Gender and Ossuaries: Ideology and Meaning

Abstract

Burial practices, as a material means of culture, can provide a variety of different insights into the nature of society and the relationships between the living and the dead. Burials may also show the interaction among individual members in the living society, who used particular burial practices to construct their own social reality. Ossuaries found in specific archaeological contexts are used here to investigate gendered aspects of the social life of the people of Jerusalem and Jericho who used these ossuaries at the end of the Second Temple period, through the study of skeletal remains and epigraphic evidence. The burials discussed here reflect the gendered ideology of society. The identity of the male persona is more public and individualized than that of the female, which is connected primarily with the private spheres of childbearing, motherhood, and wife-hood. Burial does not passively reflect gendered aspects of society, but is created through human agency, by the individual who actively shapes his meanings and intentions within the material culture.