To add a little context to the previous post: I’ve taken a course in short story writing, and Silencing the Echo might have been an entry for a short story competition in Wales — but I decided against entering it.
The inspiration comes from a druid who campaigned for reburial of prehistoric remains in the UK. Avebury, I think. Reburial was, he said, a matter of “common decency”. As phrases go, it’s a good one. It taps into the British sense of decency and reasonableness. Or at least it does at first.
When it keeps coming up again and again it loses the feeling of a sincere spontaneous statement and starts looking like a soundbite. Looked at closely, it gives away the intolerant nature of some of the campaigners.
Imagine we’re on opposite sides, and I’m campaigning for common decency. What does this make you? I suppose it could make you uncommonly decent, but the insinuation is a moral failing rather than simply a matter of disagreement, and when the same tag is used over and over then it looks less like an accident.
An unquestioned assumption is that reburial is what the person buried would wish for. This is not certain.
For example, when I last looked it was agreed that Neolithic burials were weird. The burials were in long stone mounds covered with earth. Inside would be a number of chambers. People were buried in the chambers. Not just one, but many. Ribs might go in one chamber, thighs in another and so on. When I was studying this, the favoured explanation is that this symbolised the egalitarian Neolithic society. This seems to be falling out of favour.
The mounds themselves were in awkward places. If you tried to place a mound in the centre of a people’s territory then the territories looked very odd. If you put them at the edge of a territory then they make more sense. The usual interpretation is that the barrows then become a boundary marker, justifying the presence of the people there, because their ancestors are there. This may be true, but there is another possible explanation.
In a time when people were thought to live on as spirits after death, then a criminal poses a problem. Someone who has cursed the tribe and caused ritual pollution to harm the settlement while they’re alive is a dangerous person. What harm could they do after death? Simply killing them may not be enough, their spirit would have to be contained in the afterlife. Could dissembling the body and placing it in a secured chamber do this? It might explain the mix of bones. It would also explain why the tombs are at the edge of territories. This doesn’t rule out them being markers too, but there also be a practical* reason to keep them at the edge.
This explanation would also solve another problem. There are nowhere near enough people in these barrows to represent Neolithic burials. Most people were buried in an entirely different way. So it would appear that only an élite few were selected for an egalitarian burial. This makes no sense. One explanation is that the burials were for an élite, another is that they were for problem people. Barrows might be a prison for people who cannot be free after completing life imprisonment. If we’re going to take the concept of an afterlife seriously after death, we cannot assume that the spirit associated with the bones is happy about being buried.
Condemning the remains to destruction to satisfy the desires of a few people is a big step. One possible solution would be a sanctified vault for respectfully storing bones with Pagan oversight. The problem with this solution is that it would open the possibility for many pagans to connect with the remains, and this would remove the possibility of a modern élite deciding what can and cannot be done. People would have to behave with common decency toward each other.
*In this case I’m using the word practical from what might be their point of view.
