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A grave is like a time capsule. Archaeo-
logists literally burrow into them to get
unadulterated insights into past beliefs and
religious conceptions.
"Death says a lot about a community. The
way we treat the dead is more important
than you might think," says Asgeir Svestad,
who has studied the Sami transition to
Christian burial customs. This kind of rese-
arch involves literally digging into the issue.
"A funeral is an embodied action – it
is something we do in a particular way
because we have always done it that way. If
you lose one of your loved ones, you don't
want to expend any energy thinking about
whether or not you want to have a coffin
and flowers. People don't think very much
in a reflective way about funerals, about
how they should be conducted – we just do
it the way it has always been done before. It
becomes clear in this kind of situation that
our things play an active role, like our silent
support staff. Our things hold the ritual
together and hold our hands."
Shallowgraves
So what does a grave tell us?The graves in
the cemetery at Gullholmen in Tana are
so overgrown and so long abandoned they
are very hard to notice, even when you
walk around the cemetery and see the few
tombstones that remain.
But archaeologists noticed that the graves
in the oldest part of the cemetery, from the
mid-18th century, were too shallow to be
typical Christian graves.
"The coffins were 65-70 cm deep, which is
quite shallow, compared to the six feet or
two metres called for by Christian tradition
.... and (they) seemed to be more typical of
the Sami pre-Christian beliefs about death
and the deceased's (double) soul or spirit. It
was important that the soul or spirit not be
impeded on its journey to the hereafter or
in its travels among the living."
"According to Sami tradition, a person
didn't cease to exist even if he or she had
died. It was unwise to disturb the graves.
The dead person's spirit was able to leave
the grave and seek out the living world, and
could act as a force of good or evil. This
spirit could watch over reindeer and be use-
ful, but he or she should not be disturbed
or visited. It turns out that some of these
beliefs were transferred to the Christian
era," says Svestad.
Before the late Middle Ages, it was com-
mon for the Sami people to wrap their dead
in bark and bury them in sledges.
"We often found split reindeer bones from
sacrificial meals. Reindeer bones were also
found in association with a Christian burial
on Gullholmen and probably also came
from a sacrificial meal," Svestad said.
The graves at Gullholmen are from the
1730s. The most recent grave dates from
1868. It is during this period that Christian
burial customs began to take over.
Gullholmen'smany stories
One of the most interesting graves in
Gullholmen is a triple burial site. The
coffins in the grave were buried in a way
that was informed by Christian tradition,
fromwest to east, and there were remnants
of the cross on all the three coffins.
Secrets
in the cemetery
The remains of a young man who was autopsied tell a
story of the earliest public health services in Finnmark.
Foto: Asgeir Svestad.
24
•••
Labyrint E/11
– University of Tromsø
A grave is like a time capsule. Archaeologists literally
burrow into them to get unadulterated insights into
past beliefs and religious conceptions.
Text: Maja Sojtarić