Embedded Files
Burial Goods and Its Prestige Values
Burial Goods and Its Prestige Values
It is customary to associate a person's status with their funeral goods. Burial or funeral goods are items discovered along with human skeletal remains. Prior to determining the connections between the burial items and the person who is interred, it is appropriate to assess the nature of the burial goods. It's likely that the objects are related to the individuals who buried the deceased rather than the deceased themselves.
According to ethnohistory and ethnography, the elements of prestige associated with the elites and nobility in the Philippine context were gold, silver, ivory, semi-precious stones, clothing made of imported Chinese silk, or intricately woven cotton. These typically serve as symbols of strength and indications of privileged rank.
Similar efforts to determine status through the use of burial goods have been done in earlier assessments outside the Philippines. Alekshin [1983] gathered three techniques for determining the value of grave goods assemblages from earlier works:
Assessing Wealth
Assessing Wealth
Burials with a high number of objects found in graves and diverse types of artifacts were considered wealthy. Burials containing rare materials, meaning these materials were seldom found in a particular site, were likewise considered wealthy.
The type of material used will have a significant impact on the artifact's prestige value. Alekshin emphasized that these criteria, however, did not take into account the materials used to create the pieces Much more expensive than ten porcelain items is a piece of gold that was discovered in a grave.
Other Factors
Other Factors
Raw Material: Color, texture, luster, and other physical properties
Source of Material: Diffifulty obtaining an item. "The source could be far away and scarce; far but abundant; near but scarce; or near and abundant."
Time and energy required to manufacture and acquire an object: Energy spent in looking for the materials used. If you have enough time to search for these instead of food, it means that you have more than enough food to feed your family.
Cultural Meaning: Subjective. Differs from every culture and generation.
Are the Gold Peggings of the Bolinao Skull considered Burial Goods?
Are the Gold Peggings of the Bolinao Skull considered Burial Goods?
Pegging, a type of gold dental decoration that represents both aesthetic and social values, was once a status symbol. Prior to death, gold pegging was a procedure reserved for members of more exclusive communities.
Therefore, gold pegging is not a grave good. A skeleton with gold pegs denotes its prestigious social standing. Only 8 of the 51 burials contained teeth that had been gold-pegged, indicating that not everyone is a fan of the technique. Some funerals contain teeth with metal adornments but no gold pegging.
Even though the Bolinao skull itself cannot be technically considered as a grave good, the discovery of which still led the field of Archaeology towards pursuing different studies which can contribute to our endless quest of knowing more about the past. It is also important to take note that every material that is excavated by archaeologists has its own importance and all of these cannot simply be under a universal umbrella standard of whether or not something is prestigious or not.
Simply knowing that all of these can pave way the to discovering the past is already a win for the industry of Archaeology here in the Philippines.
Page updated
Report abuse