Introduction – rethinking early medieval mortuary artefacts

The study of portable artefacts, particularly those discovered from graves, has traditionally been one of the mainstays of early medieval archaeology. As explored in the introduction, while a consideration of ‘commemoration’ might tempt us to focus this study upon burial mounds and gravestones, this book will begin by considering the role of portable artefacts and materials in the remembering and forgetting of the dead.

The choice of early medieval communities to clothe the dead and place artefacts on and around the cadaver is the very reason that these graves have become such a visible and diagnostic feature of the archaeological record and an invaluable resource for understanding the early medieval period. The high visibility of furnished graves is not without its problems for archaeologists, since graves with objects have tended to dominate archaeological studies at the expense of the many regions and periods within the early Middle Ages where grave goods were sparse or absent – because they do not survive, because they were placed with the dead but were recirculated among mourners or deposited elsewhere, or because they were never a part of mortuary ceremonies (see Lucy & Reynolds 2002). Yet for those communities practising furnished burial rites, placing selected artefacts and materials with the dead could serve as an important means of configuring and transforming social memories of the dead and the past, and, in turn, social identities.