Mortuary archaeology

In the bicentenary year of its excavation, remote sensing has revealed, for the first time, the full extent of this iconic type-site Iron Age cemetery and its landscape context in East Yorkshire. A total of 23ha was surveyed, revealing new insights concerning the burial ground and damage through modern farming.

El presente escrito tiene como finalidad la identificación de patrones arqueológicos en contextos mortuorios localizados en cuevas de Yucatán, los cuales permitirán conocer los materiales culturales asociados a dichas prácticas. Para ello fue indispensable distinguir las características de las cavernas, los elementos asociados y las modificaciones o adaptaciones hechas en ellas.
Se espera con este trabajo tener un primer acercamiento en la determinación de los espacios rituales en cavernas, así como un mejor registro, conservación y detección de los distintos materiales arqueológicos, puesto que actúan como un elemento integrador en los posteriores estudios bioarqueológicos y tafonómicos.

Palabras clave: cuevas, clase y tipo de enterramiento, contexto mortuorio, espacio ritual.

The proposed paper aims to present a preliminary framework for an ongoing research within the scope of a Doctoral Thesis regarding the mortuary practices in Mediaeval/Modern Portugal.
The assumption that Christian burial practices are completely standardized has often been contradicted by bioarcheologists on-field, however, most observations and results are kept on site-specific level and confined to grey literature.
Differences have been observed in other areas such as Art History and History. They can pertain to differences in the representation of deceased women in funerary art – with different positions and goods, while expressions of piety have been noted for both genders.
Historical documentary sources show women as active members, financing the construction of religious buildings, and carefully stipulating their own funeral rites with astounding detail, from what will be worn, the offerings to be bestowed and the number of days of mourning. Some scholars studying testaments and pious donations have already pointed out differences related to gender: in the choice of the burial place – beside the husband or back with their own family line, and the increase likelihood to wish to be buried wearing religious attire, often from mendicant orders.
The bodies themselves have been mostly kept out of the discussion where Christian Portuguese Medieval and Modern burials are concerned. As such, we aim to explore a bioarcheological perspective based on anthropological field reports, to outline differences in mortuary practice between female and male adults, and children in Portugal from burial sites instituted after 1297.
In the present paper we aim to present the preliminary framework of our ongoing study, a theoretical state of the art and the methodology to be employed throughout our research. We believe that comprehensive statistical inter-site comparisons will underline possible trends not visible at intra-site level or highlight the geographical or chronological specificity of these trends.

La Consentida explores Early Formative period transitions in residential mobility, subsistence, and social organization at the site of La Consentida in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. Examining how this site transformed during one of the most fundamental moments of socioeconomic change in the ancient Americas, the book provides a new way of thinking about the social dynamics of Mesoamerican communities of the period.

Guy David Hepp summarizes the results of several seasons of fieldwork and laboratory analysis under the aegis of the La Consentida Archaeological Project, drawing on various forms of evidence—ground stone tools, earthen architecture, faunal remains, human dental pathologies, isotopic indicators, ceramics, and more— to reveal how transitions in settlement, subsistence, and social organization at La Consentida were intimately linked. While Mesoamerica is too diverse for research at a single site to lay to rest ongoing debates about the Early Formative period, evidence from La Consentida should inform those debates because of the site’s unique ecological setting, its relative lack of disturbance by later occupations, and because it represents the only well-documented Early Formative period village in a 300-mile stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast.

One of the only studies to closely document multiple lines of evidence of the transition toward a sedentary, agricultural society at an individual settlement in Mesoamerica, La Consentida is a key resource for understanding the transition to settled life and social complexity in Mesoamerican societies.

The site of Hasanlu, Iran, is best known for its destruction around 800 B.C.E. at the hands of the Urartian army. The period leading up to the destruction, Hasanlu IVb, was one of rapid change at the site, located where the burgeoning of the Urartian state to the north conflicted with the expansion of the Assyrian Empire from the west. Changes—which have been loosely attributed to “militarization”—are evident throughout Hasanlu, including in the approximately 100 Period IVb burials on the site’s lower mound. For example, for the first time at Hasanlu the IVb burials include militaristic dress items, including weapons and armor. This paper explores the relationship between the osteologically determined biological sex of the human remains and the gendering of mortuary assemblages and artifacts. Based on durable dress items found in these burials, this paper challenges assumptions about binary sex and gender in antiquity, arguing that in Hasanlu Period IVb, dress played an active role in the construction of an “other” or third gender at the site.

In 293/4 BC Demetrios Poliorketes, the son of Antigonos the One Eyed, a general of Alexander the Great, ascended to the Macedonian throne and synoecized several towns in the northern Pagasetic Gulf to create an economically strategic port city called Demetrias, which played a significant military and political role as a Macedonian capital throughout the Hellenistic period. Over the course of its occupation, Demetrias became a multicultural polity inhabited by Thessalians, Macedonians, Egyptians, and numerous other populations which were buried in one of the city’s extramural necropoleis.

This paper analyzes the osteological and artefactual material from the Hellenistic graves at Demetrias in order to demonstrate that burials no longer solely reflected local burial forms, but ones that expressed a collective Demetrian identity as well as other identities, reflecting the paradoxic Hellenistic reality in Alexander’s former empire in which local identities negotiated increasingly global realities. I plan to analyze and compare burial patterns by examining potential variations in skeletal orientation, burial goods, tomb architecture, grave markers, and accompanying inscriptions. The potential variations will be assessed in the historical context of Demetrias as well as the broader context of funerary culture in Hellenistic Greece to identify expressions of social and political identities.

In 294/3 BC Demetrios Poliorketes, the son of Antigonos Monopthalmos, a general of Alexander, ascended the Macedonian throne and synoecized many of the settlements in the northern Pagasetic Gulf to create an economically and militarily strategic port city called Demetrias. Macedonian patronage of the city allowed the city to flourish as a cosmopolis, attracting inhabitants from all over the Mediterranean, making it an interesting case study concerning the formation and negotiation of identities.

The excavations of Demetrias started in the early 20th century and continue to the present day in the form of rescue excavations. In addition to uncovering the city’s private and public sectors, excavations have also revealed abundant funerary material, including over a thousand graves, and a large collection of painted grave stelae which were built into the city’s fortifications. This paper presents the modes through which the inhabitants of Demetrias expressed affiliation to group identities through their burials.

The case of the burials at Demetrias demonstrates observable identity formation processes resulting from the integration of numerous group identities into a single population. In this paper, I demonstrate that the inhabitants of the city both maintained older identities, as well as forming new group identities. I first examine the changes in burial practices from the area of Demetrias pre- and post- synoikismos through changes in the grave goods and architecture, as well as shifts in the locations of cemeteries. Areas such as Soros were abandoned, whereas some burials continued despite the abandonment of the settlement. I also examine the grave stelae with respect to the iconography of the paintings and the inscriptions, as they allow us to determine the group identities with which the deceased individuals were affiliated. Many stelae mention areas from around the Mediterranean such as Egypt, Asia Minor, and Phoenicia. Some stelae even exhibit people maintaining old city identities generations after that city had been destroyed such as in the case of Histiaia. Despite the diversity of identifications present in the burials, however, we also see the beginnings of a “Demetrian” way of burying the dead.

My analysis of Demetrian burials demonstrates the clear complexity of identity formation processes. Although many chose to identify with a particular location, many more omitted any indication other than with the current polis. These identities with which inhabitants of Demetrias affiliated themselves were multi-layered, contradictory, and constantly changing.

The Neolithic site of Shkārat Msaied is under excavation since 1999 by a Danish team of the University of Copenhagen. During the last seasons we have focused on building unit F and its surroundings. Unit F contains a series of burials offering striking insights into the PPNB mortuary practices. The contribution presents the fieldwork and research carried out at the site in recent years. Shkārat Msaied is one of the PPNB sites in the Petra area showing the transition from round to rectangular buildings and the use of the “vertical” space highlighting the long building tradition in the region.