Elite Burials Research Articles

The Context and Significance of Copper Artifacts in Postclassic and Early Historic Lamanai, Belize

We consider the archaeological contexts in which copper objects have been recovered at the ancient Maya site of Lamanai in northern Belize and the significance these objects had for the residents of the community during Postclassic (ca. A.D. 950–1544) and Spanish colonial (post 1544) times. More copper objects have been recovered from controlled archaeological contexts at Lamanai than any other site in the southern Maya lowlands area. Bells make up the majority of the assemblage during the centuries just prior to and during historical times, but high status objects such as rings and clothing ornaments found in elite burials dominate in the Early Postclassic period. All of these objects were imported from outside the Maya area. Utilitarian objects, including needles, axes, and fish books, are found in a variety of contexts during Late Postclassic and Spanish colonial times, as are bells and rings. Production materials, including prills, blanks, and pigs/ingots, in addition to mis-cast objects that are production failures, also appear during this time. Nearly all of the copper objects found at Lamanai are distinctly Mesoamerican in form and design, and based on metallurgical analyses it appears that manufacturing technologies were distinctly Mesoamerican as well. The presence of production materials and mis-cast piecesy along with the results of chemical compositional and microstructural analyses, support the idea that the Maya at Lamanai were engaged in the on-site production of copper objects by late precolumbian times.

State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a 4th-century Ruling Elite (review)

Reviewed by: State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a 4th-century Ruling Elite Walter Edwards State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a 4th-century Ruling Elite. By Gina Barnes. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 288 pages. Hardcover £75.00. A singular event in Japanese antiquity is the sudden appearance around the end of the third century c.e. of monumental keyhole-shaped tombs, differing sharply from elite burials of the preceding Yayoi period in both size and uniformity. The 280-meterlong Hashihaka, located in the southeast Nara basin and considered the oldest of the colossal keyhole tombs, dwarfs the earlier Yayoi mounds, which never exceeded one hundred meters in length. And whereas the latter varied in outward form according to region, the standardized keyhole shape spanned the area from northern Kyushu to Kinai in the first stage of its appearance, then spread as far north as the Tôhoku region by the mid-fourth century. Recent reappraisals have moreover pushed the age of the earliest keyhole tombs back to the latter decades of the third century, tantalizingly close to the age of Himiko’s hegemony, intensifying interest over possible links between the two. State Formation in Japan, Gina Barnes’s latest contribution to the study of the Japanese past, focuses on the keyhole tombs’ appearance and spread as critical steps toward the fifth-century emergence of the Yamato state. Approaching this topic from a comprehensive array of perspectives, it begins with a historical sketch against the wider canvas of northeast Asia (“Yellow Sea Interaction Sphere”), tracing the development from the Yayoi period of exchange with polities of the Korean peninsula and northern China, as seen through the movement of prestige goods such as bronze mirrors and strategic commodities such as iron, and through Chinese historic records. Barnes analyzes interaction in this arena as a combination of “core/periphery relations” on the one hand, such as the tributary system through which the Chinese court appeased distant peoples by providing prestige goods and titles, and “peer polity interaction” on the other, involving competitive emulation and differentiation among trans-regional networks of peers, both within Japan and between Japan and the Korean peninsula. Within this multidimensional framework, Barnes traces the development of a Yayoi prestige-goods system in which western Japan, and particularly the northern Kyushu region, had greater access to bronze and iron sources through core/periphery and peer-polity relations than did the areas at the eastern end of the Inland Sea corridor, which were probably dependent on their western Japanese counterparts for the metal that filtered down to them. Prestige items like the bronze bells commonly found in the eastern region were not used for the promotion of individual or group status, but rather as part of fertility rites for the benefit of the community as a whole. By contrast, the prestige [End Page 393] items buried in chief-like graves in northern Kyushu, such as Chinese mirrors, were status markers whose acquisition presumably enhanced social standing, although supply was apparently unstable and the focus of competition. Historical records depict interaction at this time between the more advanced polities of northern Kyushu and the Late Han dynasty (25–220), through which particular individuals were able to receive titles as “king.” And while the archaeological record allows the identification of a small number of “kingly” graves in the region, Barnes disputes claims made by some Japanese scholars that stratification into ruling versus commoner classes had already emerged. Rather, she points to a gradient of prestige indicated by relative amounts of bronze mirrors, etc., and suggests that status was not ascribed but achieved through individual success in supervising domestic production, manipulating social networks to obtain such items, or perhaps warfare. The archaeological record indeed indicates that warfare became increasingly prevalent from the first century b.c.e. on, as evidenced by the construction of villages at upland locations for defense and observations by the Chinese of a period of disturbance in the latter part of the second century c.e. In addition to pressure for land, competition intensified over the diminishing supply of prestige goods as the Late Han court fell to unrest and uprisings, and crude imitations of Chinese mirrors...

The architecture and the signification of the Tarkhan mastabas

The palace facade mastabas at Tarkhan follow in general, in design and arrangement, the better preserved and documented examples excavated at Saqqara. Some features provide the same impression of a less evaluate status in comparison to Saqqara. Only one mastaba had chambers in the superstructure. There are only a few subsidiary tombs at Tarkhan, in marked contrast to the high number of such burials in Saqqara, or to the number and arrangement of subsidiary burials at Gizeh (Petrie 1907 : 2-7, pl. VI). Furthermore, there is not much inscribed material from these tombs ; perhaps this reflects the looting of these mastabas, but it is also possible that writing was, at that early state of Egyptian history, not yet so widespread across the country. A special feature are the well recorded cult places at the outside of many mastabas, not so well attested at other sites for this early period. Next to these cult places was always found a big amount of pottery, indicating a cult activity. The excavators did not record this pottery in detail. It remains unknown how long the cult functioned. However, for mastaba 2050 is mentioned that three pot marks found, relate to similar ones of the time of Semerkhet (Petrie 1914 : 5), indicating a cult at least for the following generation. For each generation from the time shortly before state formation to about the middle of the First Dynasty one large-scale tomb is known from the excavations. This creates the impression that these elite burials were reserved for the local governors at the town served by the cemeteries of Tarkhan. A gap is only visible at the beginning of the First Dynasty, between Narmer and Djet. There are two possible explanations for the gap. Either the governor tombs of that time are simply missing, or there was a governor with a particularly long reign, eventually buried in tomb 1060, the first of the extant palace façade tombs at Tarkhan. After Sequence Date 78, the time of state formation, a decline in number of burials is visible. One or two generations later the big palace façade tombs start. At first sight, this seems curious, but it has to remembered that Flinders Petrie did not publish all tombs found. Burials with not enough pottery were not included in his publication (Petrie, Wainwright & Gardiner 1913 : 4). With the time of state formation a polarisation of rich and poor is noticeable in the whole country (Seidlmayer 1988 ; Wilkinson 1996) ; perhaps, then, the number of burials remained at that time more or less the same, only with a high number of poorer burials, emptier or entirely empty and therefore not recorded by the excavators. After the middle of the First Dynasty there are no longer big palace façade tombs at Tarkhan. There are still some important burials of the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period (Petrie 1915), but in general it seems that the place lost its importance. Forty kilometres to the north the cemeteries at Helwan and Saqqara were growing, reflecting the rise of a new national centre, Inebhedj, the future Memphis. The history of Tarkhan must also be read against this regional and national setting.

A Seventh-Century ad Cemetery at Stoneage Barton Farm, Bishop's Lydeard, Somerset and Square-Ditched Burials in Post-Roman Britain

Part of a cemetery of uncertain extent was excavated following its discovery during work upon a late prehistoric and Roman rural settlement. At least four of the inhumations appeared to lie within square-ditched enclosures with entrances on the east. Bone survival was very poor but one skeleton, from a double burial, was dated to the mid-seventh century and was probably female. The practice of square-ditched burial is discussed and it is suggested that the burials are a widespread but uncommon form of secular elite burial in areas outside Saxon control.

Chiefly exchange between Kyushu and Okinawa, Japan, in the Yayoi period

Introduction During the Yayoi Period of Japan (approximately 300 BC to 300 AD) tropical shell bracelets appear in elite burials in Kyushu (FIGURE 1) .In this paper I discuss recent investigations which indicate that these shells were produced in Okinawa, some 500 km. to the southwest of Kyushu, and were exchanged for Yayoi pottery vessels and possibly other artefacts. The context of this exchange system and the implications for Japanese prehistory are also considered.