- Burial and the Other World -
1 on the left, and among the infants 6 were crouched on the right and 3 on the left.
Ten of the burials were placed with heads to the north (between north-west and
north-east) and five ~ith heads to the south.
The interpretation of the burials in the Pit Tradition is far from straightforward.
The burials represent a small minority of the parent population, selected along
criteria favouring adults but later broadened to include infants. Within this minority,
several subgroups may be distinguished. Their characteristics do not match those of
social or political elite minorities known from ethnographic study; such minorities
are usually distinguished by burial with grave goods (indicative of their position)
within restricted cemetery areas. Another possible minority group would be the
victims of human sacrifice. It is certain that the Celts did practise human sacrifice
(Caesar, Strabo, Lucan and Tacitus all mention the practice with a variety of details
relating to method employed; see Wait 1985: II8-20, 235-45; Ross 1967), and it
seems possible that the partial burials with overtones of violence and dismemberment
are the results of sacrificial rites. The most likely explanation for most of these burials
is that they are the remains of abnormal, outcast members of Celtic society. Within
the ethnological literature, outcast groups usually receive a non-normative treatment
of the body, a different mode of disposal, a different place of disposal, frequently
associated with social rubbish and dirt, and rarely have a normal age/sex distribution
- all true of the Pit Tradition. It is as if every effort had been made to differentiate
these people from the social majority of 'normal' people, who may have been either
cremated or had their corpses exposed, and then been disposed of either far from
settlements or in rivers (Wait 1985: II8-20).
A major underlying theme is that the burials represent a belief in death as a transi-
tional period (not an event) intervening between this world and the Otherworld.
During this period the body and the soul are formless and stateless, objects of dread.
This period is terminated with a formal ceremony marking the arrival of the soul
in the Otherworld (Wait 1985: 235-45). The souls of those individuals denied the
normal mortuary rite were prevented from following the normal after-death course,
thus maintaining the purity of a society's Otherworld.
Who were these outcasts? A specific answer is probably unattainable, but a
number of suggestions may serve as the basis for further investigation. In the ethno-
graphic literature (e.g. the Asante), outcast people are defined either by life style
or by type of death. Abnormal life styles include witches, sorcercers, criminals
(especially murderers), religious heretics, and practitioners of ritually proscribed
occupations. Abnormal deaths include drowning, murder, suicide, lightning, death in
childbirth, or death outside the social group's territory.
It is interesting to speculate that if the Pit Tradition burials are abnormal burials
consciously distinguished from the normal, then some of their characteristics may be
a reversal of the social norm. For example, if these are usually buried on the left side,
does this mean that the right side was considered favourable? If these are oriented to
the north-east, what was the favoured direction? Was the placing of the bodies or body
parts in a pit deliberately differentiated from a normal disposal by cremation or expo-
sure, both of which methods would represent a clean, above-ground, or airy aspect?
All of these extrapolations may be paralleled elsewhere in Celtic settlement structure
and layout, and in ritual associations found in the Celtic vernacular literature.