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The Broederstroom pot burial
... The actual variant, peg tooth, refers to an undersized lateral incisor which is missing its distal lobe (Hillson 1996) which gets mistaken for a tooth that has been filed or chiselled down in size (Jacob 1967). Barrelshaped incisors form from an oversized tuberculum (Hillson 1996) whose form can look artificially rounded (van Reenen 1975). Besides actual variants, large unworn mamelons may at a glance appear as modifications (Braswell and Pitcavage 2009). ...
Culturally modified teeth are one of the few personal identity markers to survive into the archaeological record, have modern comparatives, and exist as a global deep-time behaviour. Typology and description, however, have suffered from a multitude of, often misinterpreted, classification systems usually restricted to specialized geographical areas and local publication. With the high variation of designs, a lack of consistent codified definitions makes cohesive discussion frustratingly difficult: highlighting that a new, clear global classification system is overdue. Expanding on the frequently-used works of Romero (1958-1986), a renewed classification model is presented, supplying continuity between past and future work. It provides an integrated system synthesizing previously temporally and spatially scattered examples, located via the literature and online museum collections. Pursuing a logical structure, modifications are integrated by more precise, defined descriptions and clear drawings. Usability and successfulness were assessed via both standardized participant evaluations and examples held at the Natural History Museum, London; results adjusted and improved the classification. This classification system provides a functional tool for global comparisons, supplying a framework to discuss designs in clear, unified codes rather than confusing or imprecise descriptions while also removing the necessity to access scattered, rarely reprinted classifications.
... The brief overview below provides a glimpse of the variation observed in such mortuary practice, as well as the commonalities, all of which should enable us to gain a better understanding of the deeply symbolic nature and import of the Melora Saddle burial. Two pot burials found adjacent to hut remains were recovered from the fifth-to eighthcentury AD site of Broederstroom, near the Hartbeespoort Dam in Gauteng (Mason 1986: 131, 167-73;Van Reenen 1975. One burial contained teeth of an adult and of a child 8-10 years old, while the other yielded the cranium and mandible of a 12-year-old child. ...
The interment of infants in ceramic receptacles was a fairly widespread funerary practice in southern Africa during the Iron Age. Using the rich source of ethnographic data on child-death and mortuary practices among Southeast Bantu speakers, we explore the cultural significance and symbolic meaning of an infant pot burial uncovered on Melora Saddle, an early nineteenth-century African farmer settlement on the Waterberg Plateau, Limpopo Province. The skeletal remains belong to a perinatal individual, aged between 34 weeks gestation and newborn. The short-necked jar was interred in an upright position either inside, or close to, a house. Ethnographic data show that a conceptual link was made between a woman's reproductive capacity and the land's fertility, as well as between potting and procreation. A close symbolic link existed between pots, wombs, mothers and their houses. Child-birth and child-death were fraught with ritual danger that had to be averted to ensure the well-being of the family and the community. Any deviations from the natural order of things generated pollution (heat or dirt), which threatened a woman's fertility and a lineage's continuation. Such ritual impurity not only destabilised the social order, but also disturbed the natural order, as a result of which the rains, the ultimate sign of a community's well-being, might stay away. To counter the ritual danger, and thereby to restore a woman's fertility and avoid a drought, foetuses and infants were buried in jars, either in a cool, wet place in the bank of a river, or inside a house or in the shade under its eaves. As in the case of the Melora Saddle jar, the bases of such burial vessels were often deliberately perforated, evidently a symbolic act to ensure that a woman would become pregnant again. Ash, representing an extinguished fire, served as an important cooling agent in such burials, which would account for the location of several midden burials uncovered in Iron Age sites.
This paper reports the findings of fragments of human skeletal remains and an infant pot-burial found on the edge of a byre at Simunye, northeastern Swaziland. The site is dated to the second millennium AD (130±40 BP, Pta-8080) and is attributed to the ancestral group of Tsonga. The particular pot-burial style is compared with similar archaeological evidence and is also discussed in the context of Tsonga-related ethnographic examples. It is argued that in this context the style of infant pot-burial observed at Simunye is associated with a symbolic equation of pots with wombs.
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