CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Parvanov, Petar Ivanov |
|---|---|
| Title | Deviant Burial Practices in Medieval South-eastern Europe |
| Summary | In a discipline, such as archaeology, pre-occupied with repetitive patterns and trying to extract the most typical cultural features, deviant burials can represent a problem. This situation was particularly evident in the national archaeologies of South-eastern Europe. These rare and unusual cases where differential treatment of the deceased and invasive manipulations of the body are detected challenge the traditional explanatory schemes and were for a long time considered a mere distraction from the research questions imposed by the dominant narratives. This dissertation shifts the attention to the growing number of previously marginalized evidence and tries to approach the medieval funerary record in a systematic and theoretically informed manner. The deviant burial practices are considered extra-normative body treatment signalling the devaluation of the individual. Based on analogies from similar European surveys, the principal forms of mortuary deviance are prone position, decapitation, fixation of the body, and the mutilations on the postcranial skeleton. Yet, alternative manifestations of the phenomenon are also considered such as mass graves, spatial isolation etc. The varied data is approached in two supplementing ways. The first one is the general quantification and chronological and geographical sequencing of the known deviant graves according to the methodological criteria set in the project. The second one uses a selection of case studies where the clusters identified in the process are contextualized in their immediate background. While much of its appeal originates in the exceptionalism of the phenomenon, the most fascinating aspects of research on the topic is the exposure to diverse and complementing perspectives conventionally disregarded in historical reconstructions of the past. Thus, a multi-faceted interpretation is offered for the emergence and development of the deviant burial practices in the funerary record in the medieval northern Balkans. The themes elaborated upon are fundamentally concerned with the social significance of the practice. While much of the discussion is assessing the intertwined secular and spiritual factors in the process, deviant burials are also connected to the variability in the human responses to death, the materiality and universal symbolism of the bodily experience, and the social complexity and power structures in the region during the medieval period. |
| Supervisor | Laszlovszky, József; Choyke, Alice |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/parvanov_petar.pdf |
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