Tombs and testaments: Mortuary practices during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in the spanish-venezuelan catholic tradition

Abstract

The paper synthesizes data obtained from the excavation and observation of several western Venezuelan cemeteries of the 17th to 19th centuries, with documentary information obtained from testaments and other written sources of the same period on the Spanish Catholic funerary ritual. The combination of these two lines of evidence has permitted a preliminary reconstruction of the characteristics of the Venezuelan colonial burial practices, and some of the changes that occurred through time.