On the variations of the deceased's Arm position in the Russian Orthodox burial custom

In this article, I aim to conduct a comparative analysis of the deceased's arm positions (taking gender and age specifications into account) and define their distinct features. The burials examined are located in the Dormition Cathedral of St. Sophia, Tobolsk, and dated to the 17th century. The relevance of this study relies on examining one of the most important elements of the Orthodox funeral rites, the deceased's arm position, while simultaneously regarding age and gender specifications of funeral rites. The earlier studies researched these subjects separately. In order to define the region-specific features of the arm position variations, the frequency of their occurrences is also compared against the published data regarding other Christian burial sites in Northwest Russia, the Cis-Ural region, and Western Siberia, dated to the 16th-19th centuries. The research material comes from the excavations conducted by A. Adamov in 2005 at the cemetery grounds overlapped by the Dormition Cathedral of St. Sophia, Tobolsk (1683-1686). For the analysis, I selected 38 burials located in the western part of the cathedral grounds and outside them, under the parvis foundation. The skeletons' good preservation with the original position of bones intact enabled me to select such a number of burials for the analysis. All the burials analyzed had age and gender specifications. In order to organize different arm position variations into groups, I opted for a vertical division of the human body as per the principles of topographical anatomy. Three arm position groups were distinguished: arms on the abdomen or below the chest, arms crossed on the chest at the heart area, and a mixed position (the abdomen - the middle/upper part of the chest, the shoulder). By conducting a comparative age and gender analysis of arm positions discovered at the Dormition Cathedral's cemetery, I found that arms positioned on the abdomen and parallel to each other was the typical position for children. Arm positions among adults offered more variety. I should note that the position with arms crossed on the chest was typical for some of the male burials but did not occur in female burials. The positions from the other two groups occurred with similar frequency for both genders, taking into account the 2:1 male to female burial ratio in this cemetery. The comparison of arm position groups and variations in the burials at the Dormition Cemetery against the data from other burial sites dated to roughly the same time period and located in Northwest Russia, the Cis-Ural region, and Western Siberia, did not enable me to define any distinct region-specific features. In general, the frequency of the occurring arm position variations fluctuates considerably in different regions. It is evident that the positions with arms across the abdomen, below the waist, and on the chest are by far the most common ones. The mixed position occurs the least often.

Keywords

Authors

References