What about us non-elites? Do we matter?

I never really thought about it until our discussion in class on Friday but archaeology does tend to focus on high status burials. These seem to be the ones that most people are interested in, probably because they can be filled with valuable grave goods, rare items, and the bodies of once powerful rulers or royalty.  Can you blame people to be intrigued by these finds? Personally, I would rather read about Tutankhamun's tomb filled with golden treasures or Qin Shi Huang's terra cotta statues than a simple grave filled with nothing but a pile of bones.  I did some online research to look for evidence of archaeology of the middle or low class and I was surprised to find little.  In the articles that did mention the graves of non-elites, it was usually in order to compare them to the graves of high status people because using a comparison can help identify social stratification through differences in the grave goods (material, amount, rarity), monument style and size, grave location, and health (evidence of diet, nutrition, obesity etc.).


However, I did find a few interesting articles about a group of people who have a very low status: slaves. These articles focused on archaeological findings related to slaves and their sociocultural lives in the New World.  In an article by Charles Orser entitled The Archaeology of African-American Religion in the Antebellum South, Orser (1994) says that American archaeologists have a growing interest in New World Slavery such as what slaves ate, what their houses were like, what types of material culture they used, and their religious beliefs (p.91).  Orser focuses on studying the religion of slaves on various plantations during the 1800's in the American South to find out what African traditions were carried with the slaves to the New World.


Another article of interest is called, An African-Type Healer/Diviner and His Grave Goods: A Burial from a Plantation Slave Cemetery in Barbados, West Indies by Jerome Handlers.  In the article, the author discusses a burial - called Burial 72 - that was excavated from a plantation slave cemetery in Barbados.  The deceased slave was buried in the 17th or 18th century and he is considered significant because he was buried with several grave goods that were not found in other graves in the cemetery. The grave goods included an iron knife, metal jewelry, a pipe, fish vertebrate, dog teeth, and European glass beads along with other items. Handlers (1997) believes that these unique and elaborate grave goods reflect the man's "exceptional or non-ordinary status within the slave community" (p.102) and suggests that he was important in his community and might have been a healer/diviner or a medicine man.  I found this article interesting because it considers status differences among slaves and shows that a person can have different statuses depending on the context.  In the context of this specific plantation cemetery, it appears that the man in Burial 72 had high status in comparison to the other slaves buried in the slave cemetery but the man also had low status in comparison with the high class people buried in other cemeteries. It is all relative.

I found these articles interesting because they focus on a different class of people than the ones I usually read about.  I think it is important to look at different groups of people in a society to allow us to get the big picture of the social organization, beliefs, politics, and life in general.  Low class and middle class people tend to make up the majority of a society's population so they must not be ignored just because they were not buried with shiny objects. 

References:

Handler, Jerome S. 1997.  'An African-Type Healer/Diviner and His Grave Goods: A Burial from a Plantation Slave Cemetery in Barbados, West Indies', International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 91-130. 

Orser, Charles E. 1994. 'The Archaeology of African-American Slave Religion in the Antebellum South.' Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Vol. 4, pp 33-45