Why Bury Things With the Dead? Several Reasons, and Not All About the Dead
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Objects placed in a burial are among the richest evidence archaeology has, and reading them is harder than it looks, because they were put there by the living for mixed reasons.
What gets buried
The range is enormous and varies by society, period and status. Personal items appear constantly, including jewellery, weapons, tools and clothing fastenings. Vessels containing food and drink are almost universal. Objects of daily work, from spindle whorls to fishing gear, appear in ordinary burials. Elite graves add imported luxuries, precious metal, elaborate weapons and occasionally vehicles, horses and, in a number of documented cases, other people. Some objects are made specifically for burial and were never functional, being too thin, too small or made of unsuitable material, which is itself informative about intent.
The reasons suggested
The motives are mixed and frequently operate together:
- •Equipping the dead for a journey or an afterlife
- •Marking the status the deceased held, or is claimed to have held
- •Displaying the wealth and standing of the surviving family
- •Removing objects too closely associated with the dead to be reused
- •Fulfilling obligations owed by mourners to the deceased
- •Competing publicly with other families at the funeral itself
Why they are hard to interpret
The central difficulty is that the dead did not choose what went into the grave, so the assemblage reflects the intentions of the mourners rather than the life of the person buried. A richly furnished grave may record a powerful individual, or a family making a claim at a moment when its position was uncertain, and distinguishing those is frequently impossible. Objects may be heirlooms already old when buried, so their date does not date the burial. Sword burials do not establish that the person fought. And assumptions about which objects belong to which sex have repeatedly been shown to be wrong, most famously where skeletal or genetic analysis identified a weapon burial as female.
The problem they created for archaeology
Objects buried with the dead are exactly what looters want, which has meant that the richest sites are frequently the most damaged. Tomb robbing is as old as furnished burial itself and several Egyptian and Chinese tombs record ancient break-ins in their own repairs. Modern looting supplies an international market in antiquities, and an object removed from a grave without record loses almost all its information, since what matters archaeologically is which objects were together, in what arrangement, with which body. Museums and auction houses now require evidence of lawful export, and the trade continues, which is why unprovenanced material is treated with suspicion by researchers.
Why the practice declined
Furnishing graves diminished sharply in many societies and the reasons differ by case. In much of Europe the spread of Christianity is associated with the practice fading, since salvation was not understood to depend on possessions and a shroud and a coffin became the norm, although the change was gradual and elite burials retained grave goods long afterwards. Elsewhere sumptuary regulation restricted funeral expenditure directly. Economic pressure matters too, since burying wealth removes it from circulation permanently and heirs have obvious views about that. The practice never disappeared entirely and persists in modified form wherever a photograph, a letter or a personal object is placed in a coffin.
The takeaway
Objects in a burial were chosen by mourners rather than by the dead, so they record what the living wished to express as much as anything about the person, which makes a rich grave ambiguous between real status and a family making a claim. Heirlooms date earlier than the burial, and assumptions about which objects indicate which sex have been overturned by genetic analysis.