DEATH IN ANCIENT BRITAIN: " Hades before Halloween", set in Ancient Britania Cross-curricular Project #ESO3 #ESO4
We just love Halloween! And we are so excited for Halloween 2022. Things are sort of back to normal and we are here for all things creepy, cute, trick or treaty, and generally anything Halloween. In this project, however, we are going to learn about Death and burials in ancient Britannia and for that we need to craft a graveyard with ancient names. Let's make it happen.
Theoretical Background to the Cross-Curricular Project
By A.D. 43, the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.
The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of bobbing for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.
LISTENING SKILLS WORK
Introduction to the topic
All Saints' Day
On May 13, A.D. 609, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.
By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In A.D. 1000, the church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It’s widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, church-sanctioned holiday.
All Souls’ Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
DEATH IN ANCIENT BRITAIN: History of Death
GRAVE GOODS INCLUDED FOOD, DRINKING VESSELS AND BODY ORNAMENTATION. IN RICHER BURIALS, GOLD SHEET WORK WAS ATTACHED TO CLOTHING, AND LATER STILL PINS, TWEEZERS, AND RAZORS WERE FOUND. WOMEN IN DEATH MIGHT WEAR FINE JEWELLERY, WHILE MEN WERE LAID OUT WITH THEIR WEAPONS.
Carpe Diem – How did the ancient Romans view death?
WILLIAM BUCKLEY AND THE RED LADY
In 1822, Reverend William Buckley, Oxford’s first professor of Geology made rather an interesting discovery. Excavating the deeper recesses of a cave in South Wales, Buckley came across a massive mammoth skull and digging further unearthed a skeleton, dyed red with ochre, draped with seashell necklaces and surrounded by grave goods believed to have been of ritual significance: bone, antler, and ivory rods.
At the time Buckley believed that no skeleton could be found that was older than the Great Flood recorded in the Bible, and that it was the body of a woman, (he postulated a Roman prostitute or witch) which he named the ‘Red Lady of Paviland.’ Since then it has been discovered that the ‘Red Lady’ was in fact a man and studies have shown that he may have lived 26,000 years ago. This makes the find the oldest ceremonial burial discovered in Western Europe and of immense significance in the history of death.
Death in the ancient world is difficult to study. Without written records archaeologists have to rely on what they can physically find, which may be purely circumstantial. Methods of burial such as the scattering of ashes and where bodies are buried in certain conditions may be barely traceable after rotting for several millennia. However, that which archaeologists are lucky enough to unearth can give us real clues to the beliefs and customs of prehistoric people.
PALAEOLITHIC AND NEOLITHIC BURIALS
The ways our ancestors dealt with death across the British Isles have varied across the different peoples who have inhabited our islands and across time. Like the Red Lady of Paviland, many Palaeolithic burials at this time involved skeletons dyed with red ochre and provided with tools and weapons. Burials were mostly in caves, but as time went on moved gradually to open ground.
As people started to live a more settled life in the Neolithic period, funerary structures emerged. These could be huge earth mounds or ‘barrows’ found in the South of England, or the stone chambers found in the East. Sometimes these were designed with astronomical features in mind, for example with holes that aligned with the sun over the winter solstice. The bodies in Bronze Age barrows have been found in several states. Sometimes the bodies are simply interred, while others have been found partially cremated, with the bones picked out of the pyre to be placed in a wooden box. Still more have been found where ‘excarnation’ had taken place, a practice in which the corpse was laid out for birds of prey to strip the flesh from the bones. The bones would then be collected into boxes, possibly to be taken out at the time of feasts.
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