L. and Vuolanto, V. (eds), Hoping for continuity. Childhood, education and death in antiquity and the Middle Ages, Rome (Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae 33), 179–90.Google Scholar
Nilsson-Stutz, L., 2003: Embodied rituals and ritualized bodies. Tracing ritual practices in late Mesolithic burials, Lund (Acta Archaeological Lundensia 46).Google Scholar
Pagano, M., 1996: La nuova pianta della città e alcuni edifici pubblici di Ercolano, Cronache Ercolanesi 26, 229–48.Google Scholar
Pappalardo, U., 1997: Nuove testimonianze su Marco Nonio Balbo ad Ercolano. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung (Bullettino dell'Istituto Archeologico Germanico, Sezione Romano) 104, 417–28.Google Scholar
Parslow, C.C., 1995: Rediscovering antiquity. Karl Weber and the excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii and Stabiae, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Rohde, G., 1942: Os resectum, in Paulys Real Encyclopëdie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft 18 (2), 1534–36.Google Scholar
Scheid, J., 2007: Körperbestattung und Verbrennungssitte aus der Sicht der schriftlichen Quellen, in Faber, A., Fasold, P., Struck, M. and Witteyer, M. (eds), Körpergräber des 1.–3. Jahrhnderts in der römischen Welt. Internationales Kolloquium Frankfurt am Main, 19.–20. November 2004, Frankfurt (Schriften des Archäologischen Museums Frankfurt 21), 19–25.Google Scholar
Schumacher, L., 1976: Das Ehrendekret für M. Nonius Balbus aus Herculaneum, Chiron 6, 165–84.Google Scholar
Scullard, H.H., 1981: Festivals and ceremonies of the Roman republic, London.Google Scholar
Simon-Hiernard, D., 1987: Remarques sur le rite de l’os resectum, in Février, P.-A. (ed.), Nécropoles à incineration du haut-empire. Table ronde de Lyon, 1986, Lyon (Rapports archéologiques préliminaires de la région Rhone-Alpes 4), 93–95.Google Scholar
Strathern, M., 1988: The gender of the gift, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Tanner, J., 2000: Portraits, power, and patronage in the late Roman Republic, Journal of Roman studies 90, 18–50.Google Scholar
Thomas, J., 2000: Death, identity and the body in Neolithic Britain, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, 653–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Dyke, R.M., and Alcock, S.E., 2003: Archaeologies of memory. An introduction, in Van Dyke, R.M. and Alcock, S.E. (eds), Archaeologies of memory, Oxford, 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, H., 2003: Material culture as memory. Combs and cremation in early medieval Britain, Early medieval Europe 12 (2), 89–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, H., 2004: Potted histories. Cremation, ceramics and social memory in early Roman Britain, Oxford journal of archaeology 23 (4), 417–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zevi, F., 1981: L'attività archeologica nelle provincie di Napoli e Caserta, Atti del XXI Convegno di studi sulla Magna Graecia, Naples, 325–58.Google Scholar