Another 'light' story concerns Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Forgive me but I do not have the exact reference. Chaucer
wrote about a contemporary medieval group of English people
who were on pilgrimage to the important Christian cathedral
at Canterbury. The work is fiction but has the flavour of
satire or allegory. One of the travellers (the Pardoner?)
has some holy relics. Chaucer comments drily that these holy
saint's remains are, in fact, 'piggy's bones'. They are
a fraud, but the ?Pardoner gets away with it because most
people can't tell the difference.
It's not just pigs that get substituted for humans either.
I recently identified some large post-medieval horse bones
that had been afforded special display in a niche in the
wall of a church. These, too, were supposedly holy relics.
Personally, the humerus was so large I couldn't have fitted
it into my own arm but plenty of other people seem to have
found no difficulty in believing that they were human....
Perhaps there is a difference between rural
hunting/ agricultural communities (where people
are familiar with animals alive, dead and decomposed) and
those distanced from animal life and death in towns, but I
suspect that there may be several cases where animal
remains have been substituted for human remains without
people being aware...
Quite apart from deliberate substitutions eg for sacrifices.
I agree with Laszlo - we are in danger of examining our own
navels too much about the nitty gritty of precisely how
best to quantify and describe animal remains. These
methodological questions concentrate so hard on calculating
numbers in order to address economic or environmental
questions of who raised what, who ate what etc, that we are
in danger of forgetting that animals meant more than food,
wealth and water meadows.
Sue
On Wed, 14 Jun 2000 19:00:47 +0200 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> I could kill to have some proper and reliable reference for this type
> of information. There are lots of little "light" stories like that, that
> could elucidate attitudes to animals that would be of great value in
> interpretation: I am not talking about direct analogies, just
> broadening our horizon: I can imagine that undeniable similarities
> between pigs and humans, and the love-hate relationship stemming
> from potential antropomorphization, have given rise to many peculiar
> customs.
>
> A more "serious" question: has anyone ever come across "typical"
> (fine transversal) skinning marks on pig metapodia/phalanges?
>
> Cheers, Laszlo
---------------------
[log in to unmask]
Dr. Sue Stallibrass
Archaeological Science Advisor for the north-west region of English Heritage
School of Archaeology, Classics & Oriental Studies (SACOS)
University of Liverpool
Hartley Building
LIVERPOOL L69 3GS
direct telephone: +44 (0)151 794 5046 departmental FAX: +44 (0)151 794 5057
e-mail: [log in to unmask] OR [log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|