Funerary Practices and the Construction of Religious and Social Identities in the South-East of Gaul from the 4th to the 10th Century

Abstract

How might funerary archaeology contribute to the discussion about religious identities in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages? In answer to this question, I describe the different ways in which religious and social practices are expressed and evolve in a given context. In Roman Gaul, the large-scale switch to inhumation in the second half of the 3rd century may be linked to a change in perception of the idealised image of the deceased, and is not accompanied by any change in burial practices or in the organisation and dynamics of funerary areas. A century later, traditional funerary practices are widely represented in the archaeological series, but funerary areas are emerging whose organisation and dynamics differ from those of the early Roman empire. In larger cities, some are developing around a funeral basilica erected on the mausoleum of a saint, and their graves clearly show changes from past practices. These new funerary expressions, which become exclusive in the second half of the 5th century, can be linked with the rise and the structuring of Christianity, along with social changes. During the Early Middle Ages, before the completion of the parish system in the 11th century, societies successively build their Christian identity. Using their burial customs and the organisation of their deceased, these societies display their socio-cultural norms, both inherited from and partly reshaped throughout their history. Our archaeological data show that in the funerary sphere, sense of religious identity is not expressed in the same way at the end of the 4th, 6th, 8th and 10th centuries, and that the real break between Antiquity and the Middle Ages relates mainly to the silencing of individual and familial memory in favour of the construction of a collective Christian memory.