Stian Hamre

Doctoral fellowship (2007-2011)

Project title:
Regional differences in Norwegian medieval burial practices? An osteoarchaeological study.

Project summary:

My project is concerned with the early Christian burial practices in medieval Norway. In the early Christian Norwegian laws from the 11 th century (Eidsivating, Borgarting, Frostating and Gulating ecclesiastical laws), instructions were given to regulate the burial practices at the time. They all state that every Christian who dies shall be taken to church and buried in sacred ground. The differences, however, are concerned with the division of the graveyard as the Borgarting and Eidsivating legislation both divide the graveyard into four different areas where people should be buried according to social status. The people with the highest social standing should be buried closest to the church and the people with lower social status further away from the church with the slaves at the graveyard fence. The Eidsivating legislation also proclaims a sexual division of the graveyard with men buried to the south of the church and the women to the north, and the presence of family plots is also indicated in a later version of the law. The two remaining set of laws (Gulating and Frostating), on the other hand, give no information about a division of the graveyards. The aims of this project are to determine whether such regional difference existed and in what respect, and also to see how the potential differences correspond to the differences in legislation.

These questions will be investigated through an osteoarchaeological study of four different graveyards, one from each area of jurisdiction. Social stratification of the graveyard will be determined on the basis of age at death, stature, and certain pathologies and indicators of malnourishment. The presence of family plots will be studied through an examination of a set of genetically determined non-metric traits. All these skeletal features will be interpreted with regard to their distribution on the graveyard.

Publications and osteological reports

Hamre, S. 2007. Report for the osteological examination of K/H 001. FOS report 02/2007. FOS, Bergen.

Hamre, S. 2007. Amendment to the FOS report 01/2006, including the later discovered human skeletal remains from Nonneseter, Bergen. FOS report 01/2007. FOS, Bergen.

Hamre, S. 2006. Final report for the preliminary osteological analysis of the human skeletal remains from Nonneseter, Bergen. FOS report 01/2006. FOS, Bergen

Hamre, S. 2005. Bilateral symmetry as a means of reassembling commingled human remains: a study of the long bones of the upper and lower limbs. Scandinavian Journal of Forensic Science. 11(2):60-68.

Hamre, S. 2005. En innføring i rettsantropologi. Bevis. 4:29-31.

Education
I graduated from the University of New England, Australia, in 2001 with a BA in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology and in 2003 I got my MSc in Forensic and Biological Anthropology from Bournemouth University, England.