Funerary Practices in Archaeology: Pluralities & Heritage

Abstract

This article presents an aspect of the configuration of the studies of funerary practices in archaeology, first in terms of their plural perspectives and intersecting spaces, such as mortuary studies, funerary archaeology, social bioarchaeology and archaeology-anthropology of death; and in a second moment, with emphasis on the issue of cemeteries as historical archaeological heritage. It was based on an article initially published in <i>Revista Clio Série Arqueológica</i>, a periodical of the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, which dealt with the issue of the relationship between funerary sites, funerary practices and archaeological heritage. From a review of the random archaeological bibliography, the intersections between a general archaeological theory of material culture and as bioarchaeologies were verified, on the one hand in the international perspective and hermetic legislation and burial terminologies, on the other hand, in the perspective of the case from Brazil. In the first case, hypotheses were formulated to characterize funerary contexts and non-funerary contexts in relation to funerary cycles. In the second case, exemplified sites and funerary terminologies linked with the proper funerary contexts - the heritage-cemeteries in the case of Brazil. Heritage-cemeteries contain objects of material culture, closely related to human skeletal remains, comprising artifacts or primordial, symbolic, sensitive structures, representing an innovative intersectional area, with the body amalgamated with artifacts and funerary structures, within the studies of funeral practices, perhaps necessarily, in the underground and aboveground approaches.