Vows and Violence: Identities Enacted through Diet and Trauma at the Late Medieval Tintern Abbey, Ireland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Diet, mobility, and trauma are key factors in the performance of social identities and the maintenance of social boundaries between groups. In medieval Ireland, burial at monasteries also provided an opportunity for both lay and ecclesiastical communities to represent the religious identities of deceased individuals. In this study, mobility, trauma, and diet are investigated at Tintern Abbey, Co. Wexford, Ireland (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries AD) in relation to estimated membership in the lay or ecclesiastical community. The prevalence of trauma that likely indicates interpersonal violence is notably high at Tintern Abbey. Osteological analyses, in addition to carbon, strontium, and oxygen isotope values, will be considered for 24 individuals at up to three periods in life. Despite Tintern Abbey’s connection to other Cistercian abbeys in Wales and across Europe, the ecclesiastical individuals did not experience significantly more mobility than the lay community members. The most notable factors that differentiate the lay and ecclesiastical groups are diet and trauma, whereas individuals in both groups undertook mobility. This study finds that trauma and diet are the important performative divisions between lay and religious groups at Tintern Abbey.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33236