This thesis discusses three bronze oil lamps found in the ancient city of Meroë, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Scholars have considered the lamps to be imported from Hellenistic Egypt, but careful examination has revealed that the lamps were not imported. The lamps were locally made in Meroë; the materials and technology needed to create bronze lamps were available to Meroitic craftsmen.

In the fall of 1999, human skeletal remains and historic artifacts were discovered on private farmland approximately two kilometres south of the Town of Battleford, Saskatchewan. Document searches and a ground-penetrating radar survey of the property resulted in the discovery that the land was once used as a cemetery for the Catholic Church of St. Vital during the years of 1879 to 1885. Numerous interest groups were brought together in the process of handling this sensitive situation, including the landowners, the Heritage Resource Branch of the Department of Saskatchewan Culture, Youth and Recreation, the Rural Municipality of Battle River, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Prince Albert, and the Battleford Tribal Council. A decision was made to relocate the burials to the current town cemetery. In the meantime, permission was granted for the University of Saskatchewan to play the lead role in the excavation and analysis process. The partial and complete skeletal remains of thirty individuals were recovered, and in addition to a basic osteological analysis of the individuals that included sex determination, age at death and population affinity, a detailed assessment of the pathological conditions was also undertaken. The document and artifact analyses will be the subject of a separate thesis by Colette Hopkins.

This thesis is a historical archaeological essay and deals with the Frankish empire and its sway over the European area. The aim of this essay has been to examine if the sway of the Franks reached the Scandinavian area. The Frankish empire was the most influential power in Western Europe from the 6th century until the death of Charlemagne 814 AD, when the kingdom began to disrupt. The essay is divided into three parts. The first part is a background where I describe the Frankish empire in a historical context. The second part contains the archaeological finds. The third part contains a discussion and conclusions.

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During the Late Bronze Age, the number of metal objects in the Baltic Sea region increased tremendously.  Mobility and interaction in this northern inland sea intensified. This occurred in a period of prehistory when the ship was the predominant symbol in southern Scandinavia. The ship can be found in rock carvings, on bronze objects and by way of erected stone monuments: stone ship settings. These stone ships are mainly to be found in the Baltic Sea region, with a marked concentration on Gotland. The stone ship settings and their landscape context are the focus of this dissertation. The objective is to clarify whether it is possible to find evidence of social groupings of people in the Nordic Late Bronze Age (1100-500 BC), by focusing on the stone ship monument, adopting a maritime approach. These people might have been part of a maritime institution specializing in trade and long distance journeys during this period, thus achieving a more advanced maritime way of life in the Baltic Sea. Are the ship settings an expression of these specific groups of people, who utilized their practices to position and articulate themselves in the landscape? If such maritime institutions can in fact be traced, there must also be uniformly structured locations for these groups of people to meet in, some kind of antecedents of harbours. By taking an inland sea, the Baltic Sea, as a geographical demarcation, a different perspective of prehistory is attained. The area in the Late Bronze Age and earliest Iron Age (950/900-200 BC) differed from the Nordic Bronze Age sphere. The communities around the Baltic Sea, through the establishment and sharing of mutual interests, seem to have reached a certain degree of consensus. This concordance might well be largely explained by the complex dependency on metal. Such a manifestation would not have been possible without an infrastructure or network, in this case a maritime one. This is something which has previously been overlooked in discussions on the Bronze Age in the Baltic Sea.

This thesis utilises the evidence from mortuary archaeology to explore the identity of the inhabitants of Britain during the period of Roman rule. It assimilates burial evidence from diverse sources both published and unpublished and integrates it with other material and literary evidence to investigate the people of the province and examine aspects of their lives. By assessing the extent and reliability of the mortuary evidence and by combining this evidence from major cemeteries, smaller burial sites and individual or isolated burials it has been possible to determine aspects of their lives from a different perspective than that previously employed. The thesis has been divided into five parts. Part 1 (chapters 1 to 3) serves as an introduction. Part 2 (chapters 4 and 5) considers the evidence available while Part 3 (chapters 6 to 8) focuses on specific groups within the population. Part 4 (chapter 9) looks at instances of death and burial that differ from the norm and Part 5 (chapters 10-12) presents a picture of the daily life of these people. The study concludes with a summing up of the evidence and a look at the future of mortuary studies of Roman Britain. The introductory chapters set out the objectives of the dissertation, look at the work that has already been done in this area and evaluates the need for a synthesis of the available evidence. The scope of the project, both temporally and geographically is outlined in chapter 2. The third chapter takes a look at the contemporary written evidence available, in the form of literary and epigraphic contributions, and assesses its reliability as an indicator of the appearance and lives of the Romano-Britons. This survey looks not only at the Roman view of the natives of the province but extends beyond the Roman period to examine the literary evidence that is available from the subsequent centuries. Chapters 4 and 5 take an in-depth look at the evidence available on the people of Roman Britain. The extent of the burial evidence is reviewed in chapter 4 while chapter 5 deals specifically and in depth with how this evidence can be utilised. The skeletal evidence is assessed for its extent and reliability. Factors affecting the survival of the remains is appraised and the effects of the biases created by such differential survival considered. Grave-goods and the organisation of the cemeteries are brought into the evaluation and the strengths and weaknesses of all of the evidence evaluated. The following chapters (6 to 11) focus on discrete aspects of the population. Chapters 6 to 8 look at the representation of specific groups within the community - the young, the elderly and those who arrived from other parts of the empire. With the aim of providing an indication of the diversity of both the composition of the population, the communities they represent and the associated burial rites, chapter 9 examines some of the more distinctive burials from Britain during this period. An area of intense interest, decapitation burials provides the focal point of this chapter. What may appear to be more mundane aspects of the lives of these people occupy chapters 10 to 12. What kept them busy, their occupations and their pastimes is viewed from the perspective of the burial evidence in chapters 10 and 11, while chapter 12 examines the mortuary evidence, in the form of funerary art and the remains of clothing, hair and accessories for their appearance.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1995. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement and English abstract inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-219).

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1995. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement and English abstract inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-219).

This study, Death shadowed by life: Accountability in popular interpretations of suicide in Sweden 1850–1900, draws inspiration from the perspective of new cultural history, exploring ideas of accountability and the relationship between life and death in interpretations of suicide in late 19th century rural Sweden. The sources used in this study consist of records of popular belief and practice that were collected in the early 20th century. In historical writings suicide is often treated as an isolated act which was by default morally condemned. In this work the perspective is broadened, analysing the self-killing act in relation to understandings of the self-murderer’s earlier life as well as to related types of death. I argue that the definition of suicide, in the context here examined, had less to do with the intention and agency of the person who killed themself than with the context of the person’s earlier life. The main aspect when classifying deaths, both accidental and intentional, as suicides was the presence of sinful acts in the past. Furthermore, suicide was part of an even wider category of deaths caused by sinful acts in life. However, as opposed to these other kinds of death, suicide was understood as the ultimate proof of sinful behaviour. Finally, I suggest that sin in this context had a pragmatic facet that intertwined with, but did not depend on, moral judgment. This study thus sheds new light on the stigmatization of suicide.

This paper uses an osteological approach and applies the study of entanglement in an attempt to understand the crematoria on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), which represent a unique tradition within the ceremonial spheres of the Polynesian area. Skeletal remains from the crematorium of ahu Hanga Hahave, which consist of both cremated - and unburned remains, have been analysed to reveal the different practices that took part in the cremation process and to identify the individuals that were deposited in such structure. Ethnohistorical records were applied to interpret the osteological evidence and to discuss the circumstances surrounding the possible use of the crematorium, as either a site for sacrificial offerings or a site for burials.  This paper aims at creating an underlying basis for the study of crematoria on Rapa Nui and provides an overview of the processes central to the disposal of the dead and the usage and significance of this structure. The results of this study showed that the ancient Rapanui through the practice of cremation, followed an internalised structure within their society to complete each cultural act that constituted the crematorium, and these were divided in the construction of the crematorium, the making of fire, and the treatment of the dead. The complexity of each cultural act presents the possibility that an organised society, with at least one designated head, may have been in charge of the practice of cremation physically and spiritually. The skeletal remains could not be applied to determine whether the crematorium of Hanga Hahave was used for sacrificial offering or for burial since the analysed remains only represented one-fifth of the entire bone collection from the crematorium. However, the findings of this study have pointed towards a burial practice rather than a sacrificial one. / Denna uppsats använder ett osteologiskt tillvägagångssätt och Hodders’’entanglement’ studie i tolkningen av krematorierna på Rapa Nui (Påskön), som representerar en unik tradition inom Polynesien. Skelettmaterialet från krematoriet i ahu Hanga Hahave har analyserats för att upptäcka de olika metoder som deltog i kremeringsprocessen och identifiera vilka individer som deponerades här. Etnohistoriska källor användes också i tolkningen av det osteologiska materialet och för att behandla frågorna kring krematoriernas användning: antigen som en plats för offring eller en plats för begravning. Syftet är att skapa en underliggande grund för studiet av krematorierna på Rapa Nui för att ge en överblick på de centrala processerna. Resultatet visade att den forntida Rapanui följde en internaliserad struktur inom sitt samhälle för att slutföra varje kulturell handling som utgjorde kremerings praktik och var uppdelade i konstruktionen av krematoriet, bruken av eld och hantering av de döda. Komplexiteten hos varje handling möjliggör att ett organiserat samhälle, där minst en ledare har varit ansvarig i fysisk eller andlig form. Skelettmaterialet från krematoriet i ahu Hanga Hahave kunde inte användas för att bestämma krematoriets användning eftersom det analyserade materialet endast representerade en femtedel av den totala bensamlingen, dock pekar studiet på en begravningsritual snarare än en offer.