Elite identity in Late Urnfield graves
Many authors have written about identity in archaeology. Already at the beginning of the 1970s, Arthur A. Saxe (1970, 5-7) proposed that ‘every individual possesses a number of social identities’ and that ‘any occasion demands selection of several compatible social identities’. Death, in his opinion, stands as the ultimate occasion that calls for an especially comprehensive and thorough selection of these identities, as burial rites embody an interaction with the social group of the deceased as a whole, and therefore an interaction between many different subsets of these identities (Saxe 1970, 6). In a similar vein but more recently, Margarita Diaz-Andreu and Sam Lucy have seen identities as ‘hybrid or multiple’ and the intersection between different identities as one of the most interesting aspects of this field of study (Diaz-Andreu et al. 2005, 2).
When applying these ideas to studies of prehistoric elites, a look at the progress made by sociologists in the field of elite theory proves useful.5 Despite the focus on modern, capitalistic societies, several authors follow similar lines of thoughts as marked out by Saxe and Diaz-Andreu et al., such as Suzanne Keller, who herself connects her strategic elites to ‘the first organized human societies, all of which had their leading minorities of priests, elders, warrior kings, or legendary sages and heroes’. Her concept emphasizes the different roles members of the elite can play in the different arenas of a society; importance in one social circle does not necessarily imply importance in others. In her theory, elites are mainly defined by the influence they have on society due to their specific role in one of its subsystems (Keller 1991, esp. 30,32-33).
Transferring these ideas onto the Bronze Age, elite identity does not stand as a monolithic concept, but as one of many intersecting identities making up a person. These identities are thought to be multi-faceted themselves, i.e. consisting of a combination of aspects such as military or judiciary power. Additionally they are based on a broad definition of ‘elite’, including all individuals that can be assumed to have increased influence on the society they’re embedded in, no matter in which role and to which degree. This allows for a concept of elites that incorporates the horizontal structuring of a community, for example by religious next to military leaders; further,
Figure 3.3 Simplified example of intersecting identities comprising the elite status of an individual.
for the inclusion of elites of a ‘second order’ or less wealthy graves, to be able to grasp regional variability, to counter problems of preservation and fragmentary tradition, and to paint a more thorough picture of elite competition and interaction. In addition, widening the net of data collection by using a broader definition results in a more comprehensive dataset on which analyses can be conducted, and against which exceptional phenomena stand out more clearly.
A rather simplified example to illustrate this concept of elite identities is visualized in Figure 3.3: in this example, the elite status of a person stems from the fact that they are a warrior and far-travelled. Yet, it has to be assumed that other types of identities, for example those connected to familiar relations or affiliations (Harke 1994, 37; Hofmann 2013,278-279) as presented here, or to gender (Diaz-Andreu et al. 2005, 37-41), age (Diaz-Andreu et al. 2005, 63-65) or their position in the religious or spiritual life of the community,6 also played an important role, not only in life but also in the presentation of those identities in burial. As such they might superimpose or obscure those aspects of the funeral expression associated with elite status to the eyes of today’s archaeologists.
In these contexts, the assignation of meaning to objects - namely the definition of objects as status markers - has to be seen as a relational process between different actors. The processes of creation, negotiation and consolidation of the collective identity or identities of late Urnfield elites are understood to be realized, on the one hand, in the complex interplay between members of this group as well as between them and the members of the communities they lived in; and on the other hand, in the interplay between the different collective and personal identities of singular actors. These entanglements are reflected in the grave goods and features of elite burials, which are understood as the materialization of these relations.
To translate these entanglements into a network model, the obvious solution seems to be a two-mode network consisting of graves on the one hand, and object types that occur in these graves as well as features of the burial, such as tumuli or ditches, on the other hand. The bimodal graph structure enables the simultaneous study of graves and object types as well as their interconnection, but it also allows for a focus on one mode in particular (Breiger 1974), while it prevents the loss of information that reducing one of the modes to edges brings. In this context, it is important to note that in order to be able to create a network between geographically and culturally diverse grave assemblages, the second mode of nodes does not represent specific objects or their exact archaeological classification, but their general type, e.g. ‘sword’ or ‘bit’. Obviously, these processes of categorization imply some issues, e.g. the need to group each object into a single class, even those with multiple, unknown or uncertain assignations7 as exemplified by the fragments of unknown designation from grave C of Kunzing (Figure 3.2, 2-4), or the challenge of an appropriate level of granularity, especially in the case of composite objects like wagons or horse harnesses.
While this network abstraction serves well to express the idea of objects as physical representations of aspects of elite identity in graves and the way they tie together, there are several points it cannot address. This becomes especially evident when contrasting the network model with a Strathernogram as proposed by Gell (1999, 36-37).
