Parisi Erotic

The Parisi were an Iron Age people of eastern Yorkshire, in what is now England, visible from roughly the fourth century BC until Rome took the north in the AD 70s, after which they were absorbed into the Romano British population of the region and later into the English of Deira and Northumbria. No community carries the name today. What survives is a burial signature so distinct that archaeologists gave it its own label: the Arras culture, named for a cemetery near Market Weighton. Their country was chalk and clay, the rolling Wolds, the flat wet ground of Holderness behind the coast, bounded by the Humber estuary to the south and the Derwent to the west. They buried their dead in small square barrows, each ringed by its own ditch, grouped into cemeteries that could run to several hundred graves. Nothing else in Britain looks quite like it. A few of those graves held a two wheeled vehicle, a cart or light chariot, sometimes dismantled and sometimes whole, laid in with the body: more vehicle burials have come out of this one district than from the rest of Britain combined. The finds from Wetwang Slack, Kirkburn, Garton and, more recently, Pocklington are the reason we know anything about them at all, since they left no writing and no one described them while they lived.

The name is the standing puzzle. It is the same name as the Parisii of the Seine, whose town became Paris, and the old reading was straightforward migration from Gaul. The evidence is less obliging: the burial rite has continental cousins, but the pottery, the settlements and the people themselves look local and long settled. Kinship of some kind is likely; a boatload of settlers is not required. The graves argue for a society that buried women with the same care as men, sometimes with mirrors, swords, brooches and joints of pork for the journey. At Rudston and Garton Station a handful of bodies were speared where they lay, spears driven into the open grave in a rite no one has satisfactorily explained. Rome then recorded them briefly and administratively. Ptolemy lists the Parisi with a single town, Petuaria, generally placed at Brough on Humber, and a stone from there names the civitas of the Parisi along with a local magistrate who paid for a new stage. Within a century of conquest their leading men were funding theaters and saying so in Latin.