Of Death and Debt. A History of the Body in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Yorkshire

Abstract

This paper addresses the way in which social identity is articulated through the body at death and linked up with cycles of gift-giving and the architecture of tombs during the Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age in eastern Yorkshire. The dynamics of funerary rites are explored and longer-term historical changes in the archaeological record are interpreted in terms of modifications to these 'everyday' dynamics. Grave goods, seen as part of a network of gift-giving, articulate this process by closing/initiating debts in the course of death which threatens to rupture this network. In a later transformation, however, different practices involving grave goods serve to marginalise death from strategies for the maintenance of social identity.