Twisted reflections of life: creating communities of death through Iron Age Italic funerary dress

The early Iron Age communities of Italy are known mainly through their funerary records. This paper is a reflection on my PhD research analysing Iron Age Italic communities through their funerary dress, applying material and sensory analyses to the evidence for published funerary dress assemblages from the cemeteries of Bazzano, Fossa, and Osteria dell’Osa to present new understandings of how the dressed body was constructed and perceived in its mortuary setting. This paper discusses the merits and difficulties of an approach in which objects are classified in multiple ways to reconstruct how the dress might have been perceived and what that perception might have meant for the communities to which these individuals belonged, considering the utility of constructing a community from its perceptions of itself, as materialised in their creation of the corpse. Osteological estimations of sex and age provide footholds by which to understand the people and the communities which the cemeteries served, but funerals are not simple events, they are multifaceted performances. The performance, appearance, and investiture of corpses provide multiple lenses through which to build a composite picture of the deceased, their constructed identity in the grave, and the communities in which they lived, but what relation did these bear to the reality of these communities? This paper explores this question and presents findings from this approach to funerary study.