#long barrows

I can't be the only one who heard this:

The mysterious 6,500-year-old burial of a woman and several arrowheads in northern France may reveal details of how women were regarded in that society during the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, a new study finds.

The researchers investigated giant graves known as "long barrows" — large earthen mounds, often hundreds of feet long and sometimes retained by wooden palisades that have since rotted away. Of the 19 human burials in the Neolithic cemetery at Fleury-sur-Orne in Normandy, the team analyzed the DNA of 14 individuals; but only one was female.

The woman was buried with "symbolically male" arrows in her grave, and the researchers argue that she may have had to be regarded as "symbolically male" to be buried there.

                – Parker Pearson (Bronze Age Britain, 2005)

For people in these prehistoric cultures, a lot of ceremony was put into burying their dead. For thousands of years customs remained constant, and the changes remained congruent with the idea of attachment to the dead.

Tombs could mean much more to societies who parake in ancestor worship. Often in long barrows, there would be no specific body in one place, and bones were sorted by type rather than as whole people. This could indicate that instead of meticulously tracking individual heritage and only looking at your own ancestry, the ancestors of a whole community would be worshipped or revered as a single entity. The tomb would in this case become a place to look for any spiritual guidance the ancestors were believed to be capable of.

There is also substantial evidence for some toumb sites being used as social spaces to some extent, with material showing feasts, maybe even taking the remains outside to the feasting space as some small human bones can sometimes be found lost in the rubble. This could be taken as a way to still include the dead in social gatherings as people, somewhat akin to a family gatherings taking place at an elderly relatives' house due to their inability to move long distances. There are societies today which also remove bodies from their tombs to physically bring them to an event like a wedding, so it is possible that this could have been practiced too. Excarnation (the process of defleshing a corpse by either natural elements and scavengers or by butchery) would have been an unusual practice for societies unconcerned with the dead, as much effort was put potentially into releasing their soul properly and preparing for them to be placed into a tomb.

As we see practices change it is well reasoned to say that the beliefs dictating the actions have changed too, but the idea of tombs as something more symbolic are likely to be very consistent through the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age - and as late as the Iron Age in some further reaches. When tombs actually became permanent burials the prevalence and importance of grave good becomes apparemt. Group burials were common but the idea of excarnation had been all but abandoned by this point, and people were buried whole with flesh on the bone. If these people simply wished to dispose of their dead they would not have put so much care into gathering and placing them in their graves with such a wealth of grave goods or ceremony, such as covering in ochre or pinning people into the earth with antlers. Whether this was done to prepare the dead for the afterline or something similar is not quite clear, but there was definitely a purpose to it.

This new way of burying people differs in that it isn't clear that the burials were revisited in the same way as barrow tombs, and the permanent aspect of these burials shows a definite change in attitude. They were probably revisited, but not in the same spirit as the open tombs of the past, with attention given to the ancestors as individuals with important by themselves.

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