Grave-Goods as Gifts in Early Saxon Burials (ca. AD 450-600)

Abstract

This paper considers the possibility that Anglo-Saxon grave-goods, rather than having been the life possessions of the deceased, may have been gifts to him or her, thereby directly effecting a relationship between the survivors and the donor. This cautions against ‘life-mirror’ approaches to burial data that assume a reflective correspondence between the wealth of the deceased in life and in death. It also takes a Deleuzean approach to signs, emphasizing them as a means of directly producing something, social relations in this case, rather than as a means of communication and as symbols to be decoded. Different lines of evidence are explored to determine, first, if any grave-goods were more likely to have been gifts and then to establish the possible scope of such actions, so that we might have some confidence that we are dealing with a practice, rather than with idiosyncratic, isolated instances.