Talk:Urnfield culture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Malformed references

I see

• Konrad Jad?d?ewski, Urgeschichte Mitteleuropas (Wroc?aw 1984).

and can't find an entry in the page history where this was not corrupted with ??? - does anyone know the correct reference? --Nantonos 15:00, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Why Cremation?

Funeral practices are a form of religious practice, and religious practices are among the most conservative of all cultural or linguistic elements. The question rises, then, of why inhumation gave way to cremation.

My answer is that some sort of religious innovation occured. I gather that cremation seems to be associated particularly with warriors. No specific ethnic or linguistic group can be clearly linked to them, tho' Italics and Celts are often linked to it. It is also

"the major late Bronze Age ... culture of temperate Europe" (JP Mallory, EIEC, "Urnfield Culture".

It was a prestige culture, probably the elite culture; it is hard not to think of it as a warlord culture. The Urnfield culture is reputed to have originated in the Balkans (references?).

Interestingly, the dates for Urnfield are the same as those for Mycenae. And the traditional date for Homer, ca, 800, comes at the end of the Urnfield culture. While the Mycenaeans practiced inhumation, and in fact, there is seems to be NO evidence for Urnfield practices in Greece (and particularly, in Thessaly), we nonetheless have the funeral of Patroclus in Book 23 of the Iliad, which is both an Urnfield burial and a kurgan burial -- with human sacrifices, and the addition of animal sacrifices, the ashes put into an urn and buried at the base of a tumulus. Homer has transmitted to us something very interesting, something that does not at all fit into the Mycenaean scheme, but nonetheless reflects something from further north, the steppe perhaps, but more likely, from the Balkans, something definitely Urnfield-related.

The picture I get is of late bronze age multi-ethnic war-bands wandering all over the place, following a barbarous war-god religion, a religion that perhaps saw the smoke of the dead warrior's pyre as a sort of translation into proto-Valhalla. It may have also been a recognition that wandering warriors could not stay put to watch over a proper inhumation, so the deceased and his grave-offerings were all incinerated, just to keep the grave-robbers away.

As for Patroculus, I think Homer is just inserting some stuff unrelated to the Greeks, but quite pertinent to his stock of old stories. --FourthAve 07:34, 10 August 2005 (UTC)