Jude Jones (University of Southampton, UK)

One of the chief functions of archaeology is to encounter and to explore the power of objects. Most recently many archaeologists of representation have come to view the object as an agent operating alongside the human with a degree of existential parity. However while putting myself through the process of exploring the power of such things as Tudor and Stuart tomb effigies I began to experience considerable disciplinary dislocation. The effigies themselves elicit perfectly authentic archaeological questions concerning early modern attitudes to death, to social and political status, to gender relationships and newly developing ideas of individual identity but the available texts are entirely authored by art critics, art historians and social and architectural historians. Should this be a problem in the present intellectual climate where we are being urged to embrace multidisciplinarity? And surely these commentaries explore very similar concerns?

Indeed they do, moreover each brings a unique perspective to this area of mortuary memorialisation. But at the same time all, in their various ways, seem to view the object through the medium of the human rather than looking at the human through the medium of the object. One is drawn into considerations of whether tombs are art-forms or not, or one becomes entangled with issues such as Nikolaus Pevsner’s dismissal of them as a genre as being ‘stiff and incompetent’ non-sculptures.

Using some of Alfred Gell’s insights into the anthropology of art, it became apparent that the seeming fragmentation which I was experiencing between the archaeological and historical approaches could be explained and reconciled if it was possible to accept Gell’s premise that it is social agency which creates the circumstances in which a society can configure its objects into artistic categories - that both human and object are inextricably joined in a social venture in which artistic categorisation is a moveable feast.

This paper is a discussion of where this approach led. It suggests that both the intense semiotic construction and the visceral impact of Tudor-Jacobean tombs and their effigies can be understood as representations of a society’s intimate relationship with death - a society in which death itself can be seen to act as an agent.