The discovery of Iron Age burial sites in France has had a dramatic impact on the archaeological community, as evidence indicates that a funerary tradition exists that is challenging established funerary paradigms.
The French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) uncovered several Celtic males who were interred in a seated or vertical deposition in very large circular pits. The decision not to bury these individuals in a recumbent or flat position indicates an elaborate, previously undocumented, social hierarchy or religious ritual associated with this part of ancient Gaul. With continuing osteological studies and radiocarbon dating of these remains, the transition from local finding to a subject of global archaeological inquiry about Celtic spiritual beliefs and the superstitious nature of Celtic funerals during the first millennium BCE can be initiated.
Rare ‘seated’ Celtic graves found in France
According to the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), sites in regions such as Alsace have revealed circular pits where bodies were interred in a seated or ‘contracted’ position. Unlike the types of burials customary for when this burial type developed in the late Gaulish period, the so-called ‘pit burials’ (tombes en fosse) contained few, if any, grave goods, which may indicate they were a special subset of society, or a specific type of ritual events distinct from family-type burials.
How the ancient Gauls staged the dead
Research being done by various sources, including UNESCO World Heritage documentation and French government archaeology, has also shown that the ‘seated’ position would have been maintained via deliberate taphonomic engineering of back-filling and re-filling the soil in the pits. Osteologists, who are scientists who study the bones of humans, have reported that the skeletal remains found in these graves show little or no evidence of having sustained trauma or injury before burial; therefore, the theory of human sacrifice no longer holds water, but the evidence does support that there was a very specific way to conduct complex inhumation rituals that would sustain the verticality of the spinal column post-mortem of ‘seated.
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Why were the dead seated in grain pits
Scientific analysis hosted on ResearchGate and the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) suggests that these seated burials often occurred in pits originally used for grain storage. The act of burying a person in a decommissioned storage silo is a globally anomalous funerary practice. The change of function implies that the burial of these men in an upright position may symbolise fertility, the protection of goods or available resources, or the ritualised marginalisation or symbolic guardianship of these burials from the main cemetery of the community.
Was the ‘seated’ burial a Pan-European Celtic rite
The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit has dated these finds in France from 450 to 50 BCE, coterminous with the La Tène cultural horizon of La Tène, which coincided with a significant period of Celtic expansion. Comparisons are now being made between these seated burials and other similar yet isolated instances throughout Europe to determine whether this was a broad Celtic practice or an localized ritualistic idiosyncrasy exclusive to the tribes of ancient Gaul.
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