Okay, other than being comprised of the largest group in society, what's so exciting about the middle class? They don't have as cool grave goods, and might not even have any sort of elaborate burial, but studying the middle class of any society is the key to understanding what it a given society consisted of most, and how it operated. Although the rich are interesting, as they often acted like 'I do what I want!' and often had really beautiful and ornate grave goods, as we all know, hegemonic ideals don't always represent what the whole country was like.
So after a bit of research into the subject, i'm having an extremely difficult time finding articles that focus only on middle class burial. The majority of articles i've read, including this one about burials in peru, only really mentions middle class burials when comparing them to high class burials, and why they aren't considered middle class.
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/pdfplus/4141562.pdf
the only article I was successfully able to find without driving myself crazy was an article about 'the emerging middle class' in Bath which used social history records about the general infirmary at the time. Although I found this article in the archaeological section of jstor, it uses marxist theory and historical records to reconstruct the emerging middle class that developed through this infirmary and no archaeological evidence whatsoever to talk about class or status.
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/pdfplus/4286579.pdf
So, I've concluded that middle class burials are rarely spoken about because they come in second to the lavish high class burials, and are usually used to create distinctions between middle and upper class burials, without going into much detail. I can conclude that middle class burials are part of a society that needs more research, as exploring the status of the rich isn't an accurate representation of the society as a whole.
It is extremely frustrating isn't it that both archaeology and history never seem to focus on the majority of a societies population? Usually when the middle and lower classes are focused on, it seems like extreme generalizations are used to piece together their lives? That’s why I'm finding the bog bodies project so interesting because it doesn’t appear to me that the majority of the cases are extremely wealthy individuals. Through your research so far on bog bodies, what do you think the status of these individuals tends to be... in terms of wealth? Would you say evidence points to a lot of the bog bodies being lower class, middle class or upper-class people?
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