Crouching in fear: Terms of engagement for funerary remains The recording example can be found at http://jsa.sagepub.com/

Abstract

At present, there is no accepted standardised lexicon in English to describe burials and the position of buried human remains. Terms have tended to vary with the investigator and rely on loose, but often ill-defined systems of previous use. As a consequence, there are myriad terms used to describe the same phenomena or, as the case may be, no single well-defined term to do so. This means that new terms are continually invented – and sometimes re-invented bearing different nuances – that hinder use of published work and make comparisons across works difficult. In France for the last 40 years, Duday, his colleagues and students have published a series of papers employing a standard burial terminology that, until recently, was only available in French and in French language publications. Due to limited language competency of English-language scholars and a desire of French scholars to publish in their own (very precise) native language, these seminal works have not influenced English-language use. They clearly lead the way to the development of a standard vocabulary. What follows is a critique of previous non-standard terminological use and a series of suggestions to remedy this situation. This contribution’s debt to French language scholarship is clear, but it does not reproduce a mere translation of terms. Rather, it tries to synthesise French use with English-language scholarship. Its weakest point is that it does not integrate terms from other European languages that also have a long legacy of regional and time-specific application, nor can it claim to do so in other world languages. This is work for the future. This treatment concentrates on adult remains, with archaeothantological study of infant and children’s remains being at only a very anecdotal level to date.