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Remarkable double burial

March 18, 1999

Archaeologist P.W. van den Broeke discovered this remarkable grave last summer when he was excavating a small Iron Age burialground. C-14 dating has pinpointed the burial in the fifth century BC. In the region cremations were predominant in this period. But for a short span of time some deceased were inhumated. The Iron Age burialground of Lent, belonging to a farming community, contains some twenty cremations and five inhumations. Behind the inhumations Van den Broeke suspects the influence of the Celtic Marne-culture of Northern France. This influence can also be shown in the local pottery. However, why few people were inhumated while in the same the others were cremated remains unclear.
Van den Broeke stumbled on the upper burial by accident as no discolourations of the soil had revealed its presence. This person, a grown up, lay face down with one hand in the neck. Van den Broeke wanted to recover the grave as a whole, en bloc so to speak, to be able to study the burial later on in laboratory-circumstances. When having the block lifted, the lower grave came to light.
The man in the lower grave, 1,71 metres long, was about forty years old when he died. Left and right and just below his acoustic ducts a bronze ring was stuck horizontally to his skull. According to Van den Broeke these rings must have hold the plaits of the man. Up to now it was unkown that men of this period had this kind of hairdo. A third bronze ring was stuck vertically and a little above the plait-ring to the right side of the skull. A earring, says Van den Broeke. As for the upper deceased person: burials face down are a rarity. The symbolism behind it is unkown, but in any case it seems to demonstrate no appreciation for the individual involved.
What then could be the relationship between the two? Van den Broeke says: "The upper grave and the other inhumations in this burialground were laid down on the same depth. I think that these people knew there two bodies going to be buried here. They dug the first gravepit extra deep, laid the man down, filled the deep pit and buried the second body over it, transverse. And the hand in the neck of the upper person, a gesture of selfprotection? The whole situation makes me think of a Bronze Age burial found near Paderborn in Germany. A man and a woman side by side, the head of the woman beside the feet of the man. This woman had a skull injury and seems to have been killed on the spot and buried together with the already deceased man. And well, then inevitably your thoughts wander off to an observation Caesar wrote in De Bello Gallico".
Van den Broeke refers to Caesar describing customs among the Gauls. Caesar wrote a couple of hundred years later than the Lent burial took place, and talks about burning, but possibly something similar happened here.
Caesar: When the master of the house from a distinguished family has died, the familymembers gather. Is a suspicion arising about this death, they interrogate the widow as if she were a slave, and when found guilty, she is horribly tortured and burnt alive afterwards. The burialceremonies are, given the level of civilisation of the Gauls, splendid and costly. Everything of which people think that the deceased during their lives were fond of, animals too, are thrown in the fire and not long ago, and if the ceremonies were carried out properly, even slaves and serves, who were known to be close to them, were burnt together with them.
(Translation by the author of this press release.)


Sunderland, University of