Last Orders: Choosing Pottery for Funerals in Roman Essex

Abstract

This paper examines ceramic vessels from Roman-period funerary contexts in Essex. Using correspondence analysis, it charts changes in the choice of funerary pottery and isolates the elements in pottery assemblages that unite or differentiate sites. The paper finds that the status of sites can be distinguished on ceramic grounds, reflecting cultural differences in life. Jars and beakers are characteristic of settlement cemeteries, while cups are more typical of high-status burials. Flagons and samian ware are common between them. Underlying funerary traditions are rooted in continuity from the Late Iron Age, rather than post-conquest change. The study also suggests that funerary pottery was selected out of the supply intended for domestic use.Market forces and designer trends, which have conquered so many aspects of life, have now reached the one frontier that had seemed beyond their advance: the way in which we depart from this world.Jonathan Romain, The Times, February 21, 2004 In recent times, funerary archaeology of Roman Britain has held academic attention like few other subjects. The past few years have witnessed the publication of extensive Roman cemeteries in Brougham in Cumbria (Cool 2004) and London (Barber and Bowsher 2000) and a volume of collected papers (Pearce et al. 2000), which itself was hot on the heels -in archaeological terms, at least -of the published proceedings of an international funerary conference (Struck 1993). It is perhaps surprising, then, that gaps in our understanding remain. More surprising is that many of these concern ceramic vessels, the best-represented class of grave-goods. How was pottery acquired for funerary use? Why were certain vessels chosen, and what did they mean in terms of the social status and identity of the deceased? How were burial assemblages affected by the Roman conquest, the economy and pottery supply? These are questions seeking fuller answers. In his recent paper, Howard Williams (2004) has moved some way towards resolving these long-standing issues. He places a social meaning on the selection of funerary pottery, arguing that ceramics, associated with consumption and sacrifice, provided a potent means of remembering the dead and representing the act of cremation. His paper addresses the question of why pottery was selected. This study, in contrast, attempts to clarify what pottery was selected and to assess any differences between sites.

On Cultural Selection: Examining the Process of Cultural Evolution through Funerary Evidence

“…But perhaps we need not search too hard for an explanation. The dining-vessel version of the pottery deposition meme broadly replicates the vessel choices seen in elite burials of late Iron Age and early Roman graves (Biddulph 2005), for example Stanway, Colchester (Crummy et al 2007), and Folly Lane, Verulamium (Niblett 1999). No doubt a propensity for cultures to add food and drink to occasions of celebration and commemoration also contributed to the success of dining forms.…”

“…For many inhabitants of lower-status settlements, samian must have been regarded as primarily a funerary ware, so strong was the association between the ware and burial (Biddulph 2012). In high-status burials, for instance as those in a walled cemetery close to Pepper Hill, or underneath tall mounds at Bartlow, Cambridgeshire, samian was over-represented, either comprising proportionately more samian vessels than was usually present in sites like Pepper Hill, or being the only ceramic present (Biddulph 2005). Objects in other materials-glass and metal-were preferred for those graves.…”

Food, Technology and Culture in the Late Bronze Age of Southern Britain: Perforated Clay Plates of the Lower Thames Valley

“…For a much earlier period, Whittle et al (2011, 384) noted shared practices in the Early Neolithic north and south of the Thames, though these were parts of much wider regional distributions; they concluded that ‘whether there was any further kind of “estuary identity” is unclear’. For a much later period, Biddulph et al (2012, 194) have suggested the possibility of a ‘wider late Roman economic zone in the Thames estuary’. For the early 1st millennium bc , there are clearly shared practices in settlement, pottery, and metalwork, but these are parts of much more widespread traditions.…”

Re-thinking the Southern British Oppida : Networks, Kingdoms and Material Culture

“…To make further sense of this complex assemblage, the data were interrogated using the multivariate method of correspondence analysis (hereafter CA), which summarizes the principal associations in large tabulations of data, an increasingly popular method in the study of Roman finds assemblages (e.g. Biddulph 2005;Cool 2006;Cool and Baxter 1999;Lockyear 2000;Pitts 2007). The results are presented in Figures 2 and 3, taking into account the removal of outliers which rendered initial visual interpretation problematic by causing excessive clustering.…”