Grave 95 at Mill Hill, Deal, Kent. This woman was the oldest burial in the cemetery and received a... [+]
In spite of the fact that women in Anglo-Saxon England were living to a ripe old age, a new archaeological study in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology called "Sex and the Elderly" shows that they were often disrespected in death.
Archaeologists Christine Cave and Marc Oxenham of the Australian National University closely examined the burials of almost 200 people from the 6th century AD, a time when pagan burials still dominated England. Their research focused on three cemeteries: Greater Chesterford in Essex, Mill Hill in Kent, and Worthy Park in Hampshire.
One problem in osteological analysis of ancient remains is estimating the age at which a person died. Traditional methods are not very precise past about 50 years old, meaning it can be difficult to identify older people in archaeological cemeteries. Cave and Oxenham, however, used a new method of aging that they developed to identify very old individuals.
Employing this method on the three Anglo-Saxon sites, the researchers discovered that older women were more commonly found than were older men. That is, a much higher proportion of females than males was found in age groups over 55 years old. More interestingly, the researchers found that "when the oldest three individuals from each cemetery were identified, it was observed that seven were female and two were male."
While the longevity of women compared to men makes sense in the 21st century, as statistically women live several years longer on average, it has long been assumed that events such as childbirth in the pre-antibiotic era led to higher rates of mortality for women than for men. The researchers' finding therefore means that it is important to consider new techniques of aging in order to better understand the lives and deaths of older people in ancient times.
With older Anglo-Saxons identified, Cave and Oxenham looked into differential burial treatment, asking whether older women and older men were treated differently in death. To do this, they classified burials into normative and non-normative burials. Non-normative burials, they write, include "burial in a reverse orientation, careless burial, the scattering of rubble over the burial, and prone [face-down] burial." While there is no consensus on what non-normative burial means -- differential status, displeasure with the dead, or just atypical burial for no known reason -- looking at who was buried differently is an important line of evidence for understanding social roles in the past.
The archaeologists found that, while men did receive non-normative burials, more women received them than men in every age category. "Only women were buried face down, or prone," they note, "a form of non-normative burial treatment often seen as having negative connotations." In fact, two of those prone women appear to have been bound or restrained.
Additionally, "older men are more likely to receive high status [grave] goods," Cave and Oxenham write. "Whereas women receive few high status burials as they age, men receive more."
Only one older woman, from the Worthy Park cemetery, received a very high-status burial. She was older than 75 years at death, and buried with a copper alloy brooch, a beaded necklace, copper belt, and other objects. "The evidence provided by this woman," the archaeologists say, "suggests that not all women were regarded relatively negatively or neutrally, and that some attained or retained high status in their old age." These objects may also suggest that, like today, beauty was considered a major aspect of feminine identity in the Anglo-Saxon time period.
In interpreting these burials, Cave and Oxenham suggest that while women tended to live longer in the communities represented here, their status was noticeably less than that of the oldest men. "One possible reason is that men have higher mortality rates, but women greater morbidity." This means that, even though women were living longer, their general health -- and appearance -- may have been much poorer.
Although human biologists still do not know why exactly women outlive men -- it could relate to the female immune system, hormonal effects, or the properties of the extra female X chromosome -- Cave and Oxenham's article makes plain the importance of identifying older individuals in past communities. Now that bioarchaeologists are better able to understand the end of life, we can begin to ask questions about the quality of those lives and the social, cultural, and status changes that correlate with the aging body.
