Rituais Funerário

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 paper discusses the ways of presentation of information about the dead at various stages of the development of burial practices in Chersonesos. It is taken into consideration that not only the inscriptions were informative, but also the architecture and design, the material and the place where the burial structure was located. A limited number of the main variants of stelae design might be considered a peculiarity of Chersonesos. In most cases, only the upper design varied. Stelae were always decorated with two rosettes on the front and one on either side. Although design of gravestones in many ancient Greek cities was the same, the set of typical decorations of Chersonesan stelae remained unchanged for centuries. Apparently the changes in gravestone design corresponded to the changes in the historical situation in Chersonesos, as well as to the notions of the afterlife. From the third and second century BC on, the number of marble stelae and anthropomorphic gravestones increased. The presentation of narrative information on a gravestone remained unchanged for long. Only in the Late Hellenistic period was the transition from indication of the name only to more detailed account. Most gravestone inscriptions were simple and traditional in the Hellenistic period. Perhaps the notions of the dead and the burial in Chersonesos of that time differed from what existed in the next centuries. Almost all the Hellenistic stelae from Chersonesos indicate names in nominative. In such case, the livings identified the dead person with a marker representing his / her grave, i. e. the stela. The system of ideas about a particular living of the soul in Hades spread among the residents in the next period only. This process reflected in the indication of the dead person’s name on a stelae in genitive, i. e. that the stela or grave belonged to the dead person who was somewhere else. Human consciousness kept a more ancient of the dead with his / her grave for centuries, as it was reflected by the phrase “here I am lying…” in inscriptions on some gravestones and sarcophagi from the Late Hellenistic period or the first centuries AD. The tradition to show the age of the dead as narrative information instead of symbolical representation by attributes of youth or aged persons spread in the same period. There are inscriptions indicating who erected the gravestones, though in all the cases they are talking of non-Chersonesites. Therefore, this way of information presentation hardly became traditional in Chersonesos. Perhaps the heirs used design to show their participation in the funeral depicting themselves as small figures with mourning gestures or gifts in their hands near the heroized ancestors in funeral feast scenes.

When a family sent the dead body of the loved one to the embalmers, they would expect to receive  back the correctly mummified and wrapped body of that family member ready for burial. But in reality, this did not always happen: instead some families unknowingly received a mummy containing disconnected pieces of their relative, or a mixture of remains of several different people, or the body of a complete stranger, or even, just empty wrappings. How and why did the embalmers manage to make such a mess of things?

Ce texte est organisé en deux parties. La première partie remet en perspective historique la rencontre manquée entre les travaux portant sur le changement social africain, dans lesquels va s’inscrire Balandier à partir des années 1950, et la dynamique historique des funérailles africaines de la même période. La seconde partie revient sur l’actualité de l’héritage de Balandier pour penser les dynamiques contemporaines des funérailles africaines, lesquelles sont considérées ici comme des points d’entrée féconds à partir desquels il est possible d’explorer avec profit des dynamiques plus générales du champ social.

Un seminario per mostrare l'importanza di un dialogo tra discipline umanistiche e scientifiche.
Sinergie necessarie per scavare, documentare, ricostruire e valorizzare storie di uomini e popolazioni passate.
A parlarcene saranno membri dell'ISCUM, esperti del mondo accademico e del MiBACT.
Vi aspettiamo!

La sala conferenze del Museo di Sant'Agostino si trova in piazza Sarzano (a destra dopo l'ingresso del Museo) ed è raggiungibile con il metrò, fermata S. Agostino.
Per chi venisse in macchina il parcheggio più comodo è il Marina park in via Mura della Marina

La Tumba de Ramsés IV. Realizado por los alumnos Paula Martín Tovar, María de los Ángeles Navarro Sandoval, Paula Muñoz Godino y María Navarrete González.

Aquí os dejo los magníficos vídeos realizados para la clase de prácticas de Historia Antigua I: Egipto y Próximo Oriente, en el Grado de Historia de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2016/2017). La difusión en este canal se debe exclusivamente al intento por dar a conocer tan excelente esfuerzo investigador, análisis crítico y labor de los alumnos, contribuyendo a un mejor conocimiento global de estos temas para los amantes de la Historia.

El Rey Escorpión. Realizado por los alumnos Marta López Partida, Jorge Barbero Barroso y Diego Vilar Toledano.

Aquí os dejo los magníficos vídeos realizados para la clase de prácticas de Historia Antigua I: Egipto y Próximo Oriente, en el Grado de Historia de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2016/2017). La difusión en este canal se debe exclusivamente al intento por dar a conocer tan excelente esfuerzo investigador, análisis crítico y labor de los alumnos, contribuyendo a un mejor conocimiento global de estos temas para los amantes de la Historia.

In reconstructing the life of past populations, human burials are highly informative of symbolic and ritual behavior. In eastern South America, however, skeletal remains dating to the early Holocene are rare, precluding the proper study of their ritual dimensions. Lagoa Santa region in central Brazil is an important exception, as hundreds of well-preserved early Holocene human skeletons were recovered throughout 170 years of research. Here, I present a critical review of the history of discoveries of human remains in the region starting with the first interventions of Peter Lund in the first half of the nineteenth century. New excavations in Lapa do Santo starting in 2001 have revealed an elaborated setting of mortuary behavior in Lagoa Santa. Between 9.4 and 9.6 cal kyBP, the reduction of the body by means of mutilation, defleshing, tooth removal, exposure to fire, and possibly cannibalism, followed by the secondary burial of the remains according to strict rules, became a central element in the treatment of the dead. In the absence of monumental architecture or grave goods, these groups were using parts of fresh corpses to elaborate their rituals, showing this practice was not restricted to the Andean region at the beginning of the Holocene. Between 8.2 and 8.6 cal kyBP, another change occurred, whereby pits were instead filled with disarticulated bones of a single individual without signs of body manipulation, showing that during the early Archaic, Lagoa Santa was a region inhabited by dynamic groups that were in constant transformation over a period of centuries. The Lagoa Santa region is renowned worldwide for its rich fossil collection and for the conditions that led to an excellent degree of preservation of human skeletal remains such as is seldom observed in other ancient archeological sites in the Americas. Furthermore, the presence of humans in the region dates back to the end of the Pleistocene, endowing it with an outstanding role in the studies investigating the first Americans.