engleski

Social dimension of burial mounds

Burial mounds as artefacts of human culture represent a wide range of people’s actions and intentions. Not only they emphasize the funerary event but also reflect the social relations between the living community and ancestors. Throughout the Prehistory and Early Middle Ages burial mounds were created as well defined monuments and played an important role in manifestation of both personal, as well as, collective identities. Their spatial structure, form and dimensions usually reflect variety of social relations including family bounds, social position and gender categories. Through the research on burial mounds we may better understand the relationships between domestic and funerary components, as well as, cosmological significance of individual monuments and whole funerary areas. The current studies in Central Europe suggest there are distinctive relations among the spatial position of individual monuments within cemeteries reflecting the social and familial ranking. The isolation and outstanding size of particular monuments may rather emphasize a special social status of the buried individual. The variability of burial monument dimensions may reflect the gender differences. The choice of internal burial construction and funerary ritual (inhumations/cremations) also represent a certain level of social differentiation, such as in Middle Bronze Age of Early Iron Age. We discussed the social issues of Prehistoric and Early Medieval communities in the light of our current knowledge on creation and further development of burial mounds and other types of funerary monuments in whole Europe and beyond.

burial mounds; social aspect

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