TĂRTĂRIA: A RITUAL-GRAVE TO CONSECRATE A NOVEL ANCESTOR IN A NEOLITHIC MEDIUM-SCALE COMMUNITY
Journal Title: Acta Terrae Septemcastrensis - Year 2011, Vol 10, Issue 0
Abstract
In the Middle Neolithic of Southern-Central Europe, not every corpse received individual and partial secondary burial in a sacralized pit-grave. Even rarer was the re-deposition of a hybrid body made of selected skeletal/artifactual fragmented remain packed together with three inscribed tablets which were the only complete items. At Tărtăria - Groapa Luncii (Transylvania, Romania), this happened as part of a pre-planned and multi-stage mortuary program aimed to consecrate a newly-created ancestor. The article documents significant funerary liturgies reflecting the deceased, “Milady Tărtăria”: an elderly, disabled and ill revered woman with a pivotal magic-religious role in an inclusive mid-size Vinča A community. Post-mortem, the ritual practitioner continued like when she was alive, supporting the community in striding across the gap limping between life and death, with one foot in each world, and exploiting exceptional skills in rituals concerning the sovereign mysteries of vitality connected with sexuality and fecundity. Milady Tărtăria’s dying was a slow process of transition from a spiritual state into another, empowering her with supernatural but immanent faculties and assuring her beneficial influence on the living. A key point was the creation of an alien bone/clay/spondylus/stone skeleton suitable for an ancestral state. Other fragments of her original body possibly circulated as relicts among people. The two principles of fragmentation and accumulation worked together thereby reinforcing distinctive social relations and community identity. A “great feast” marked the re-deposition of Milady Tărtăria. She was subjected to final interment inside the pit-house were she had spent her life and it became an ancestral space blessed by spiritual wealth and inserted within a system of place-value and exchange. The Danube script was utilized as a key component of social reproduction strategies based on ancestral ideology of lineage within a kinship-based society. The calibrated age of the bones found at Tărtăria is 5370-5140 BCE. The cultic complex belongs to the Vinča A2 or the Vinča A3 stages (contemporary with the Starčevo-Criş IVA horizon).
Authors and Affiliations
Marco Merlini
Keywords
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