Grave goods: signs of status

While doing research on Medieval Japan I noted that the elite had a real lack of grave goods. Unlike the European "princes," all decked out in beads and rare goods, these elites had no such classifier attached to them. If one randomly stumbled across a Medieval Japanese grave in the course of their excavation and had no knowledge of what to expect from the culture, would they have thought they were doing with samurai, noblemen, and even imperial dead? Would the lack of goods lend them to not calling these graves "princes"? Now the main reason for the lack of grave goods is the Buddhist religion that was prominent at the time. The practice of separating oneself from material culture was a big part of achieving enlightenment, and thus the dead did not need goods to be passed on with them. I wonder how many other, now dead, religions have felt this. Could there be "impoverished princes" miss classified because their graves did not show enough grandeur?

To set the elite apart from the laymen in Medieval Japan, richer coffins and mortuary markers were used. If any of this was intact for our hypothetical archaeologist to find, maybe he (or she) could elicit some difference between it and a layman. But what if he does not find a layman's grave, then he has no comparison to look against.  This may not be an improbable thought. It seems the lower class, at the time, was left to their own devices and would have to settle for the woods, or less designated areas. This means they may not be with in a bounded cemetery to make a comparison with. So if you only have elite to work with, how do you say anything about the common man, or even recognize that something is missing?

It seems to be that this all means that archaeology is a messy and complicated field. But then that is what makes it so fascinating to read  about and discover.

Pollution of death

As I have been doing research on medieval Japanese death rituals/ grave goods, I came across an interesting concept. Death as a pollutant factor. Not just the dead body, but death itself. It was seen as polluting the air around the dead body and was particularly damaging to close kin (Gerhart 2009). So much so was this pollution taken seriously that as other family and friends came to pay respect the body was placed within a coffin and that coffin was placed behind a screen. You did not look upon the dead as we commonly do in the West. There was no open casket, to do so was placing the living in harms way. The body was often transported at night, in secret and the coffin was surrounded on all sides by screens carried by attendants. Though I should point out at the point that is was the view and practice of the elite nobles, the commoners did not always have this luxury.

It makes me wonder how the commoners dealt with this pollution. Did they accept their lot and do the best they could, or did neighbors and friends band together to protect the family of the deceased?  Unfortunately there is not much out there about the common man's dealing with this matter, but it is an interesting thought.

A neat website a ran across talked about coins as both tainted and giving health and long life to the greaving community. Apparently at a funeral coins would scattered about and those assembled would gather them and taken the money with them as they left the ceremony. On the way home they bought food and drink to bring them good luck and health, but they had to spend it all or risk ill luck from the death pollution tainting the coins (Kim Unknown). I am not sure where exactly this information is pulled from but it does sound pretty interesting. 

So how do we view death? I think about when someone is ill, they 'battle' and fight against it. If they pass on they have 'lost' the battle. Death is personified in the west as a character that hunts you and seeks you out, the ultimate bad guy that no-one can ultimately escape. But there does not seem to be a pollutant factor of death in the west. Death pollution has definitely intrigued me, how about you?

References:

Kim, M Unkonwn, Vitality and Pollution: Scattering Coins in Japanese Mortuary Rituals, http://www.karinoyo.com/JAWS/JAWS_14.1330.A.pdf

Gerhart, K.M. 2009, The Material Culture of Death in Medieval Japan, University of Hawai’i press, Honolulu.

What others have to offer

This week has been a hectic week of project workings and all that fun stress. So, this weeks blog prompt was an interesting divergence. What do others have to offer? How do they match up to our group made marking rubric? One problem I ran across was though I could find sites dedicated to the Kofuns of Japan, non of them utilized their web pages as I imagine creating mine. All the information was on one, extremely long, page, with the tendency to read like a essay than an informative, dynamic web page.

I had mixed feelings about my findings. I was happy in a 'I have the bestest idea' way when I could not find anyone else with an identical topic, yet I was also disheartened that everyone was so different from where I wanted to go with the information. Ultimately I settled on a site that talks about a single Kofun and a star chart that was found inside of it. I though it made an interesting parallel with grave goods (though I would be tempted to put this ornamentation in that category, but I think others would argue differently). ** SITE **

So here is me playing teacher and giving the site its marks:

I deducted 1 point from referencing because 1) it was not Harvard (not really the writer's fault but it is in my criteria) and 2) there seemed to be little thing off with a couple references (though I could be wrong). The pictures seemed sightly off from the content at times, not enough to take away a full mark, but enough that something needed to be deducted. I had to take away 1 point from text because the writing was geared towards academics and was not accessible to a larger audience. Lastly, I really was not drawn by the plain, white appearance. It seemed to detract from the paper and make it that much harder to read.

Overall the site received 19.5/23. Not a bad mark considering that the site was not made with this rubric in mind. It was a well written essay pasted to a web page for others to see. Nothing else really to it.  

hmmm. Definitely makes you think about what makes a good site. 

Cannibalism: to emote or not to emote

I was reading a paper that looked at two contrasting arguments on cannibalism at a New Mexican site (from around 1150 AD). One side presented evidence for the practice in the area; it was calm and straightforward. They gave bone analysis, coprolite diagnostics and comparisons to other sites at the time as evidence and in all their argument seemed sound and plausible. All the simple scientific wording and evidence gave me confidence in their findings. The next argument was a reaction paper that torn into the first, saying NO to cannibalism. It was full of emotion and political correctness and hyper awareness of past mistakes. I was thoroughly put off by the tone of the paper that it took me a reread (or two) to see that they may have some valid points. They talked about the possibility that the evaluation methods may not have been up to snuff to apply the cannibal label.

So whats the big deal? Well it turns out that our oh so enlightened forefathers seemed to have used cannibalism as a reason to enslave/murder/convert/subjugate other cultures. That means that cannibalism was not practiced as much as was reported and that now cannibalism becomes a headed topic.

When you read the word 'cannibal' in the beginning of this post what popped to mind? Was is an aboriginal person dressed in a leaf skirt or such, gathered around a stew pot with a poor victim sitting in it? (hopefully you did not check out the picture before you started reading..) I would not be entirely surprised if this was the image. Why? Why media of course. Cartoons are full of cannibal 'joke'/stereotypes. They all show the 'savage' trying to cook some 'enlightened' soul from a good upstanding country. It is because of these images that people give such strong reactionary papers. I assume that it was trying to protect the descendants and the idea of the past culture as a whole, but I felt the pure negative emotion and the political angle did the opposite. It drew me to the first paper, it made me want to defend it from the onslaught.

Have you ever encountered such a paper? On that had merits but they were so hard to tease from beneath the emotions of the writer? How do you think this could effect the story told? (I think that it could harm the message, no matter how well meaning/correct it may be). Ethics tell me to protect people from harm. So is hypothesizing about past cannibalism harm? It could be in some circumstances, so the second argument has strong merit in calling for stronger evidence and surety before throwing the "cannibal" label around. I just wish it had been more calm and even toned, like the first paper.

Early Encounters of the Shadowy Side

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When do we, as children of the West, encounter death? I have vague memories of a funeral when I was barely knee high, though I had no idea at the time it was such. I recall that for some reason everyone wanted to go to the front but I was not allowed. Man was I not happy about that. In hindsight now, it may have been for the best, there being an open casket and all, and I did not have any concept of death at the time. My own experience brings to the front: are we too seperated from death? Do we hold it to a cleaned up, sanitized image? Should we be scared of exposing children to death?

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I think we are too sparated from the cycle of life in general. We do not have contact with the food we eat, let alone are capable of handling the butchering process. I remember the first time my mother handed me a raw chicken breast to clean, season and cook.... 'eeeeew' and lots of poking I believe was my response. I think that we need to gain a better perspective of death in our life. It is a natural process, on that is emotional and that emotionality needs to be understood as normal and ok. I am not saying that we need to off more people in our lives or start dragging childern to random funerals, but I do think it should be part of an early child's education. That is why I love books like '100 facts Mummies.' It approaches death as natural and as a matter of fact and then goes on to really tells us all about the neat things people like to do with bodies. When education like this is given to appropriate aged kids (as in they have the capability to understand death and wont just see all the pictures as monsters that live under their bed) it can open the mind to the concept and allow for the normalcy of death to sink in. It might make talking about serious deaths easier later in life/childhood, including deaths of pets.