Life, Death and Burial – Multidisciplinary Approach to Interpretation of Medieval and Early Modern Age Evidence

Abstract

The combination of humanistic and scientific analyses provided a much more reliable and comprehensive interpretation of burials and helped resolving some very old research dilemmas. Addressing two separate problems, the article presents the examples of royal and military funerary practices from Serbia. Royal funerals are among the most important topics in European Mediaeval studies. They represent a complex set of phenomena, illustrating biological past (including aDNA profiles), habits and everyday activities of the buried royalties, and their social status and cultural identity, in many cases clearly confirmed in historical sources. On the other hand, archaeologically under-studied burials of soldiers and other participants in wars from the beginning of the Modern Ages provide ideal conditions for the development of theoretical conceptions and methodological tool-kits. Military burials analysed so far reveal the characteristic bone injuries, presence of infectious diseases, level of health protection of military personnel, entheses and bone deformations assigning the buried to infantry or cavalry, but also direct causes of death or execution. The observed phenomena make solid grounds for establishing health markers in soldiers of the early Modern Age.