Burying the future
I read about Lindsey Büster’s article on cached objects with interest
( The world in antiquity, Sep/Oct 2021/180). The question of such objects, deliberately buried or deposited, always provides fascinating unanswerable questions about the originators’ intentions; thought processes we will never know. Dr Büster broadly classifies the “problematic stuff” as hoards, grave goods and structured deposits. Deposited items might be considered valuable treasure or be more mundane of course. I have another take on it. Might the originator of what is left actually be mindful that they know full well there are people yet to come, who might come across the material left behind? What the “future” people would make of it is of course open for discussion – and again we can never know, but perhaps we need to edge away a little from the automatic presumption that items were deposited just for contemporary reasons.
Paul Crabtree, Tewkesbury