11th January 2014, 03:32 PM
BAJR Wrote:Is there any material out there on average weight of material from Roman cremations? Asking for someone trying to deal with bags of remains.
Bone or total deposit?
The recovered weight varies hugely depending on how the remains were recovered. For a lot of older excavations they just picked out the bigger bits of bone and the rest went on the spoil heap, hopefully these days the entire content of the burial pit or whatever is retained and floated, although of course often a lot of that charcoally fill with white bits in has been chucked before the digger gets down to the pot and realises their mistake - this is the kind of information which rarely if ever even gets written down, let alone passed on to the specialist or mentioned in the final report. I've had several prehistoric crems where there was none or very little bone actually in the pot, it was all in the surrounding fill - some Roman crems seem to be the same. Also, the weights can potentially be fairly unreliable since you can't tell how many of the 'unidentified' bits are actually part of the person rather than bits of accompanying animals, bone furniture mounts etc - this can vary wildly depending on the skill/knowledge of the person doing the analysis, and of course how much time/budget they've been given. I had 4 crems out yesterday selecting C14 samples where actually there isn't a single bit of identifiably human bone between them (although all the hobnails in one are a bit of a giveaway, plus they were buried in amongst inhumations)
While we're on the subject, is there any evidence for columbaria in Roman Britain? (?that the right name - the buildings they have elsewhere with all the niches for crems) We've got one that seems to have been kept somewhere for 2-3 centuries before it finally got stuck in the ground [and another who was accompanied by a 200yr-old pot...ergo the cremation vessel isn't a good guide for dating, always get C14] - could explain a lot of the 'missing' Roman population, if they weren't burying them :face-thinks: