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More on Burial Customs as an Archaeological Source

Although I agree with Alekshin's (CA 24:137-45) general definition of burial customs (the sanctioning of the transition from one qualitative state to another, the preparation of the deceased member of the society for his life in the other world, etc.), I would like to add, merely as an example, some observations based on my own years of study of prehistoric funeral rites in Poland. I am, of course, aware that my remarks will concern societies which differ from the ones Alekshin examines not only geographically and chronologically, but also in their social and economic development. This seems justified in that Alekshin calls his article "Burial Customs as an Archaeological Source" even though his examples come almost entirely from the Central Asian and Near Eastern record. First and foremost I would like to emphasize that the transition of the deceased member of the society into another world is accompanied-as was pointed out by Malinowski (1958:42224)-by a strong feeling of love mixed with dread of the deceased. Both elements are often reflected in the archaeological record; the second appears particularly distinctly in cemeteries situated far away from the settlement, preferably across water (in contrast to burials within or near settlements). I want to add here that in Poland too cemeteries are sometimes our only or almost our only source of knowledge of the material and spiritual culture of a society. We also find, however, mainly in the earliest phases of the Middle Ages in several Polish regions, that we may have numerous settlements but lack any information on cemeteries. In this case we are dealing with burial practices that leave no archaeological traces (Malinowski 1973). Thus burial practices are not always a reliable archaeological source from which scholars can draw conclusions of a sociological nature. The basic changes in burial rites that Alekshin discusses may have quite different sources. For instance, burials with skeletal material appear towards the close of the Bronze Age in southern Poland in cemeteries of the Lusatian culture and gradually come to prevail over the hitherto traditional cremation tombs. Archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic data indicate that this phenomenon may be explained as the result of foreign ethnic infiltration (Malinowski 1974). Later on, during the Early Middle Ages in the western Slavonic region, such burials almost entirely replaced the formerly general cremation graves (as well as, in some regions, burials leaving no archaeological traces), undoubtedly because of the adoption of the new Christian religion and its funeral liturgy (Zoll-Adamikowa 1979:217). The sexing of the deceased exclusively on the basis of grave goods may sometimes be deceptive. For instance, in tombs of the Early Iron Age Pomeranian culture, the so-called archaeological sex determinants occurring in graves are not mutually exclusive, various ornaments, including earrings, traditionally ascribed to women being present also in the graves of men and small children (Malinowski 1966). Still more striking are the data on the Przeworsk culture, dated to the Late La Tene and Roman periods; here masculine graves contain a typically feminine attribute, the spindle whorl, whereas women's burials include the typically masculine weapons. In this case, too,