Votive deposition, religion and the Anglo-Saxon furnished burial ritual

Abstract

Anglo-Saxon archaeology can offer very few examples of deliberate, irretrievable deposition outside the mortuary arena, unlike the British and Continental archaeological evidence for the Roman and Iron Ages. With the exception of the furnished cemetery sites, Anglo-Saxon archaeology is notably short of ‘ritual’ deposits or structures until the arrival of Christianity, and we are equally short of ritual centres or sites expressing communal effort. It may be that any belief systems supported by the people inhabiting lowland England between the ending of Roman Britain and the Conversion left no surviving archaeological trace. In this context, however, furnished burials, accepted by archaeologists as a ritual display for an audience, may be ready for reinterpretation. Recent evaluation of Anglo-Saxon mortuary ritual has studied furnished burial almost solely in terms of conspicuous display, social organization and the relationship between the individual and the symbolic social messages of the goods with which they were buried. This paper argues that a rigid distinction between ‘votive’ and ‘burial’ deposition could be misleading, and that this distinction may be preventing us from seeing that the mortuary ritual should be recognized as an expression of a communal belief system, as well as carrying other important social messages.

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