Practices for the Living and the Dead: Medieval and Post-Reformation Burials in Scandinavia
Dissertation cover
The function and placement of graves in a burial ground reflected the social role and status a person had in society during the Middle Ages. Factors such as gender, age, and health affected this evaluation and categorization of people. This is shown in a dissertation by Kristina Jonsson that was recently submitted at Stockholm University.
It has long been known from historical sources that cemeteries were organized and divided into zones for the graves of various social groups. The zones correspond to a rough division of the population into an upper, middle, and lower class, but, with her dissertation, Kristina Jonsson is the first scholar to attempt to delineate the social zones in detail on the basis of the structures of the archeological material.
“Defining the zones made it possible to compare the social strata in society. For instance, it was possible to see how childhood was treated as a separate phase of life in the higher social strata and that advanced age could also be considered as granting status among these groups. Another pattern that emerged was that women appear to have been more equal to men in cities than in the countryside, but even in cities their status declined in the latter part of the Middle Ages,” says Kristina Jonsson.