Corpse treatment in a Late Formative bell-shaped pit at La Laguna, Tlaxcala, Mexico

This chapter discusses mortuary ritual practices among early Jews/Christians and Romans in order to draw a ritual profile of early Christian mortuary practices in their ancient Mediterranean context. The theoretical framework for the chapter is CSR-inspired ritual theory with a special focus on the ‘action perspective’, that is an underlying premise that ritual actions mirror social actions and that they are analysable as such. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to mortuary ritual in general, followed by a presentation of the most relevant sources (texts and archaeology). Finally, rituals of funeral and mourning and of visiting and eating with the dead are discussed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between mortuary rituals and afterlife beliefs, in which it is argued that mortuary rituals are rarely influenced by dogma and belief systems, but are rather pragmatic, traditional, and local practices that are directed at the deceased as a social agent.

Ring cairns in Wales have been viewed as a discrete form of structured cairn, a stony ring enclosing an open central area, dating to the second millennium be, whose distinctive character may reflect a particular role not primarily connected with the interment of the dead. Fifteen likely ring cairns were noted in cairn groups on five ridges in SE Dyfed and on the Gower Peninsula. Although the position of ring cairns on these ridges to some extent overlaps that of other cairns, ring cairns tend towards locations particularly dominated by higher ground which are not so favoured by the other cairns. A range of structural elaborations was present amongst the ring cairns including kerbing, in-filled interiors, orthostats in the bank, and breaks in the ring possibly representing entrances.Two ring cairns adjacent to each other, GCRC I and II, on Cefn Bryn, Gower were excavated. GCRC I was a stony ring bank, originally with two entrances, one of which had been blocked in antiquity. It enclosed an open area at the centre of which was a pit containing a very little burnt bone. GCRC II comprised a ring bank of stone with inner kerb, against which was a pit containing earth and charcoal flecks. It certainly had one entrance, which was deliberately blocked perhaps at the same time as the interior was filled with stone to the level of the top of the kerb. The pit contents at the rings each gave mid-ind millennium be radiocarbon dates. It is possible that the pit fill at GCRC I came from an earlier burial elsewhere so the determination may not reflect the time of deposition at GCRC I.A case can be argued that ring cairns in the area were built for the public performance of ceremonial on the basis of the apparent absence of formal burial at GCRC I and II, and the structure and siting of the monuments suggesting their suitability as arenas. Ceremonial may have been connected with mortuary ritual, although undated evidence for early agricultural activity in the vicinity of the rings indicates a potentially wider social and economic context for their use. While aspects of the evidence for activity at the two excavated ring cairns may be paralleled at structurally similar monuments in N Wales and S W England, some variations in form and activity are apparent which could indicate differences of emphasis during the time they were in use across the region. Finally, ring cairns are not the only form of broadly contemporary monument to which a ceremonial role can be assigned, and the differences in monumental form could well reflect different ritual requirements, or even social distinctions though too little work has been undertaken as yet on possible social models for the region for this idea to be developed.

Anglo-Saxon archaeology can offer very few examples of deliberate, irretrievable deposition outside the mortuary arena, unlike the British and Continental archaeological evidence for the Roman and Iron Ages. With the exception of the furnished cemetery sites, Anglo-Saxon archaeology is notably short of ‘ritual’ deposits or structures until the arrival of Christianity, and we are equally short of ritual centres or sites expressing communal effort. It may be that any belief systems supported by the people inhabiting lowland England between the ending of Roman Britain and the Conversion left no surviving archaeological trace. In this context, however, furnished burials, accepted by archaeologists as a ritual display for an audience, may be ready for reinterpretation. Recent evaluation of Anglo-Saxon mortuary ritual has studied furnished burial almost solely in terms of conspicuous display, social organization and the relationship between the individual and the symbolic social messages of the goods with which they were buried. This paper argues that a rigid distinction between ‘votive’ and ‘burial’ deposition could be misleading, and that this distinction may be preventing us from seeing that the mortuary ritual should be recognized as an expression of a communal belief system, as well as carrying other important social messages.

Reviewed by: Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: From Ancient to Contemporary Times ed. by Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid Hyang A Lee Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: From Ancient to Contemporary Times edited by Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. 265pp. As Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias have shown, personal and societal attitudes towards death have gradually changed in the course of history. Although their research dealt only with Western societies, their thesis indeed holds true for all societies, including Korea. Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea is an edited volume of ten essays about how Koreans have historically dealt with death and how mortuary rites have changed. The concept of mortuary rites here covers all aspects of death from the treatment and burial of the body to the burial sites, ceremonies, rituals, and the afterlife. This book effectively presents both change and continuity in Koreans’ attitudes to death in Korean history from the Greater Silla Kingdom to present times. Compared to Western societies where Christianity, whether in the form of Catholicism or Protestantism, was the dominant religion over a long period of time, East Asia and Korea experienced a comparatively varied religious outlook, which was subject to change as the ruling regime changed. As the editors of this volume also point out, different focal belief systems constructed Koreans’ worldviews and influenced their consciousness and lives over time. They include shamanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, geomancy and Christianity. These belief systems intermingled over time and contributed to a syncretic religious worldview in premodern Korea. However, Koreans’ consciousness of death and practices dealing with death are not influenced solely by these religious worldviews. The introduction of modern Western medicine and the modern [End Page 331] knowledge system was another great axis to affect aspects of death in modern and contemporary Korea. This edited volume covers all these aspects. While subtitled “From ancient to contemporary times,” the book does not present a chronological development. Instead, the chapters are grouped under the themes of body (part I), disposal (part II), ancestral worship and rites (part III) and afterlife (part IV). Each part consists of two to three essays covering different historical eras. Part I deals with the treatment of the dead body both in the premodern and the modern period. By examining Buddhist cremation rites in Greater Silla and Koryŏ, Sem Vermeersch tackles our widespread misunderstanding about the Buddhist impact on death in those periods. Using archeological materials and historical records, Vermeersch refutes the notion that cremation was the dominant burial practice in Greater Silla and Koryŏ. According to him, cremation was but one of the different ways in which people treated the dead body. The association between Buddhist identity and cremation was realized only amongst a limited part of the elite after the mid-eleventh century. This chapter forms a suitable introduction to the volume in so far that it shows through diachronic analysis that an important feature of mortuary rites is their resistance to change. In contrast, the second chapter of this part deals with contemporary changes in mortuary rites. John DiMoia, drawing upon the Minnesota Project conducted by the University of Minnesota and Seoul National University from 1956 to 1962, explores how modern medicine hospitalized the treatment of the dead body in Korea. The “emergence of the hospital as a site for death represented a shift from the past, and in part the funeral hall was designed to ease this transition.” (p. 70) He provides an interesting analysis of the funeral hall as a medium of transition from the past (tradition) to the present in dealing with the dead body. However, his treatment of the historical development of cremation before the 1950s is too sketchy. Also, cremation was not introduced in the 1930s as he writes (p. 70), but in 1912, when the colonial authorities first legislated burial rules. Part II contains two articles dealing with the disposal of the bodily remains in the Koryŏ dynasty and contemporary Korea. Resonating with Vermeersch’s arguments, Charlotte Horlyck presents a variety of ways to dispose the dead body in the Koryŏ period. This depended on individual circumstances, which is in...

Four seasons of excavation at the Santa Isabel site on the shore of Lake Nicaragua have recovered an extensive assemblage of material remains relating to Early Postclassic period (A.D. 800–1250) domestic practice. This paper reports initial project results, specifically relating to themes of architecture, foodways, specialized production, and belief systems. Exceptional preservation of organic materials such as faunal and botanical remains, as well as bone tools, permits an expansive description of the material culture relating to household level consumption. Through the intensive coverage of 5 ha of the site center, including 10 house mounds, we see that intra-site variation also reflects community organization. Finally, Santa Isabel presents potential for inferring cultural relationships between central Mexico (based on ethnohistorical accounts) and Greater Nicoya.

Disciplines such as sociology and anthropology have showed that the experience of illness, is above all, a social product, that is, that social factors of different kinds play a central role in shaping individuals' subjectivity. This paper refers to the case of Ocuituco, a rural town of central Mexico. The article presents some of the results achieved through an interpretive sociological study of individuals' subjective experience of traditional illnesses such as susto, soul-loss, and fallen fontanelle. The aim is to analyze how Ocuituco's inhabitants attach meaning to, interpret, and experience these illnesses. The main point being made is that the subjective experience of traditional illnesses is shaped both by the cultural background of individuals, and by the sociological features of the setting where these individuals live. Data are interpreted in connection both to structural factors (poverty, medicalization, and patriarchy), and to the main traits that characterize individuals' view of their world: a sense of uncertainty, a sense of the unexpected as being normal, a sense of being oppressed, a familiarity with a patriarchal order. It is shown that both susto and fallen fontanelle are belief systems which allow individuals to interpret their circumstances and attach meaning to their problematic everyday life.

Human remains under the microscope of funerary taphonomy: Investigating the histological biography of the decaying body in the prehistoric Aegean

An intrinsic and material consequence of mass violence is the corresponding mass production of human corpses. What the perpetrators subsequently do with these corpses varies greatly from one instance to another, and the rationale behind their choice and behaviour is not always clear. If establishing an infallible typology of the treatment of corpses of the victims by the perpetrators thus holds the risk of leading to erroneous extrapolations, the different modalities of treatment all seem to share one point: the use by the perpetrators of the corpses of their victims to make their crimes visible or, to the contrary, to hide them. Focusing on selected cases (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Argentina), this contribution explores how treatments of corpses as diverse as exhibition, mutilation, concealment, or destruction are seldom a random choice and reveal the perverse relationship between perpetrators, violence, and death; between what they show and what they hide.

Comparing mortuary rituals across 57 representative cultures extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper demonstrates that kin of the deceased engage in behaviours to prepare the deceased for disposal that entail close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse. At first glance, such practices are costly and lack obvious payoffs. Building on prior functionalist approaches, we present an explanation of corpse treatment that takes account of the unique adaptive challenges entailed by the death of a loved one. We propose that intimate contact with the corpse provides the bereaved with extensive veridical cues of death, thereby facilitating acceleration of a grieving process that serves to recategorize the deceased as no longer a relationship partner, opening the door to relationship replacement and a return to social functioning. The benefits of exposure to such cues are tempered by the costs of exposure to cues of disease risk, a balance that in part explains the relative rarity of highly invasive mortuary practices that exacerbate the latter factor. We conclude by discussing implications of our model for contemporary mortuary practices in the developed world.

Boiling-over dense pyroclastic density currents during the formation of the ~ 100 km3 Huichapan ignimbrite in Central Mexico: Stratigraphic and lithofacies analysis

En parallèle aux sépultures. Histoire des idées sur d'autres pratiques mortuaires attribuées aux Néandertaliens

Information-systems methodologies and life-cycle: Information systems methodologies: a framework for understandingT W Olle and six other members of IFIP Working Group 8.1 Addison-Wesley, Wokingham, UK (1988) 346 pp £17.50 softback

AMERICAS, CENTRAL | The Olmec and Their Contemporaries

In Europe, cremation as a burial practice is often associated with the Bronze Age, but examples of cremated human remains are in fact known from the Palaeolithic onwards. Unlike conventional inhumation, cremation destroys most of the evidence we can use to reconstruct the biography of the buried individual. Remarkably, in Ireland, cremation is used for the earliest recorded human burial and grave assemblage (7530–7320 bc) located on the banks of the River Shannon, at Hermitage, County Limerick. While we are unable to reconstruct in any great detail the biography of this individual, we have examined the biography of a polished stone adzehead interred with their remains. To our knowledge, this adze represents the earliest securely dated polished axe or adze in Europe. Microscopic analysis reveals that the adze was commissioned for burial, with a short duration of use indicating its employment in funerary rites. Before its deposition into the grave it was intentionally blunted, effectively ending its use-life: analogous to the death of the individual it accompanied. The microwear traces on this adze thus provide a rare insight into early Mesolithic hunter-gatherer belief systems surrounding death, whereby tools played an integral part in mortuary rites and were seen as fundamental pieces of equipment for a successful afterlife.

The elaborate terracotta figurines of central Nigerian Nok culture date back to the early 1st millennium bce and represent the earliest large-size sculptural tradition in sub-Saharan Africa. Archaeological finds from the mid-20th century suggested that they appeared together with iron production and pointed to an early complex society preceding later Nigerian societies, such as Ile-Ife and Benin, which feature evidence for social differentiation and political organization. Fieldwork in the last fifteen years has yielded signs of specialization in terracotta and iron production, but no evidence for social or political complexity. Nok people were small-scale farmers living in dispersed homesteads from the mid-2nd millennium bce, when they arrived in the region from the north, and sharing the same lifeways, the same ceramic style, and, from 900 bce onward, the widely distributed use of highly standardized terracotta figurines. The earliest evidence for iron production is found at least one hundred years after the appearance of the first terracotta figurines, so that no link between the figurines and the presence of iron can be established. Excavations in 2016 have proven the spatial and temporal connection between terracotta figurine depositions and stone-pot arrangements interpreted as graves, indicating an ancestral belief system further revealed by evidence of feasting and mortuary rituals recurring over time. Thus, while no social or political complexity can be postulated for Nok culture based on the current evidence, the terracotta figurines and their use in mortuary rituals point to a complex ritual system spread over a large area in central Nigeria. Nok culture with its characteristic figurines and pottery disappears in the last centuries bce and is succeeded by people with new crops and different pottery in the early 1st millennium ce.