Social Implications of Unburied Corpses from Intergroup Conflicts: Postmortem Agency Following the Sandby borg Massacre

Abstract

A massacre took place inside the Sandby borg ringfort, southeast Sweden, at the end of the fifth century. The victims were not buried, but left where they died. In order to understand why the corpses were left unburied, and how they were perceived following the violent event, a theoretical framework is developed and integrated with the results of osteological analysis. I discuss the contemporary normative treatment of the dead, social response to death and postmortem agency with emphasis on intergroup conflict and ‘bad death’. The treatment of the dead in Sandby borg deviates from known contemporary practices. I am proposing that leaving the bodies unburied might be viewed as an aggressive social action. The corpses exerted postmortem agency to the benefit of the perpetrators, at the expense of the victims and their sympathizers. The gain for the perpetrators was likely political power through redrawing the victim's biographies, spatial memory and the social and territorial landscape. The denial of a proper death likely led to shame, hindering of regeneration and an eternal state of limbo.

Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Interaction: An Introduction

“…If one looks at (bio)archaeological papers on the agency of the dead, one finds that they often deal with unusual and uncanny corpses (Alfsdotter, 2019;Novak, 2014;Phelps, 2020;Tung, 2014). This observation has led Bettina Arnold to suggest that there may be limits to the general applicability of postmortem agency (Arnold, 2014, p. 524).…”