Grave Goods - History

History

Evidence for intentional burial is found in Neanderthal sites from 130,000 years ago or earlier. In Homo sapiens burials beginning about 100,000 years ago, the body of the deceased was sprinkled with red ochre, and offerings of food, tools, and fresh flowers may have been deposited in the grave.

Beads made of basalt deposited in graves in the Fertile Crescent date to the end of the Upper Paleolithic, beginning in about the 12th to 11th millennium BC.

The distribution of grave goods are a good indicator of the social stratification of a society. Thus, early Neolithic graves tend to show equal distribution of goods, suggesting a more or less classless society, while in Chalcolithic and Bronze Age burials, rich grave goods are concentrated in "chieftain" graves (barrows), indicating social stratification.

The expression of social status in rich graves is taken to extremes in the royal graves of the Bronze Age, notably in Ancient Egypt. The pyramids and the royal graves in the Valley of the Kings are among the most elaborate burials in human history. This trend is continued into the Iron Age. An example of an extremely rich royal grave of the Iron Age is the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang.

In the sphere of the Roman Empire, early Christian graves lack grave goods, and grave goods tend to disappear with the decline of Greco-Roman polytheism in the 5th and 6th centuries. Similarly, the presence of grave goods in the Early Middle Ages in Europe has often been taken as evidence of paganism, although during the period of conversion in Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish Empire (7th century), the situation may be more complicated. In the Christian Middle Ages, high-status graves are marked on the exterior, with tomb effigies or expensive tomb stones rather than by the presence of grave goods.

The practice of placing grave goods with the dead body has thus an uninterrupted history beginning in the Upper Paleolithic, if not the Middle Paleolithic, upheld until comparatively recent times, in many regions of the world ceasing only with Christianization.