Howard Williams is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester, England, specializing in mortuary archaeology, and cremation in the early Middle Ages. His academic journey began at the University of Sheffield, followed by an MA in burial archaeology at Reading University, and a PhD focusing on early Anglo-Saxon cremation practices in southeast Britain.

In this episode we talk about:

Find more about Professor Howard Williams and cremation in the Early Middle Ages through:

Read and purchase the book, Cremation in the Early Middle Ages, via Sidestone Press: https://www.sidestone.com/books/cremation-in-the-early-middle-ages

You can also read the 2020 open-access edited collection Digging into the Dark Ages: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781789695274m.ca/

Notes from the start

The taphonomic impact of scavenger guilds in peri-urban and rural regions of central and southern Alberta. Part I – Identification of forensically relevant vertebrate scavengers (Journal of Forensic Sciences 2023)

Get Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist, the first Elise Marquette novel, here.

Do you want to be the first to hear a Scattered episode? Become a Patreon member and get the next episode before everyone else: https://www.patreon.com/c/YvonneKjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast? Do you have a question about working with human remains? Do you have a search story to share? Email at [email protected] or contact me through the contact form on my website: yvonnekjorlien.com.

Support the podcast and my research through:

Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research?

Check out the Scavenging Study: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/.

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for coming on my podcast. This is a lovely, I guess, diversion from regular programming because I’ve been trying to get somebody on here to talk about mortuary archaeology and you are the man. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What’s your current role? And then we’ll get into your origin story and get into the nitty-gritty.

Howard Williams: Thank you so much, Yvonne. It’s lovely to be here. And yeah, my name is Howard Williams and I’m professor of archaeology at the University of Chester in England in the UK, but very much on the next to the Welsh border. I happen to live in Wales, just over… I see England every day. I cross the border. But the university is in England. and I live in Wales but I’m in that borderland. I teach at the university a range of topics and on archaeology programs to undergraduates, MRes masters by research and I supervise PhD students. I research a range of fields including mortuary archaeology, the early middle ages, and the history and theory of archaeology, and public archaeology. Death comes into all of those in one way or other. That’s who I am and that’s what I do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I find UK and Europe archaeology fascinating because we don’t really have those Ages here in North America.

Howard Williams: No.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We have pre-contact, contact, and post-contact. That’s pretty much, the overlying timeline. It fascinates me about the ages. So I’m always having to consult some sort of reference material because that wasn’t the basis of my training. The basis of my training was all North American. So anytime somebody says Middle Ages or whatever, I’m like, Google it. What is that time frame?

Howard Williams: Yeah. Yeah. these frames of reference are a curse as much as a blessing. And they bracket people in terms of what they study, who they talk to, how they define themselves.  So, yeah, one level I’m a medievalist in terms of I do work with historical sources as well as archeological resources, but it’s a very early historical period, so I have dialogue and a lot of constructive dialogue with prehistorians and across disciplines with anthropologists and others as well.

So, it’s a really fun period and region to look at Northwest Europe in the early Middle Ages, sort of in popular terms, early medieval Wales, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, that kind of stuff. But it’s the period of time which has the most problematic and sketchy terms that get used and abused all the time. People are really interested in the early Middle Ages and not always for good and healthy reasons. But it is a time that is really fascinating because you have some historical sources, a lot of new archaeological finds. And so I’ve been interested in the history of that field and also the burials of that period in particular.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, how did you get into it? Were you one of those people that kind of came out of the womb wanting to be an archaeologist or were you formed by other circumstances?

Howard Williams: I don’t know. I’ve often actually thought about what my origin story is and I’ve written it and told it in different ways when people ask it. So I’m probably sound, like I’m making it up because I keep changing my narrative because I don’t think there was a single moment I can’t recall. I was very much interested in deep time in natural history, in paleontology, in archaeology when I was very young and I suppose when I went to university I genuinely hadn’t a vision of a career in archaeology.  I just wanted to do a three-year subject. First generation going to university. I had an older brother who did physics with astrophysics and I thought what a subject would I like to do and I could actually maintain an enthusiasm with. And I say this to potential students as well because I think there’s a lot of perhaps hyperbole amongst people who do make it in the field that they choose and that somehow ‘I was destined to it’ and ‘I remember once my father said…’ or ‘my mother picked up a fossil and immediately I knew it’ was or that kind of thing but I don’t think… I just kept my options open.  I went on some few voluntary digs at the age of 16 18 went to university and did it at the University of Sheffield. I got a BSE archeological science in what was then a big thriving dynamic department of archaeology that sadly just closed. But in the 90s it was a real full of some of the big names in European and British archaeology. and then I went on and I just kept going with it really. So I did an MA in burial archaeology at the University of Reading with then professor Bob Chapman and Dr. Heinrich Härke, Professor Heinrich Härke and Professor Richard Bradley, some quite well-known figures in the world of prehistoric and early historic archaeology in Britain and Europe. Then I stayed at Reading to do a PhD, supervised by Heinrich, looking at specifically early Anglo-Saxon period that’s fifth-sixth century CE cremation practices in southern, southeast Britain.

So it was a really interesting three and a half years. Then I applied for a few lecturesships and was told don’t apply for lecturesships, you’re too inexperienced and you won’t get it and the fools gave me a job and at Trinity College Camarthen as a lecture in archaeology and that was in 1999 and then I was there for three years. I was made permanent but it was a very small place and I jumped from a permanent contract to a temporary contract to go to Cardiff University on a replacement job for two years replacing Professor John Hines, who was on research leave, who’s a quite eminent early medieval Anglo-Saxon archaeologist. I stayed for one year and then jumped to a permanent job at University of Exeter, was there for four and a half years. Then jumped again to the University of Chester, where I still am and they made me senior lecturer when I was appointed in 2008. Then I was appointed to a personal chair as a professor of archaeology in 2010 and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

So I’ve sort of went down the academic route quite quickly. I’ve done a range of field work, but also a lot of my work is desk based. I haven’t done active field work for about a decade for a variety of personal and circumstantial reasons, but I’m still actively doing research as well as teaching on those fields I was talking about.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What attracted you to mortuary archaeology? To the burials, the cremation?

Howard Williams: Yeah, good question. I mean it was my undergraduate degree at Sheffield where I was taught by, among others at UCL, Professor Mike Parker Pearson who did funerary archaeology module and I was also taught by Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, who is a human osteologist or biological anthropologist I think is the term now, and I get confused with the terms, but, you know, bones. Mike introduced me to the anthropology and the archaeology of death, more broadly. And then with Andrew and Beth Riga, as well, we did the paleopathology modules and the human osteology modules.

And so I thought this is really good stuff because you can get really a connection to, not only the lives and experiences of past people through their bones, but you can get in touch with and get access to and think about the complex ways in which people dealt with their own mortality. And it’s about cognition. It’s about emotion. It’s about identity and social memory and themes that really connect us today to who we are. I think we can explore in the human past through archeological evidence.  It’s not simply about just how people lived. It’s about how they died, how they engaged with the deaths of others. And so I thought that was a really fascinating field that connected up other disciplines, the history of death, anthropology and sociology of death.

And on my master’s degree, I was in a really interesting position because I was working on a burial archaeology MA with Heinrich and Bob. But we also had access to sociology professor Tony Walter who’s a big name in the sociology of 21st century deathways in Britain, and Ralph Hullbrook who’s a historian of early modern death.  There are people in other departments all interested in death and society, how we can explore the relationship of mortality to social conditions and how those change over time. So it was kind of a theme that just grabbed me undergraduate level and I just pursued it through and then when I did my PhD it was always going to be death.

And there’s been a lot of work done on the early Anglo-Saxon unburnt dead, the inhumation burials, where in the fifth, sixth, and seventh going on into the seventh century, we have a period where there’s a lot of furnishings, a lot of rich arrangements of treatments of the dead in unburnt.  But alongside that, there’s a lot of people who are being cremated and their ashes collected or cremains, as the funerary industry term is, and collected into ceramic urns often and put into the ground as well. And most of the attention had gone on the unburnt dead because they are seemingly a much more easier resource for in terms of human remains are better preserved, the artifacts are better preserved, and so most of the studies had focused on them but I knew there were very far fewer studies have been done on the cremated material. So I thought I didn’t do primary osteological analysis myself but I used the work of others and synthesized and analyzed the burials looking at variability and change over time in. That was just such a fascinating piece of work. Like most PhDs, you hate it by the end, but I think it was a really great choice to explore. So yeah, it was always going to be death for me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You’re preaching to the choir. I completely understand. But when I tell people I have a podcast about dead people, they kind of look at me sideways. So, any time… the people who are attracted to death and the dying, we’re a different sort. And so, I always like to hear people’s stories. Yeah.

Howard Williams: I mean, I didn’t go through a goth phase or anything like that. It wasn’t like an extension of personal identity, which I know some people that is a thing.  And I’m not mocking it, in the same way that I know people go through all kind of, phases in their life of interest in particular things that stay with them and, help explain their trajectory, but, they’re no longer that. But I was never particularly religious. I’m not particularly spiritual. It’s nothing like that. And it’s not anything to do with a particular aesthetic or it was more about the rich promise of the data to allow us to get at past lives and people’s interactions with their mortality. That was the thing that captured my fascination. And it’s like what it could tell us about the past rather than something about me if that makes sense.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, I understand. and you’ve just been, I believe, a co-editor on a recent book,…

Howard Williams: Yes. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cremation in the Early Middle Ages.

Howard Williams: Wish I can waft at you just there you are. I know that’s a podcast but I still feel like brandish a book is always a good feeling.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The tangible. You can smell it and touch it.

Howard Williams: Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

So yes, I’ve published quite a lot of reviewed journal articles and book chapters, but I’ve also tried to serve the field and promote my collaborators work, and work with them on a range of edited collections and journal special issues. But my latest edited collection is a really interesting book because we collected it in a different way.  I worked with a doctoral researcher, now postdoctoral researcher, from the Netherlands, Femke  Lippok, and Femke organized a research seminar at Leiden where she was doing her MA and then PhD on cremation in the early middle ages in 2018, just before a year and a bit before the pandemic and all that. I said to her I’ve done a lot of publications on cremation in early Saxon England but there really isn’t a book, a resource, for student scholars cognit fields that looks at the whole of Northwest Europe and draws together the latest research. Because of course cremated material it’s more difficult to do but we’re increasingly getting stable isotope analysis we’re getting the paleopathological, the osteological data, the contextual excavation data, the quality of excavations of cremation burials is improved massively, our data sets are improving, radiocarbon dating, meaning we can date material that hadn’t previously seen. We thought how do we do this? Do we do another conference and then an edited collection or should we do something different? Because we started during the pandemic we said why don’t we do it by structured interview? Because I’ve been doing edited collections with student contributions and then expert contributions and found it very difficult to get the experts to write.

So in previous projects, I’d already been doing structured interviews to get and actually worked to get perspectives you wouldn’t otherwise garner, so almost like a podcast but then what I would do is then I would transcribe, or me and Femke transcribed, asked questions, sent the manuscript to the author, the author added in citations, images, tables. We also did key information boxes, fact boxes for key sites and key issues. And basically what we’ve produced is a kind of more like a textbook, but it’s written in an informal sort of Q&A style.

I think in doing that we’ve produced something that’s not just simply another edited collection about a topic in archaeology. It’s actually quite I think easy to read but actually there’s more depth and enriched …we got things out of people we wouldn’t have perhaps got if we just let them write. I think I’m really proud of it.  I don’t know how it will be received, but yeah, we’ve got 19 chapters covering all from Finland’s Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain and Ireland. So, I think I probably missed a few, but we kept to Northwest Europe, but we could have extended it further if time had allowed.

But yeah, and it’s kind of silver open access, so you can read it online on the publishers website for a year and then they’re going to be downloadable PDF after a year or purchasable from Sidstone Press. But yes, it’s almost fully open access. We got some money from the EU funded ERC project that Femke was working on to help pay for the open access.  So, we’re very proud of this. Yes, it came out like we had a book launch just before Christmas and I’ve put that on YouTube. We had a good chat and with all the authors and some extra contributors and yeah, it’s a first of its kind.

So, this was the last time in Europe that cremation was popular before the 19th century reintroduction of the idea of cremation and the early middle ages where cremation goes out for a variety of reasons including Christianization and socio economic changes in different parts of Europe in this period and then cremation was just a very minor weird thing that some people did through the later middle ages into the early modern period. I think this sits an important story for the story of Europe and attitude to death as well as the detailed archeological evidence that we’re able to pull out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. I mean, that’s initially what hit me is that it’s a very broad topic and especially, if you’re just talking about Europe. So maybe give us some background about why cremation in the early Middle Ages, especially, it’s a thing that you need an edited collection about it.

Howard Williams: So obviously the story of death in the early middle ages has always been dominated by historical sources, but increasingly, since the 19th century, archeological evidence has helped to fill in the picture. These burials tell us about people’s life and their deathways and particularly since the second world war, 50s and 60s, across Europe, there’s been renewed dialogues over archeological discoveries that are telling the stories of the societies after Rome in the western Roman Empire collapses or fragments in the fifth century traditionally replaced by barbarian successor state. Some of them are Christian, some of them become Christian at various points. Right up into the Viking age, a time of invasion, diaspora, where there’s never actually a period in this period where there isn’t some invasion and diaspora.

But my point is, right the way through up to the 11th-12th century where we see the kind of more consolidation of European medieval states, kingdoms we see various different death rituals some of which are more perhaps familiar and fit into an orthodoxy of Christian practice and others that are either beyond or on the edges of that Christian world. And cremation has often been seen as pre-Christian or non-Christian. But it’s actually much more complicated than that. And the new archeological evidence and the new radiocarbon dating we’ve got is showing us that surprise, surprise really people aren’t doing what the church tells them. People aren’t doing what their kings are telling them. People are doing a lot of crazy stuff. We’re finding that local and regional patterns of the way people are disposing of the dead across Europe doesn’t really fit into any of these simple historical models. And at one level we kind of guessed that 50 years ago, but it’s really refining it now.

So to give you some examples — I’m dumbing it down massively, so if anyone who is an expert in these areas, hears this, please be aware — but the standard model for say, Ireland, the island of Ireland is that Christianity arrives in the sort of late fourth- fifth century, everyone converts to Christianity, Christian golden age. everyone’s, just dancing around colored green, happily being Christian culture and then the Vikings ruin it all and the Normans make it worse and then the English make it worse again. And it’s that story. But actually what the archeological evidence he’s finding is that actually early medieval Ireland, we’ve got evidence of not only burial away from churches is continuing right up to so from the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth century,10th century and 11th centuries but cremation, something that would traditionally be seen as not Christian, is continued to be practiced right up into the 9th-10th centuries and people can argue to their blue in the face about how godly and Christian the early Irish were. Maybe they were but they were certainly not adverse to doing things that were not sanctioned by the church. I don’t think any churchman would had any choice or control over death rituals. At best they may be interested in how people getting people baptized but how people lived, married, and died is something the church couldn’t control until much later, centuries.

And so it’s kind of many people in who are specialists in the early middle ages would go we knew this already  But it’s filling in the gaps actually enriching our story with the archeological evidence to show yes and here’s the evidence. And if you talk to any scholars of later medieval Europe where the church is supposedly having all power and control, we know that’s not happening either. And there’s lots of local variation there. But my point is in these centuries that in Ireland that is traditionally Christian, people are still doing a lot of variable things with their dead.

And likewise we can see the evidence coming out from Europe is showing us in the low countries, in Netherlands and Belgium, cremation inhumation being used as options within societies for generations and generations. So as with perhaps our societies too, whether we’re talking about Canada, the US, Britain, Holland, France, people have options and people are exploring those options. It’s not always clear why people are choosing one or the other. So there’s not one early medieval death way. There are myriad of different ways in which people are disposing of the dead. And I suppose that’s the story we’re pulling out with the book is local and regional variability. N ot a simple narrative.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because mortuary archaeology, as you said, can shed light on not just lifeways but also death ways and how the living treat the dead, it’s interesting when we have alternative options or perhaps alternatives or changes in the way things are done. And so I find it fascinating that, in your example for Ireland, if the church says do it one way, but then you’ve got some people that are doing it another way, to me that would speak of, there must be a reason why they’re not doing it the standardized or the, sort of ordained way by the church. What would that say to you?

Howard Williams: Absolutely. I think it says to me is that actually burial practice remains kinship focused. So I think it takes a long time, and perhaps never, that large parts of Europe have the church dominating deathways.  I mean, in urban context in the later middle ages, sure, but I’m just saying that – and, yes, people will be burying in churchyards from the 10th-11th century in England, for example, but it takes many centuries for that to formalize and those structures to be in place and even then I think there are only certain moments of the funeral where actual priests and other agents of the church would want to or dare to intervene on what goes on.

And so I think funerals are multi-authored, right? They’re places where the dead person might have a say, relatives have a say, neighbors have a contribution and perhaps have a say. And maybe religious specialists formalized and recognized and informal like the old woman of the village who washes all the bodies, will have a role in these kind funerary choices.  And I think that there are moments in early medieval Europe where practices might be a literal two fingers to the authorities, but I think in most cases it’s just more we’re doing this stuff yet, and if someone says, I don’t think you should be doing that. There are a few sources from early saying cremation was seen as pagan, but not so much, they weren’t so much interested in the cremation being pagan as human sacrifice, horse sacrifice, and infanticide being things that the church was more latched on to as things they didn’t want happening and eating horses as well. They didn’t like that. They saw that as pagan, but only in certain parts of Europe. So, it an interesting, it’s not so much burning the dead that was ever seen.  We don’t have actually a lot of evidence to show that anybody in the church was sitting around going, “do you know what’s really not on? Burning the dead. Yeah, I’ve always thought that.” There’s nothing in scripture that says this. It’s more… so I think a lot of this is down to — if I want to be crude about it –the kin still have the agency have the authority for much of the period I’m studying, the 5th to 11th centuries..

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, so it’s not so much the church saying you should do this. It’s more of the church not saying —

Howard Williams: Or not caring.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, or not caring. And so the family is more open to do whatever they want or need to do.

Howard Williams: Yeah. I mean, we don’t have many cremations in churchyard context. So, I think there is a sense that cremation goes when the church starts to have control over the places of the dead.  But I don’t think it’s because cremation is seen as anti-Christian. It’s more about the move towards controlling the process and the places. I’m not saying it’s irrelevant, but I think our evidence is showing it’s a much more rocky and complex path towards that Christian deathways being controlled by how people are being disposed of. So yeah, by the time people are getting churchyard burial, no one’s being burned or very few people are being burned. But it’s about how they get there is a much more complicated route.

So, if you were going to do a historical drama and feature this, you probably wouldn’t have a moment where someone comes to Denmark in the 10th century and goes, “I say, I’m a bit Christian. I think you shouldn’t do this type of things, you heathen types.” And they go, ” Okay.” I don’t think that would have been a conversation that was on the tips of people’s brains in the period. These are all about practices that may have never been part of a discursive conversation. And that’s something that we have to remember when we’re dealing with death rituals is that even today it’s very difficult to talk about death. And then when people do talk about it, they may cook up explanations and justifications on the spot for things they never really thought why they were doing what they were doing. So I don’t see why we should see people in the past as any more necessarily self-reflective on these things. Again our evidence is messy because I think people are messy in terms of the way they think and what they do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then, it’s all if there’s actually evidence and if there isn’t, then what kind of story are we going to make up to fill in the gap?

Howard Williams: Yes. Yes. A lot of this is back-projected narratives of Christian conversion, are like Just So stories of people seeing the light or most of that would have been a much more complex process anyway. And, yeah, so absolutely.

That’s the kind of reason why I think that topic is important and why this book I think is going to sort of be a new level for future research to build on, both whether you’re doing the field excavations because I think it’s making a lot of field archaeologists aware that cremation is an early medieval thing in their region and place. Because I think a lot of the time when they’re finding cremations they’re assuming they’re bronze age or earlier iron age and they’re not even getting them radiocarbon dated.

There’s a internal, like making people aware you should be looking for this stuff in areas and periods where they wouldn’t otherwise look. And so I happen to know — and I can’t talk about it because it’s literally not published yet — that there’s one region we don’t cover in this book where I happen to know, as we were finishing the book, the first evidence of cremation practices from the early middle ages was found. And in the book I have to frame it in the introduction as we haven’t found any, but is that because people haven’t looked? And knowing I’m kind of right. I knew that now they’ve radiocarbon dated some of these undated cremation deposits rather than being prehistoric there turning out to be early medieval.

And so I think there’s going to be a lot more of that in the next couple of decades as people realize that they should be looking for this. Dating the very perhaps innocuous small deposit of cremated human remains with a bit of animal bone and you bit of flint and it could be frankly anything from the mesolithic right the way through to the early middle ages. Some of them are going to increasingly turn up being early medieval in date.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Well, that’s delve into that because I did have a question about, are all cremations in an archaeological context: are the cremains always in an urn? Are they always going to be found within an urn or…

Howard Williams: No, no, no. Absolutely not.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Is it just a hearth? And they could be mixed up with burnt animal bones.

Howard Williams: Absolutely, absolutely. And this is one of the key things is that traditions, like in my field of analysis when I was doing my doctoral research on early Saxon period cremations where most of the cremation is… at least a selection of the body is being collected up with the animals that were sacrificed on the grave goods. They were putting whole cows and horses and dogs on pyres with people as well as joints of meat, such as sheep or goat and pig. The dead were clothed, they had pots and they had food and they had all this stuff. They were then collecting bits out of that and putting it in an urn at some later date and burying it. And that gives you a discrete context. We often find that in many different periods and places across later prehistoric and early historic Europe and we find that around the world.

But no, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to use ceramic. We have examples of other materials used as vessels from bark to leather to wood to bronze vessels. But also, you don’t need to ever there’s nothing telling you there’s universal rule that you have to collect up all the cremains and put them in one place, let alone put them in under the ground at all. 

So one of the things I’ve published on is the possibility — and we can come back to this as perhaps an interesting example of the absent dead — but in my period are we missing other burial rights that were involved at disposal above ground? One of the examples from the book is and one of the areas when I did my studies 22-23 years ago all my doctoral research, there was no attested early medieval cremations from Scotland, what is now Scotland, particularly the pictish territories of northern and eastern Scotland.  

During my Master’s, just before I started my PhD, I did field work at a site called the Clava Cairns, which are near the famous Culloden Battlefield of much later date and they’re now known to be early Bronze Age. They’re ring cairns and they’re very dramatic monuments and they’re now on the Outlander tourist trail because everyone wants to go to where that inspired the book that inspired the TV series. So the Clava Cairns are now quite a famous international, they were already actually quite famous in the 90s but they’re now extra extra famous. But we were excavating there and they had a secondary scatter of cremated material over the edge of one of the ring cairns and I jokingly said, “I bet it’s early medieval,” just because I was joking because I was one of the few early medieval archaeologists on the project. They were all prehistorians. I got, “Well, maybe.” I’m not trying to say I knew, but I just said it as a tease. Actually, when they got the radiocarbon dates back, this is Pictish, early medieval, it would have been. Now we’ve got more and more evidence that it’s not just these ethnic labels are all dodgy. It’s not just the Anglos and the Saxons, but also the Picts were also cremating the dead. And so this idea in the island of Britain, the idea there’s something ethnically or culturally Germanic about cremating the dead is nonsense. We’ve got clearly…

I’ll give you another example. I did a blog post only a few years ago, mocking the Bernard Cornwall adaptation of one of his book series, The Last Kingdom, where they had a fictional scene where a Cornish princess dies and Uhtred son of Uhtred and Alfred the Great, King Alfred, attend the cremation of a Cornish princess, because she’s pagan and Cornish in the late 9th century. And in my blog post only a few years ago I mocked that. I said that’s ridiculous. It maybe. But yeah, honestly, we know nothing about this. The idea that they would still be pagan in the 9th century and in Cornwall and burning the dead on in dramatic open air fires, I said, was nonsense. And I said, I can’t tell you too much, but let’s just say I’m going to have to eat my hat or eat my own words because it looks like we’ve got evidence now that in Western Britain as well as northern Britain, cremation was a thing. I’m not saying they were doing it as late as the 9th century. But, yeah, so Bernard Cornwall’s ahead of the curve as a fictional writer

This is the point is that we can mock sort of fictional portrayals of things but just sometimes by accident our evidence comes up that makes us go, “yeah, it wasn’t so ridiculous when they did that in that 1978 film or that book from 1985, or whatever it was because now we’ve got evidence of this.” This is one of those things where at the end of the day, we can be as confident as we want as academics, but the evidence is always going to challenge us and shift the picture as we find more out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it sounds like, if previously we had thought that cremation was either restricted to a time or a group or a region or even in how cremains were disposed of or buried. All of that is now off the table.

Howard Williams: Yeah. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There are no restrictions for time, group, area, even, scattering the ashes above ground. It’s all fair game now.

Howard Williams: It’s true. And I mean, obviously there’s trends. I mean, cremation is very rare in some places. So one of the case studies in the book is cremation in northern France in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods.  So an area that is Christianized early, a powerful kingdom, very complex varied regionality but the Merovingian dynasties and then the Carolingian dynasties dominate western Europe.  We have very few evidence of cremation because everyone’s nominally Christian and church burial starts taking place earlier. But one of the studies in this book reports on a single cremation burial found in a Carolingian period settlement in the fill of a storage pit and with some artifacts that are very much comparable to those from southern Scandinavia and dating to the 9th, early 10th centuries. I think, I can’t remember that’s exactly the date, but in other words from the Viking period.  And so it’s very tempting to go, “Yeah, it’s a Scandinavian raider.” And it may well be because for some, while I don’t like to just jump to those kinds of conclusions, the Frankish Empire was hit hard by Scandinavian raids from the late 8th and 9th century, and we have much less archeological evidence of that than we have in England. We have much more evidence in the archeological record of those Scandinavian armies moving around, Viking armies. There’s been long waiting for more evidence from northern France of Scandinavian presence: raiding, trading and settling. Of course Normandy becomes a sort of, at least in part, a Scandinavian colony that becomes a king, a duchy, and then obviously a kingdom in its own right. So you have that origin story of Normandy. We have to have more archaeological evidence going to come out. Cremation seems to be part of that picture.

So, yeah, all that’s a fun thing about archaeology, isn’t it? We always get new data and sometimes it tells us something about the history and the historical processes. Sometimes it challenges that those historical parables.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s the fun of it. Just when you think you’ve got the story figured out, you get a new puzzle piece. It’s like, where does this go? How does this fit in? You have to redo the entire puzzle.

Howard Williams: That’s half the fun.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It is. So, because you brought it up, that the one in the cremation burial in France, that this has to be a Viking. What does a typical Viking burial look like?

Howard Williams: This is the thing.  So, lots of Vikings are very popular on social media and media and popular culture. Everyone’s heard of the Vikings. They may not have heard of the Avars or the Franks or the Gepids or any other groups from the early Middle Ages. And part of the problem is that the Vikings are so tied to modern nationhoods and various people’s fantasies of who they are, and now increasingly aDNA is informing ancestral commercialized DNA testing results. So everyone wants to a bit get in on the Viking action, from TV shows and video games to personal ancestry, identities. It links into racialized identities and we have a whole white supremacist and white nationalist angles to the Vikings in North America, in Scandinavia, in Britain too.

So Vikings are a bit contentious, and so when I try and talk about Viking burial rights, I try to make the point that there’s no single way of disposing of the dead that is exclusively Viking. In fact, no one in the early Middle Ages — there’s a good reason for that — no one in the early Middle Ages went around calling themselves Viking. It’s not an ethnic term in that period. If anything, most likely origin for the term is simply someone describing someone on the seaborn venturing, raiding, trading, an expedition over water is probably the origin of the term. And since the 19th century, in particular, it’s become a label we’ve increasingly attributed to a period of northern European history. So, it’s a bit of a myth in itself.  There was a thing called a Viking society or Viking culture at all and some people call it old Norse culture but that’s equally a problematic labeling as well.

So I suppose the point is for if you wanted to use it just as a period and regional term, Viking period mortuary practices in Scandinavia, in areas where Scandinavians settle are incredibly varied. They’re disposing of the dead, burning them, burying them on, obviously our evidence comes from on land. The myth of a Viking boat being set alight by flaming arrows is a hallowed tradition that goes back to 1958 and Kirk Douglas, as Einar, in the film The Vikings, so it must be true. But seriously, that’s a bit of a modern myth, but the elements are there.

I’m a bit late to the party of realizing that How to Train Your Dragon 2, the animated film, has the same thing. There’s many different renditions of this firing your arrows. The warrior chief goes off and flaming boats. But there are actual early medieval sources that speak of pushing people out in boats over water, of scattering ashes on water. And so water was important. But my point in this context is there’s no single Viking funeral deathway. They were doing all manner of stuff and that’s only the stuff we have archeological evidence for because they’re probably disposing of the dead above ground. As I said elsewhere, in Europe, they’re probably doing lots of things we don’t have evidence for. So yeah, there’s no such thing as a Viking way of death or Viking funeral. It’s really a modern mashup of mythological sources, historical sources, and a bit of archaeology thrown into the mix.

But you if I showed a Viking period burial site to your audience, most of them would go what’s Viking about this and I would say actually nothing. What you got here is an object that is Hiberno-Norse, shows it’s probably made in Dublin and traded around the Irish Sea. This object is probably from Norway. This object is from southern eastern England. These people had these range of objects they were burying them with the dead, the burial tradition they weren’t going, “he must die like a Viking,” or, “I feel a bit ill today. Got a bad stomach. Quick, let me grab my sword so that I can die like a Viking.” Like in The Last Kingdom, everyone has to grasp a sword so they can go to Valhalla, and it’s a bit nonsense. I suppose what I’m trying to say is there’s so much modern nonsense thought about the Vikings, it’s an ongoing task to remind people that actually our evidence is not what people would like it to be.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that does the story that we make is not necessarily evidence-informed.

Howard Williams: Yeah, that’s a polite way of putting it. That’s the polite way. You’re much more neutral.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But fiction can be so much fun.

Howard Williams: But we do have evidence that were cremating people in boats, burying people in boats, and they may well have put people in boats and pushed them out into fjords and lakes, and they may have set fire to some of those. It’s not impossible. But we don’t actually have any archeological evidence of flaming boats that was, as per Game of Thrones, as per every fictional representation of the late 20th and early 21st century, either serious or comedic.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It makes for really good fiction, though. Makes for good drama.

Howard Williams: Yeah, it does. And people like the idea of a flaming journey, that the fire is not simply… but I think for most early medieval people, the fire is the journey, the fire, the transformation part of the …you don’t and the flames and the smoke. There’s a lot of animation in burning the dead open air. You don’t necessarily need to put it on a boat to have it disappear.  And I think a lot of that comes down to modern funerary industry ideas about a curtains coming down and the coffin is taken away from.  I think it matches up with our ideas of journeying and a spiritual idea that’s very Christian in some ways, even if, I’m not saying that everyone who thinks that way is Christian, but I’m saying it does fit into that our aesthetics and our expectations of death as a journey. And our fantasies and our fictions, from Tolken’s Middle Earth, to help us to navigate that in a very interesting way. And a lot of Tolken’s ideas were coming from the early Middle Ages and the mythology of Finland, Wales, but also Scandinavia. And so we have that sort of percolating through via our fantasy and our science fiction as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think that media, the film industry, social media is going to be maybe more inclined to be open to archaeological evidence before constructing their story? Can you see anything like that happen or is it just human nature for us just to make up the story and run along with it?

Howard Williams: It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because obviously I live daily with a sense of dread and despair every time I look at any kind of social media at what nonsense is being spewed now. And, yes, it’s very difficult to stay positive when you realize the level of misinformation about any topic, some of which you think what impact does that have on our world, through to the great pernicious earthshattering misinformation that is literally shifting politics and wars and responses to pandemics, and so on. So, it’s very difficult to stay positive. What I would say is that we have at least an opportunity to challenge, to push back. I’m not saying I’m not sure anyone listens, but I think we do have opportunities with social media now to push back and critique some of this nonsense for those who want to listen.

So, with AI imagery, with the ability to generate all manner of nonsense stories, myths and misconceptions of the early Middle Ages, whether it’s the Vikings and their deathways or anything else, are absolutely rife. And yet, I get a foot in the door as an academic to push back on some of that. And that’s what I try to do with my social media. And I’m not sure I’m doing it particularly well, but as I said, that foot in the door, at least I’m trying to do some of that because how the Vikings dealt with their dead may not seem to be something that matters; it’s something very academic, very esoteric.  But when you realize that some of these ideas about fatalistic conceptions of death, of warrior status, and warrior sacrifice and masculinity are feeding directly into various extremist movements today, if this helps people to think a little bit more critically about the basis of those ideas, I hope — I’m not saying I can directly — but indirectly you can chip away at some of that modern mythology by giving them good information.  And so it’s saying, “you’re wrong, it’s complicated”, “you’re wrong, it’s complicated,” may seem a bit of not a very constructive exercise with “that’s made up”.

Content has to be about storytelling and engaging people with fun stories as well. But I think there is the possibility that archaeology is being taken seriously. And I think that there’s been lots of discussions about where and how and with whom we should have these conversations about mortuary archaeology in the public domain. Should we be talk and I certainly feel strongly that I should not be talking with pseudoarchaeological grifters directly. I don’t want to have a debate with Graeme Hancock or any of these other people who have made careers and multiple books out of pedaling misinformation about the archeological record, but I do want to reach the audiences of people who are actually interested and for whom this may actually make a difference. Because it does have an impact even into fields as your own, with forensics, the things that, if we’re able to show that deep time human engagement with these death rituals, it does inform communities affected by disasters, by criminality of different forms, and what happens to their loved ones and hopefully their mourning, their restitution, their sense of restorative engagement. That’s what I’d like to think.  I haven’t done much work on that directly, but I like to think that if we are talking to the public in some form, we can help people understand what we do, wherever we do it. We don’t always get it right. We’re not perfect. It’s part of an ongoing burgeoning research field where methods are changing, ideas are changing, data is growing, but we are open. We’re not secretive like cabal, who are hiding the truth, which is what the rhetorics of pseudoarchaeology would have people believe about us and I think that’s really important to be open and dealing with those public conversations.

Yes, so what I’m trying to say is I often feel daily despair at what’s the point, but then I think a lot of people are listening and it’s rattling cages of those that would cozily sit there with their AI generated images of Viking warriors or Anglo Saxon funerals and I can say, “Well, actually, this is what we really know.” So I don’t know.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And it’s not like you’re just having a conversation with one person that isn’t recorded and can just, fade into the ether. You’re doing your due diligence to put it out there, and even if somebody doesn’t hear it in that moment, it is there for reference in the future.

Howard Williams: Absolutely. And I think that it’s people, I mean, while a lot of this the mortuary archaeology in the public arena stuff you say it has a short half-life, people are only watching my TikTok videos for half a day, but then they are finding them years later and getting occasional likes.  So people are searching for topics and finding a video I did about how we don’t actually have evidence that Picts were woad on their faces or that evidence of Anglo Saxon burial practice or what do we know about early medieval Wales, or I’ve challenged someone else’s narrative on something. They are finding it and I think that can be constructive. 

So, I just did a video a couple of days ago that’s gone not very viral, but it did get reaction. I reacted to a, I did a sort of stitch response to a very big and very good academic theologian Bible studies guy on TikTok and he’s great and we’re mutuals. But I said I don’t think his video explaining this late Roman burial was very good. I think he knew that I wasn’t having a go at him. I was able to say as a professor of archaeology these are the issues. While there’s a few people going, “look a drama between academics” actually it can be a really public forum to actually show the wider audience that we can respectfully disagree, we can show that — not necessarily, I didn’t actually disagree with anything he said but my points were that this is a news story rather than actual reviewed research but everyone’s commenting on this new burial showing the “rewriting the history of Christianity north of the Alps” is the story about a burial from near Frankfurt that has a third century silver case around the neck with a 18line Latin script evoking Jesus and St. Titus for protection. So, it’s a really international news story, really exciting archeological find. But I was saying that a lot of the commentators, including this very good TikTok creator who does Bible study stuff, are missing some key points.

So, I’m saying, we need to understand where this is and when it is and what it doesn’t tell us. We can’t tell…. And one of the things that an archaeologist, like myself, will try to keep emphasizing to the public is just because someone’s buried with something, it doesn’t mean they were that thing. So, just because you’re buried with an 18 line silver foil apotropaic prayer doesn’t mean you’re Christian at all. It just means that maybe someone gave it to you. I think it maybe, that’s a bit stark, I think there may very well be Christian. It is exciting evidence. It is the first evidence of Christianity north of the Alps. I’m not denying that. But I think we have to think very carefully about what we’re saying to the public about these things and qualify what the implications are.

And I think that is the job of where we can do…at one level we can be digital killjoys but also we can actually tell a better story by countering each other. Because everything’s so quick nowadays. There’s a rapid fire of press release reviewed study out and within 12 hours there’s 50 YouTube videos 89 TikToks and everyone’s written a blog about it. It’s very difficult to do that rapid work and still keep integrity. I think if we can improve our standards of doing that, start to work on how we do that responsibly and ethically, I think that’s something we academics can really make a contribution towards. Sadly though, there’s a lot of sensationalism within the academy too, and I think we’ve got to be very careful about how we balance this responsive quickfire reaction to new research.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I think that’s the beauty of that way information is nowadays, is that you don’t necessarily have to do it in the moment, because people are always searching. I think it’s more detrimental when somebody goes searching and they don’t find anything. It’s the same, when you were talking about cremation. Are people actually looking? It’s sad when people go looking or when they aren’t even going looking. But now they are. Even if an article is 5 years old, debunking or providing richer, more rigorous information at least it’s still there.

Howard Williams: I have great grave concerns about the AI scraping of my online content but equally at least I can say that some of my academic publications that are now open access after many years of not being, whether through my academia edu page or whether, people can go and consult them, and they can find out more detail. So, if they see a news article about a new archeological discovery –

And I’ve seen examples of this in my blog post, which I’ve been doing an Archaeodeath blog since 2014, of people going back to 2015, 2016 blog post I did about TV shows and films and going, “what did?” and I’m coming up in people’s Google searches about reflecting on The Walking Dead TV show series and how death is portrayed in it. I did a blog post about season 4 of The Walking Dead and how it represents cremation because I’ve done stuff on that kind of fiction as well. And people are actually reading that. They’re finding academics that trying to talk about those themes. Now, I’m not an expert in the zombie apocalypse but I am an expert in how people cremate make the dead.  So I can say firstly they’re technologically don’t know what they’re doing, but the key point is what does this tell us about this fictional future where people are trying to deal with an apocalypse and the undead walking everywhere. Why is even cremation featuring? What is the cultural baggage of 21st century North America particularly that is leading people to burn the dead in that TV show? So I’m able to sort of pick that apart a bit and sort of talk about what’s going on and I think people are reading it. Yeah. So I’m finding a lot of my old content is getting accessed and I think you’re absolutely right there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, I’m going to ask to maybe finish on pondering a question. What is the use of mortuary archaeology, especially nowadays? I mean, like I said before we started recording, I was delving into your recent blog post on necroviolence and that could be an argument for mortuary archaeology. It’s looking at how past deathways and lifeways have changed over time and show us how we are interacting now with our own deathways and lifeways. But for you, why continue with mortuary archaeology? what’s the purpose of studying it now?

Howard Williams: So, archaeology is the only field that can tell us the full human story from earliest times to our time and document even recent material engagements with material traces.  Mortuary archaeology as a subfield is the only way we can access the full depth, breadth, and complexity of human interactions with their mortality. That’s the way I would frame it to you. I would say it’s the only way we can draw on written sources, visual evidence. We can talk to even oral histories. That’s all lovely. And those can give us some really good sources. And I’m not just diminishing or disparaging other avenues towards understanding, but given that for 99% of the human story is prehistory, but also given how the stories of lives and deaths of most people living and dying today are not being told through historical, traditional, or sociological discourse, or verbal discussions.  We are the subject that can fill those gaps and provide a rich contextual story. It’s just local and global. We can go from the grand stories, the big narratives of how early the earliest people started to dispose of the dead. We have evidence that before our anatomical modern Homo sapiens, other hominin species were disposing of the dead. Massive debate about Homo naledi I won’t get into here but certainly Neanderthal. Yeah.

So we’ve got that deep time story and that is powerful and important to people today. It helps to then frame what we see going on in the world, whether it is in our own locality whether it’s in Gaza, whether it’s in Ukraine, to see not only how the importance of those traces of the deep past still matter to people today, but how they are politicized, afforded cultural baggage, misinformation. There’s all manner of ways in which those ancient traces matters today, but how we can see patterns in how we deal with the dead that we can trace from the distant past through to the way the importance we give to death today.

I think the other point to quickly add is mortuary archaeology is the only subject that can give us a sense and perspective on the future of our deathways. We’re going to see major changes in what happens to the dead moving forward. We’re in a world of cremation, but will cremation be the same? And will these other alternative technologies with their various complicated names that I never quite can remember. But you know that you know what I’m talking about. they’re all trademarked.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Aquamation, terramation, green burials.

Howard Williams: Yeah, we’re going to see changes, but I think what archaeology can show is, it can inform on a personal emotional level and on a societal level how we engage with the dead for the 21st and 22nd century. So I think mortuary archaeology is important because it tells us about the past, it tells us about the present, and it informs us about the future.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Lovely.

Howard Williams: That’s my thoughts, but I don’t know if your audience will think that’s nonsense or not. I think that’s why we should keep doing it because it reveals past lives and deaths, deathways, of dealing with the dead, but it also is about us and our future.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Death is a part of our lives. It just is. And yeah, I think mortuary archaeology informs us about our, like you said, our mortality and how we deal with that.

Howard Williams: And of course it hopefully, I mean, while it’s a much more emotion sensitive and legalistic context of forensics, I think there’s a lot of constructive dialogue, has been and will continue to be, a lot of constructive dialogue. At one level, forensics is a kind of sub field of mortuary archaeology in my mind and that may antagonize specialists because it’s like an application to a very specific set of deathways or not always voluntary, in that sense, but another level mortuary archaeology can be seen as sort of a deep time partner to what forensics scientists do. I’ve certainly contributed to books where forensic analysis of cremated material from all sorts of horrific and unmentionable scenarios are being discussed alongside bronze age case studies and Roman period case studies. I think that that overlap and dialogue is really important.  It helps to inform the methods and the perspectives of people working in forensics, I think. But tell me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s my sense of it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No, absolutely. I mean, any advice that I had ever heard from people who found themselves in forensic fields or giving forensic consultations usually had a background in anthropology or archaeology and they always said the broader your foundation the better because it’s the principles and the processes that are being applied to forensic contexts.

So forensic as a field is very new and there may be some debate about whether it actually is a discipline but it’s really more the application of the discipline processes of anthropology and archaeology to that context.

Howard Williams: Absolutely, absolutely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much for this conversation. I wish we had more time. I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. We could talk for hours and maybe I’ll reach out again and do another podcast episode because this has been very lovely, Professor Williams, thank you very much for this.

Howard Williams: Feel free. Thank you. It’s been great to chat. Thank you.

Transcribed by Google