Death and Burial in the Roman Age

Abstract

Evidence for death and burial in the Roman age extends across all materials surviving from Antiquity, literary texts, the remnants of memorials to the dead, inscriptions, images, and burials themselves, both the remains of the dead and the objects used in the rituals for burying them. This diversity of source material and the relevance of funerary evidence to so many aspects of ancient life continue to fragment scholarship. The allocation of epitaphs, architecture, images, artifacts, and the remains of the dead to separate disciplines has compounded their decontextualization from funerary ensembles. The subject area has also been divided by different approaches depending on the region and period concerned: the dominant interests in late Roman burials, for example, have been the investigation of Christian conversion or migration into the Roman world. However, some unifying trends can be observed. In recent decades attention has shifted to exploring the mass of burial evidence for what it reveals of Roman society, its social structures, demographic characteristics, and so on. This has been given extra impetus by the results of archaeological fieldwork, creating a sample of well-excavated burials and human skeletal remains which now rivals the numbers of inscribed memorials. The optimism of reading off social structures or demographic characteristics from funerary evidence has been replaced with an emphasis on exploring how groups and individuals negotiated their relationships to their communities through rituals and monuments. This essay presents Roman behavior in relation to death, bereavement, and commemoration, mainly using material evidence in its broadest sense. It is necessarily selective, giving examples of key syntheses and datasets and of developing approaches. In some cases (especially monuments) it gives some greater weighting to English language publications, especially where they provide gateways to non-Anglophone scholarship. After opening sections on general works on death and burial and on the Roman funeral and mourning, the essay discusses in turn monuments, funerary rituals as reconstructed from archaeological evidence, and late Roman burial practice, including its relationship to conversion to Christianity. It concludes with case studies where different forms of evidence, architectural, artistic, artifactual, osteological, etc. combine to produce a richer view of monuments and processes, in specific cultural and social contexts across the empire. Study of human remains from a demographic or paleopathological perspective is outside the scope of this essay, though some bibliographic pointers are given in the first section (Overviews of Death and Burial). Recent work on osteological and biomolecular characteristics of the skeleton is however noted where its integration with the evidence for rituals has significantly enriched the study of identities in death.