Wrapped Up for Safe Keeping: ‘Wrapping’ Customs in Early Iron Age Europe

Abstract

This chapter presents some preliminary observations on the different categories of wrapping and their possible meanings. It suggests that, frequently, in addition to being used for clothing, textiles in burials were utilised for wrapping either human remains or objects placed together with human remains as burial gifts. The chapter outlines different purposes and intentions, and provides protection they most likely carried other, deeper significance in the context of early Iron Age European burial rituals. The most obvious nongarment use of textiles in burials is as funerary shrouds in inhumation graves, although despite the frequent interpretation of surviving fragments as such, there is little direct evidence. Homeric' ritual spreads among the Etruscan elites, as attested by the textile finds from seventh-century BCE. Etruscan burials. The geographical distribution of the swords containing fabric traces matches relatively closely the distribution of the western and central groups of Hallstatt culture, that is, an area covering the North-West Alps and the Main/Rhine confluence.

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