MORTI · Money, Rituality and Tombs in northern Italy during Late antiquity

Money, Rituality and Tombs in northern Italy during Late antiquity

In the Greco-Roman conception of death, the deceased who wanted to reach the underworld had to pay a fee to Charon, the sinister boatman in charge of crossing the river Acheron to transport the souls from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Lack of money to pay for this trip meant that the soul would wander almost eternally in a dark and silent world. For this reason, Greeks and Romans would place a coin or two in the mouth or hand of the deceased. During the following centuries, coins did not disappear completely from the funerary ritual and continued to be deposited with the deceased. It Late Antique period the number of examples is much lower than in the preceding period, but the ways of depositing coins increased exponentially. Coins were also placed around the head, near the arms, next to the elbows, above the hips, between the legs and between the feet, as well as at the edges of the grave or on the slabs that covered the tomb. This multitude of variables implies substantial changes in the interpretation of the rite, where the family and individual component was important. The arrival and consolidation of Christianity must have played a significant role in transforming these meanings, because coins do not disappear completely from the funerary ritual. In fact, in the early Middle Ages, coins continued to be used in burials, but transformed into jewellery by means of perforations or settings. Logically, the coins were chosen according to the sex and age of the deceased, so that the social component of this practice in early medieval societies was even greater than in the preceding period. The MORTI project has analysed this ritual practice in northern Italy during the Late Antiquity and Middle Ages. In this dynamic territory, a large number of Late Antique and Medieval necropolises have been excavated with archaeological methodology, so there is a large amount of data available to analyse coins in funerary contexts. MORTI aims to identify different patterns of ritual use through this study from different perspectives. On the one hand, from a territorial point of view, with the intention of observing possible regional differences in this territory. On the other hand, from a chronocultural point of view, to understand the evolution of this rite in this time. In this last perspective, the project has focused its attention on the role of coins within the communities that generated each of these necropolises, with the intention of identifying elements of this ritual according to the sex, age and status of the deceased. The study of these ritual practices is essential to reconstruct the evolution of the mentalities of the populations during both periods, demonstrating the change and the reception and the consolidation of new ideas and creeds. Likewise, this analysis has made define gender roles in these late Antique and medieval societies, as it has traditionally been considered that the use of coins in tombs was mainly linked to the female sex, due to its proximity to magical and ritual practices. MORTI has made it possible to identify elements that demonstrate that in reality the use of coins in tombs had a degree of independence of the sexes and that the modality depended on the individual, so that the use of coins in tombs was a practice that was surely conditioned by family beliefs. This narrowing down of the social roles linked to the ritual use of coins in the grave, as well as the identification of some regional particularities allows us to generate more complete discourses on the conception of death and life in earlier societies. It is also important to stress that thanks to MORTI, many italian museums have new data and new strategies to connect the archaeological reality with the general public, thus explaining more clearly the complexity of late Antiquity and Middle Ages rituals, which are sometimes very difficult to transmit due to the poverty of some archaeological contexts. In short, MORTI has generated very promising lines of interpretation in Italian funerary archaeology to analyse the phenomenon of coins in late antique and medieval funerary contexts. On the other hand, MORTI has brought to light many sites excavated long ago, demonstrating the importance of revisiting previously analysed data under new research perspectives.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union