Late antique cemetery containing intentionally broken pottery

A Late Antiquity cemetery has been discovered at Bourget-du-Lac in southeastern France. Artifacts unearthed from the tombs include coins, bronze jewelry, amber beads and locally produced pottery, which attest to the funerary rituals of the time.

The site was excavated before the construction of a residential development and is located on the outskirts of the ancient town. The remains discovered by archaeologists range from Roman times to modern times, with the earliest being a quadrangular structure with wooden columns dating to the late 1st century BC/early 1st century AD. The building was replaced by a larger masonry structure during the Imperial era. Only the foundations remain, so its exact function is unknown, but archaeologists believe it was originally a dwelling. A large, well-preserved kiln was found next to the building. Radiocarbon dating goes back to the 3rd and 4th centuries, so it was added later.

Next to the masonry house there is a cemetery, which was in use from the 4th to the first half of the 6th century. (A tomb dating to the 7th or 8th century shows that even after more than a century of use, the cemetery retained its purpose in the collective memory.) About 60 individual inhumation tombs have been unearthed, arranged in rows that became increasingly dense as they approached the residence.

The dead were buried in cysts formed from reused tegula (large clay roof tiles) or rubble walls supporting wooden planks. They were placed in the tomb in a supine position, facing west, north or south. Some of them wore jewelry—copper alloy bracelets with snake-head ends, ivory bracelets, amber beads—and had ceramic pots, jars and bowls as grave goods.

This clay-coated pottery is a typical type of local manufacture, produced in Porto workshops on the north shore of Lake Bourget. (Bourget-du-Lac is on the south shore, about 15 miles away.) Some of the pottery shows signs of being deliberately broken during funerary rites. They were not smashed but carefully broken, for example, the neck of a kettle was snapped off the body.

Biodata have made it possible to define community spaces without selective recruitment, where adult graves (male and female) are placed side by side with children’s graves, sometimes groupings that reflect social or familial ties between individuals.