Bedlam, Bags, and Burial Rites: Female Hip Assemblages in Early Medieval Britain

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the early medieval period, burials across Britian included a wide variety of grave goods, which often signaling status, ethnicity, and varied by demographic factors. This study explores objects included in female graves which have been interpreted as bags worn about the hip. A functionalist interpretation may be too simplistic for understanding these complex assemblages, as some were placed in the grave during the funerary ritual after the body was already deposited, signaling a deeper meaning behind these objects. This is especially obvious for items where the utility of the objects included within the bags is not obvious (e.g., broken objects). This indicates that these items had a great personal, social, or cultural meaning than what is evident now. Previous research has interpreted these burials as ‘high status’, or potentially ‘deviant’, which also oversimplifies the complex lives these women lived. With an emphasis on spatial analysis, these hip assemblages are explored through a lens of materiality to ascertain the more nuanced meaning behind this complex burial practice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53738