Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain is Dennis Harding's latest entry in a series of texts published by Oxford University Press that summarize and synthesize elements of Iron Age British archaeology. It follows on from The Iron Age Round-House: Later Prehistoric Building in Britain and Beyond (2009) and Iron Age Hillforts in Britain and Beyond (2012). This book is a topical departure for an academic probably best known for syntheses on Iron Age settlement archaeology and Celtic Art. The overall aim is to examine the British Iron Age funerary record, and challenge the notion that archaeologists should be focussed on an identifiably consistent ‘formal’ treatment of the dead, through segregation into cemeteries and burial grounds, juxtaposing this view with the deliberate fragmentation and dispersion of the dead often recorded within British Iron Age settlements, which is understood as integrating them with the living. Bringing together the ever-expanding British Iron Age burial record since Whimster's Reference Whimster1981 publication on the subject makes the synthesis a much needed addition to Iron Age studies.
The opening chapter, ‘Defining Issues’, is a solid introduction that is organized around ideas and topics that recur throughout the book, especially the oftentimes elusive nature of insular Iron Age burial practice, the existence of ‘casual’ human depositions on Iron Age sites, and the rites associated with deposition and disposal. Additionally, Harding highlights the role of funerary archaeology in potentially addressing questions pertaining to hierarchy, inheritance, identity, and gender. In Chapter 2 (‘Mortuary Practices, Problems, and Analysis’), the burial record is problematized, with the potential biases in the dataset (e.g. survivability of infant and neonate remains, loss of material through excarnation) and problems with archaeological perceptions and interpretations of the past (e.g. reuse of graves, sequential versus multiple burials) brought to light.
The next two chapters are data-rich and provide a dense overview of the burial record across much of Iron Age Britain, exploring the notions of segregation and integration of the dead in the landscape of the living. Chapter 3 (‘Communities of the Dead: Formal Cemeteries and Burial Grounds’) provides a comprehensive discussion of cemeteries and burial grounds. There is particular focus on formal burial areas associated with hillforts and smaller settlements, the ‘Arras’ cemeteries of East Yorkshire, cist burials of the South-West and cremation cemeteries of the South-East, and Durotrigan inhumations in southern Dorset. Chapter 4 (‘Dead Among the Living Landscape’) stands in contrast, as it is concerned with what many might consider ‘informal’ burials. Here the reader is led through the myriad of sites that contain whole/partial skeletal remains or individual bones/fragments deposited around the settlement, oftentimes in pits or ditches, but also within houses and middens.
Chapter 5, ‘Focal and Signal Burials’, begins the section that drills down into the data much more thematically. The discussion of focal and signal burials contains in-depth descriptions of the ‘chariot’ burials of East Yorkshire, ‘warrior’ burials, burials within special enclosures, the Welwyn and Lexden-type burials of south-eastern England, and burials with buckets and cauldrons. Harding presents the data in a worthy effort to question the traditional view of well-furnished graves representing elites in society and rather opens up the interpretation to grave-goods representing the living community and its relationship with the deceased. That many of these focal and signal burials contain the vast majority of material finds associated with human interments allows this chapter to move on nicely to a discussion of ‘Graves and Grave-Goods’ (Ch. 6), however this is the one chapter that feels slightly out-of-place, here, in the middle of the book. It provides a rather succinct overview of British Iron Age burial practice, and would better serve the newcomer by being placed within the opening chapters. That aside, rather than focussing on specific graves and the things that had been placed in them, Harding takes a welcome and decidedly discursive approach to the topic and presents a tight summary of grave construction, furnishing, and associated burial rites (e.g. dressing of the body, food and drink).
Continuing with the thematic studies, Chapter 7 (‘Social and Ritual Violence and Death’) looks at the ‘war cemeteries’ and massacre sites associated with hillforts and historically interpreted in relation to the Roman conquest, but now known also to be an occurrence of the Middle Iron Age. This chapter also handles much of the more sensational and macabre elements of British Iron Age burial, namely the display and deposition of skulls, human sacrifice, corporeal punishment and bog bodies, and the cultural modification of human remains and potential evidence for cannibalism. ‘Gender Issues’ (Ch. 8) briefly explores this theme with reference to such things as cemetery layout and artefact associations (e.g. swords versus mirrors and cattle versus pig). The penultimate chapter (Ch. 9) is a departure from human death and burial, as it explores ‘Animal Burials and Animal Symbolism’, before the final conclusions (Ch. 10) are laid out, with many of the key points duly summarized.
Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain is a book that is dense with description, and in that regard is ideally suited to anyone not familiar with this topic, most likely undergraduate and postgraduate students or those making their first foray into British Iron Age studies. The thematic breakdown of the chapters organizes the information in a clear and accessible manner. Unfortunately, the thematic approach is not used to its fullest potential in creating a meaningful interpretative narrative about Iron Age burial practice. For instance, Chapter 4, on the burial of the dead within settlements, presents the reader with a seemingly endless catalogue of ‘burial types’—in pits on fortified sites, in pits on non-fortified sites, in pits in settlements but also containing some artefacts, deposits in enclosure ditches, etc.—that underscores the overall variety of ways human remains were treated by Iron Age people. However, in detailing the many non-normative ways Iron Age people treated the dead, Harding has an opportunity to explore in detail the motivation and beliefs that underlie the associated behavioural practices, perhaps drawing inspiration from some of the recent work in Wessex (Tracey, Reference Tracey2012) and north-central England (Chadwick, Reference Chadwick2012) to flesh-out an interesting story, but it is often left to the reader to connect the pieces and provide the interpretation. Understandably, the nature of the dataset is such that much of the detailed information available comes from three primary areas of Britain (East Yorkshire, Wessex, and south-east England), but Harding's thematic approach should allow for him to transcend the kinds of regional discussions that can be found in other books—such as Sharples’ (Reference Sharples2010) discussion of death and burial in relation to Iron Age society in Wessex or Giles’ (Reference Giles2012) examination for the Iron Age people in East Yorkshire. While the reader is presented with a wealth of site-by-site information, the exposition of those data by Sharples or Giles is ultimately much more satisfying and thought-provoking.
Although the book is aimed specifically at Iron Age Britain, Harding does draw on Continental comparada from time to time throughout the text. In calling on the Continental data, there is an expectation to regularly see parallels drawn and disconnects highlighted from across the Channel (see, for example, the comparison of the ‘doctor’ burials at Stanway, Colchester and München-Obermenzing, Bavaria, pp. 146–47). However, the overall treatment of the Continental evidence is uneven, and in many instances the data occur as passing descriptive statements that leave the reader wanting more, and where the data are drawn upon more heavily, it is often because in Britain there is very little evidence for a specific practice (e.g. burials with torcs).
In considering the evidence presented for continuity and change in practice, the role of archaeological science could have been better integrated more widely into the text. In much the same way that animal burials and animal symbolism can provide an interesting link to human burial rites, the information gleaned from archaeological science can provide other lines of evidence about not only an individual's life but also just how their remains were treated in death. The importance of taphonomic and histological studies to move forward the debate on excarnation in the Iron Age (see Madgwick, Reference Madgwick, Davis, Sharples and Waddington2008) was evident throughout, but the use of stable isotope analysis, which can provide insights into the diet and residence of people when they were alive, is only discussed briefly. Questions relating to how, and for how long, human remains were manipulated, as well as the contemporaneity of deposits and/or rites, are certainly central to our understanding of death and burial. Recently, Cunliffe et al. (Reference Cunliffe, Farrell and Dee2015) considered the possibility that five of six dated pit burials (in separate pits) from across Danebury hillfort were part of the same event—or happening—, and while the work of Jay et al. (Reference Jay, Haselgrove, Hamilton, Hill and Dent2012) on the chronology of East Yorkshire burials has suggested a shorter duration for the burials at Wetwang Slack, it has also put forward that ‘chariot’ burials are a horizon dating to c. 200 cal bc. The development of refined scientific knowledge from burials has enormous potential for altering our understanding of individuals, in life and death, and the society that buried them.
In summary, Harding's book on death and burial provides the newcomer a solid foundation on the data that underpins the subject matter. The book is thorough in its presentation of the sites and material, thereby dispelling the ‘elusive’ nature of this practice, but the book does not always hit the high mark. Any criticisms serve to stress what this book is and where it sits amongst other synthetic works on British Iron Age archaeology, and as such are not intended to dissuade potential readers. That Iron Age people were not simply buried in cemeteries and formal burial grounds, but also deposited in whole or part in pits, ditches, caves, and rivers, makes this period of British prehistory stand out, and to read this book with an expectation of universalizing narratives belies the highly varied nature of the evidence across space and time. Harding should be commended for drawing together the more readily available information on the classic sites with the most recent developer-funded finds in a volume that most readers will find accessible, easy to navigate, and highly informative.
