Discussion meeting with Dr Femke Lippok on "Death and All Its Customers: Connectivity and Ritual Economy in Early Medieval Burial Practices"

Across north-western Europe, between the 5th and 7th centuries CE, objects were deposited with the dead in strikingly similar ways. A dataset of 17 cemeteries in the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France and the German Rhineland reveals not only shared burial practices but that these changed in similar ways. Traditional interpretations have explained such similarities in terms of ethnic templates or top-down elite influence. This paper argues instead that these patterns cannot be adequately explained without considering both the social transmission and the economic significance of burial. Drawing on the concept of ritual economy, it suggests that the sustained investment in grave goods reflects participation in socially embedded systems of value and exchange. Within this framework, the observed similarities are best understood as the product of well-connected rural communities, in which practices were shared, adapted and maintained through ongoing interaction, while retaining regional variation.

Organized by the CRASIS Mortuary Ritual Network

Invited speaker Dr Femke Lippok is a postdoctoral researcher in the "COCO: connected communities in Early Medieval Europe" project at Leiden University