- Burial and the Other World -
One of the outstanding features of Celtic belief, as remarked on by these observers
is that the Celts believed in an immortal soul (Wait 1985: 205-6):
The belief of Pythagoras is strong among them, that the souls of men are
immortal, and that after a definite number of years they live a second life when
the soul passes to another body. This is the reason given why some people at
the burial of the dead cast upon the pyre letters written to their dead relatives,
thinking that the dead will be able to read them.
(Diodorus Siculus, v.28; Tierney 1960: 250)
They [the druids] are chiefly anxious to have men believe the following: that
the souls do not suffer death, but after death pass from one body to another
... Funerals are on a large and expensive scale, considering the Gallic way of
life; everything which they believe the dead man loved in life is given to the
flames, even the animals.
(Caesar V.I4, IV. 19; Tierney 1960: 273)
Similar comments regarding the immortality of souls, and a further life in an
Otherworld are echoed in Ammianus Marcellinus (quoting Timagenes), Pomponius
Mela and Strabo (Chadwick 1966: 25, 30, 51-2).
An aspect of this belief which seems to have particularly impressed the observers
was the concreteness of the afterlife. From all this emerges a conception of an
Otherworld much like this world, where everyday objects would again have a place.Ethnographic Analogy
Finally, mention should be made of a few aspects of the use of anthropological theory
in interpreting archaeological evidence. The primary method is the ethnographic
analogy - interpreting the archaeological record on the basis of parallels with
the material culture of a society observed by modern ethnographers. This requires
extensive parallels in many aspects of the two societies. Where such extensive
parallelism cannot be demonstrated, a more general analogy may be employed (called
general-comparative analogies). In this case a consistent relationship between burial
practices and eschatological beliefs may be employed to explain a society observed
archaeologically. In this mode of interpretation, it is clearly unwise to attempt too
specific an explanation. There is a voluminous literature dealing with the 'archaeology
of death' (e.g. Wait 1985: 235-40; Saxe 1970; Binford 1971; Tainter 1978; O'Shea 1984;
Huntingdon and Metcalfe 1979) and the methodology is tolerably well understood.Archaeology
Even overtly social dimensions such as political structure may also have ideological
dimensions. In particular, much of the analysis of burial or mortuary practices rests
upon the differential treatment of people as defined by the society itself. This may
mean the differential treatment of political elites, economic groups, kin groups, or
groups defined along ritual criteria. Within the burial traditions visible in the British
Iron Age, several traditions appear to deal with a social majority (i.e. they are
normative rites) while others apply to minority groups.