Abstract
Funerary taphonomy has come of age as an important field in osteoarchaeology. Its goal is to reconstruct funerary practices by using taphonomic evidence, including both evidence recorded during excavation (particularly the context and state of articulation of human remains) and evidence observable in subsequent laboratory analysis (such as element representation and traces of burning, animal modification, cut-marks, and fragmentation). This article – intended as a systematic introduction to the field – gives an overview of funerary taphonomy. It first discusses the goals and theoretical questions, and then reviews the wide range of methods available to archaeologists using human remains to investigate funerary behaviour. It finishes with a review of how taphonomists have approached particular issues, such as single burials, commingled multiple depositions, cannibalism, and the cultural reuse of human skeletal parts.
Highlights
Funerary taphonomy – the study of how taphonomic changes aid the interpretation of funerary practices – is an emerging field
British Neolithic archaeologists have made often rather off-thecuff inferences about funerary ritual since the first collective tombs were excavated in the 19th century, but it was only in the 1990s that the first systematic taphonomic investigations were done
Laboratory data can be collected from assemblages preserved in collections, in some cases long after excavation. In some cases they may even be recoverable from ‘legacy’ data in archives or reports if they are sufficiently detailed and free from recovery biases (Lorentz, 2016–in this issue, gives a good example of combining archive and original data as funerary taphonomy develops within a research region)
Summary
Funerary taphonomy – the study of how taphonomic changes aid the interpretation of funerary practices – is an emerging field. The result was to normalise the archaeological record, making a range of funerary practices invisible and cutting off an opportunity to investigate the rich variety of human deathways. This limited both what data were recorded – there was little impetus to examine bone depositions in any detail – and the development of new methods. The second source came from forensic anthropology Researchers such as Haglund and Sorg (1997, 2002) focused upon questions such as how an exposed body decomposes in different environmental circumstances, and how taphonomic agents such as carnivore scavenging and burning can be identified. The result is that one learns far less than one could about the cultural variation in how humans globally have disposed of the dead – or kept them and continued to interact with them
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