Symbolic significances of iron in archaic societies. Case study: funeral practices

In this article, we have directed our attention to the anthropological, archaeological and ethnographic researches, in which aspects related to the presence of iron in funeral practices have been analyzed. The archaeological research in recent decades showed and theorized the fact that the funerary deposits can “encode” data related to the social structure, the ideology, and the collective mentality of the given communities. In this regard, in the analysis of funerary practices, are often used notions such as social person, understood as a variety of hypotheses (age, social rank, sex etc.) that define the identity with the community to which the individual belongs, or social energy consumed while developing a funerary practice. The traditions preserved in the contemporary Romanian village also attest to the existence of iron objects (knives, pieces of scythe or sickle, nails, needles or various other objects) in the funeral rites and practices. The significance of their presence is related to the apotropaic function they exercise, but also to their ability to rule the evil world, iron being considered, in the traditional mind, the most powerful element. The ritual of burying people with different iron objects has been known for a long time, constituting one of the most widely-spread practices both in the European space and in that of other peoples.