Posted on 07/11/2008 5:09:19 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Mesolithic burials in northern Europe could be elaborate. People were buried lying, sitting cross-legged or on their bellies. They were buried with goods that included dogs, red deer antlers, food and amber beads. At Vedbaek Bogebakken, north of Copenhagen, a newborn baby was buried on a swan's wing, next to a woman who is presumed to have died in childbirth.
But quite possibly, Mesolithic people in Britain didn't practise the same traditions. The only known Mesolithic burial site in Britain is Aveline's Hole, a cave in Somerset where the remains of around 50 individuals dating from approximately 10,000 years ago were discovered in 1797. It's possible that archaeologists have been looking in the wrong places for other graves, but another explanation is that British burials were totally different from those on mainland Europe.
If so, then the submerged landscape of Doggerland could throw light on how burial practices diverged as Britain became isolated by rising seas. In Denmark, burial rites seem to have been concentrated on the coast, and there is evidence that the dead may have been placed in canoes and sunk at sea. "I suspect that will be commonplace in Doggerland," says Kristian Pedersen, a historian at Newcastle University, UK.
Mesolithic people seem to have respected body integrity more than their successors in the Neolithic, who commonly re-entered graves to remove bones, which they then stacked in ossuaries. During the Mesolithic, "the bodies are buried fresh, they're buried intact and without a lot of disturbance", says archaeologist Liv Nilsson Stutz of Lund University in Sweden. However, there are also augurs of what was to come. "There are examples in which people have opened the burials up and retrieved bones," she says.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
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Something rather touching and reverent about that.
Tell the swan. ;’)
I see we are wearing our smarty pants today.... :)
In this case, an inspired comic *flight*. Yes, it’s true, I’m punning wings around the whole of FR...
It’s a very human touch.
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