Week 4: Rituals with Fire – Group A Data

This week, Group A worked with Austin and Group D on investigating early English cremation rites with linen-wrapped pork shoulders. We were comparing the arguments of Calvin Wells and Jackie McKinley over the shape of the pyre and position of our “bodies.”

Before:

The first steps in this process were to weigh our pork shoulders both bare and wrapped in linen secured with a brooch. Group A’s shoulder initially weighed 4.074 kilograms bare, and then 4.119 kilograms when wrapped in the green linen. We then got to work on the pyre, which ended up being 115 centimeters tall (or 3.7 feet) and 140 centimeters (4.5 feet) across as its longest point. Our pyre was finally constructed at 2:20pm, and it was a windy and partly cloudy day. The initial temperature of our pork was 11° C when placed in the pyre, placed underneath the logs and in the pit itself, and with that, we were ready to get the fire started.

During:

We struggled to get the wood to catch initially, with just the brush catching and then reducing to smoke, but then at 2:45pm, a small fire started, and by 2:47pm a blaze was burning. From 2:40 to 4:45, we took temperature readings on our pork every five minutes, although we are unsure if our thermocouple readings are correct as we got some varying numbers and widely fluctuating temperatures at our intervals.

2:40pm	26.1°C, no blaze yet, just sunlight
2:45pm	11.2°C, fire catches at 2:47pm and burns fast
2:50pm	672.5°C, blaze hits 851°C at 2:51 with a bright orange column of flame, too hot to be anywhere near
2:55pm	867°C, cloth blackening and fire continuing to burn
3:00pm	930°C
3:05pm	659°C
3:10pm	728°C
3:15pm	803°C
3:20pm	742°C, by this point cloth completely blackened and wood completely whitened
3:25pm	767°C, wood has collapsed on top of shoulder but definitely still meat on the bone
3:30pm	597°C
3:35pm	468°C
3:40pm	558°C
3:45pm	489°C
3:50pm	568°C
3:55pm	744°C
4:00pm	667°C
4:05pm	537.7°C
4:10pm	445°C
4:15pm	613°C
4:20pm	416°C, wood has mostly disintegrated and only remnants are still burning but are still hot
4:25pm	316°C
4:30pm	370°C
4:35pm	466°C
4:40pm	186°C
4:45pm	91°C, called it to return tomorrow and look at remains

After:

The next day, we went out to dig through the ash and study the remains of our “body”, taking it back to the lab. In the ash, we could find bone and bits of cloth, but no sign of the brooch that had once secured the cloth. We carried our body back to the lab to weigh and examine it. Post-cremation attempt, our pork shoulder now weighed 1.63 kilograms. Despite the top being mostly cooked away and the bone being exposed, the bottom of our shoulder, which had been on the ground, was mostly intact, with the outside of the cloth blackened and the inside recognizably green. That part of the shoulder also still had skin and flesh. This tells us that the method of placing the body on the ground and building the fire over it was ineffective for achieving complete cremation. We know that the exposed bones reached around 900-1000°C due to their coloration, but we were unable to examine the unexposed bones to the remaining flesh on the shoulder.