Funerary Landscape Research Articles

The Gebelein Region in the Third Intermediate and Late Periods

While relatively much is known of Gebelein in the second and third millennia BCE, as well as the Ptolemaic times, the role of the town of Per-Hathor and its surrounding in the Third Intermediate (c. 1076–747 BCE) and Late (c. 747–332 BCE) periods remains largely obscure. The aim of this paper is to examine the existing sources pertaining to the history of Gebelein with the particular focus on state activities in the area, diachronic changes in settlement pattern and sacral topography, as well as funerary landscape in the first three-quarters of first millennium BCE and analyse the available information in a regional context. For this, published and unpublished records are utilised, together with the results of the current field prospection in Gebelein.

The walking dead: Identity, variability, and cultural interactions of funerary behaviors between Crete and mainland Greece during the Early Iron Age (11th to 8th BC)

This paper aims to examine funerary contexts of sites in mainland Greece and compare them with sites on the island of Crete in Ancient Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age, in the period of circa the 11th until the 8th centuries BC. From an integrative approach to the analysis and interpretation of material culture from funerary contexts allow us to understand aspects of the space of the dead, aspects of mortuary practices and their role in the configuration of the historical context of the rise and formation of the polis, especially during the 8th century BC. The comparative analyses also provide a better understanding about contact and interactions in the Mediterranean. This requires us to analyze and consider on the different nature of material culture from funerary contexts, such as types of treatment and deposition/disposal/placement of the body of the dead, the construction of funerary architecture, grave goods, and the agency of the space of the dead in the construction of the funerary topography (funerary landscape). Cultural interactions are material expressions resulting from the exchange of ideas, know-how, technique and technology, beliefs, customs, and behaviors, both from objects and from the movement of people. They constitute a prospective field to address mortuary archaeological data as an active part of death and of the social process of dying. Funerary behaviors assign meanings, build memories and identities to biological death. They bring life to the transition of an active person in the “world of the living” into a passive “material thing” in the “world of the dead”. Thus, the dead, become the “walking dead” and “come to life”. Cultural interactions during the Early Iron Age constitute a fundamental element in the configuration of a new historical structure, the polis, which characterizes the Greek world as a unit – not homogeneous but consisting of heterogeneous and idiosyncratic aspects. Mortuary practices integrate this world of simultaneously standardized and peculiar actions and have crucial roles in the hellenic identity and in the identity particularities of its polis in Greek mainland and Crete.

Aedicula Tombs and Statues in Rome: Reconsidering the Monument of Eurysaces

This article revisits the well-known monument of Eurysaces in the context of the Roman funerary landscape. By focusing on its structure and original context, our research demonstrates that the monument, far from being a unicum, instead conformed to contemporary commemorative practices and was in many ways typical. Analysis of comparable monuments and funerary areas, as well as characterization of the concrete used, indicates that the monument of Eurysaces was originally an aedicula tomb with a superstructure, now missing. This reconstruction allows for a more convincing and traditional positioning of the relief images known as “Eurysaces and his wife” at the crowning level of this structure. While our research focuses on the monument of Eurysaces, an important and unexpected result has been the likely identification of several full-length portrait reliefs whose distinctive features suggest that they belong to a previously unrecognized corpus in Rome: aedicular statues. This designation explains the characteristics differentiating them from freestanding statues and helps fill the lacuna of evidence for Rome’s once robust group of funerary structures and ornamentation. The identification of these aedicular statues, in turn, reiterates the fact that aedicula tombs were once popular in the city’s funerary landscape, as they were across the Roman empire.1

Memory, agency, and labor mobilization in the monumental funerary landscapes of southeastern Mauritania, West Africa

The archaeological record of southeastern Mauritania has considerable potential to contribute to longstanding anthropological debates in world prehistory, such as early cereal domestication or the emergence and organization of complex societies, although research remains limited. The archaeological study of funerary rites offers invaluable insights into cultural attitudes towards the dead and the socio-economic dynamics of the living. The materiality of remembrance is a political statement, rooted on the ability of different social agents to mobilize labor pools and networks of obligations within a given cultural framework. As such, understanding the spatial distribution and size variability in burial monuments within funerary landscapes provides insights into the social energetics of ancestor memorialization. To that end, this paper first presents a size-based classification system for pre-Islamic conical tumulus cairns in the highlands of southeastern Mauritania, West Africa, that has much wider applicability within prehistoric Saharan archaeology. Through the first application of Gini coefficients to the study of funerary landscapes, the paper then analyses the spatial distribution and degree of monument size variability within large, spatially bounded clusters (“tumulus fields”) in Dhar Tichitt in order to contextualize the socio-economic dynamics of labor mobilization at three previously undocumented tumulus fields in the western Tagant Plateau.

Making Sense of Landscape: A New Study of Sound Propagation between Tarquinian Funerary and Habitation Settings

Abstract The study of pre-Roman landscape settings has progressed across a long trajectory in its consideration of urban and rural adaptations in Etruria. Such studies, while providing valuable details regarding social organization, have not considered the unique aural nature of the landscape, particularly with respect to funerary settings. Nowhere is this more evident than with painted chambered tombs. Our understanding of Etruscan painted tombs is still largely guided by analytic studies of tomb paintings, epigraphic sources, and typologies. Thus, the bilateral relationship between each tomb’s landscape setting and habitation contexts has been explored from a solely visual perspective, rather than from a multisensory perspective, and consequently, ritual performed in and around the tomb space remains unclear. A further understanding of perceptual constructs involving aural information offers a new way forward in confronting these realities. This article utilizes acoustic modeling tools to illustrate the potential range of audibility between the Necropoli dei Monterozzi in Tarquinia and various locations in the landscape. Acoustic and spatial data collected in 2019 inside a series of painted tombs in the Calvario area of the Necropoli dei Monterozzi in Tarquinia provides further information regarding the painted tomb’s landscape setting and its environs. The preliminary study suggests that aural information can greatly enhance our understanding of funerary practices in Tarquinia, particularly with respect to how habitation areas in Tarquinia may have engaged with funerary landscapes.

Memory, Agency, and Labour Mobilisation Asymmetries in the Funerary Landscapes of Southeastern Mauritania, West Africa

Memory, Agency, and Labour Mobilisation Asymmetries in the Funerary Landscapes of Southeastern Mauritania, West Africa

Dating the pendant burials of north‐west Arabia: First radiometric results from the Khaybar Oasis, Saudi Arabia

AbstractThe monumental stone structures of the Arabian Peninsula have been notoriously difficult to date. Due to their visibility in the landscape, they have suffered from extensive robbing and later reuse, which has compromised dating methodologies. In particular, our understanding of when the elaborate “pendants” (also known as “tailed cairns” or “tailed tower tombs”) of north‐west Arabia were first constructed has remained incomplete. Recent work undertaken by the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – Khaybar project provides some of the first radiometric dates for the pendants of Saudi Arabia. These structures can now be dated as far back as the third millennium BCE, revealing for the first time a hitherto undocumented, large‐scale, monumental funerary landscape dating to the Early Bronze Age. These radiocarbon dates bring the advent of the pendant building tradition in line with funerary developments across the wider Arabian Peninsula, and may mark a profound reconfiguring of the wider Harrat Khaybar landscape during the third millennium BCE.

Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan.

Funerary landscapes are eminent results of the relationship between environments and superstructural human behavior, spanning over wide territories and growing over centuries. The comprehension of such cultural palimpsests needs substantial research efforts in the field of human ecology. The funerary landscape of the semi-arid region of Kassala (Eastern Sudan) represents a solid example. Therein, geoarchaeological surveys and the creation of a desk-based dataset of thousands of diachronic funerary monuments (from early tumuli up to modern Beja people islamic tombs) were achieved by means of fieldwork and remote sensing over an area of ∼4100 km2. The wealth of generated information was employed to decipher the spatial arrangement of sites and monuments using Point Pattern Analysis. The enormous number of monuments and their spatial distribution are here successfully explained using, for the first time in archaeology, the Neyman-Scott Cluster Process, hitherto designed for cosmology. Our study highlights the existence of a built funerary landscape with galaxy-like aggregations of monuments driven by multiple layers of societal behavior. We suggest that the distribution of monuments was controlled by a synthesis of opportunistic geological constraints and cultural superstructure, conditioned by the social memory of the Beja people who have inhabited the region for two thousand years and still cherish the ancient tombs as their own kin's.

Monumental funerary landscapes of Dhar Tagant (south‐eastern Mauritania): Towards ethical satellite remote sensing in the West African Sahel

AbstractThe remembrance of the dead is a ubiquitous dimension of most human societies, and the spatial dimension of mortuary practices actively constitutes an essential element of the cultural significance of certain places in the landscape. The visual prominence of stone‐built funerary monuments in dry upland areas is particularly conducive to their multiscalar study through above‐ground remote sensing methods. In this paper, we characterize the nature and distribution of Late Holocene drystone funerary monuments in the Dhar Tagant region of south‐eastern Mauritania using freely available, very high‐resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. We contextualize them in relation to the monumental mortuary records of Senegal and Mali within the West African Sahel, exploring their similarities and differences with other monumental funerary landscapes in semi‐arid environments. Ethical considerations and a self‐reflective attitude must be at the forefront of archaeological research, and we discuss the ethics of remote sensing research in the study of funerary practices in Africa, as well as the opportunities and challenges for remote collaborative engagement with local communities in the context of fieldwork restrictions.

Monumentality, Social Memory, and Territoriality in Neolithic–Chalcolithic Northwestern Arabia

ABSTRACT Recent excavations undertaken by the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (AAKSA) project have recovered significant skeletal material, evidence for funerary offerings, including jewelry, and the earliest chronometrically dated domestic dog in the Arabian Peninsula. Despite being heavily disturbed by recent looting, these monumental funerary structures were found to be collective burials dating to the 5th and 4th millennia b.c. The evidence recovered from these graves provides new insight into the social and funerary landscapes of northwestern Arabia during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, shedding light upon issues of social memory, territoriality, and monumentality in the Middle Holocene of the Arabian Peninsula.

Dark Matter: Research on an Evolving Funerary Landscape in St. Louis, Missouri

<i>Dark Matter</i>, a research by design thesis, investigates the ecological value of human remains, and their latent agency for advancing biological diversity in urban cemeteries. The project proposes an expedited aboveground decomposition process (Natural Organic Reduction) to convert human tissue and bone into nutrient-rich soil-like materials. Following decomposition, human remains merge with non-human ecologies over time to offer mourners an extended period of ceremony and remembrance. Transference of energy and matter to adjacent non-human life is emphasized in the transition, and a memorial’s embodiment in physical space is expanded to include natural systems and ecological productivity. The funerary landscape is thus decentralized from a static site of memorial to an evolving memorial system that invites engagement with the living. In an age of pandemic, mass extinction, and deepening climate crises, a commitment to an environmentally ethical funeral practice connects the loss of the individual to global patterns of ecological ruin and environmental decline. These layered scales of grief are experienced at divergent timescales, suggesting the need for a new typology of memorial landscape that positions the human life within larger natural cycles of birth, death, decay, and metamorphosis. Rituals of commemoration, management, and activism would be alchemized to unexpected outcomes when the program of memorial, ecological preserve, and a theater for collective actions are merged. <i>Dark Matter</i> proposes a network of biodiverse public landscapes where bodily death events meaningfully contribute to ecological systems of propulsive regenerative life.

The Role of Archival Aerial Photography in Shaping Our Understanding of the Funerary Landscape of Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus

AbstractThis study deals with the investigation of the Eastern necropolis of Nea Paphos in western Cyprus, employing archival and recent aerial photographs for the identification of surface/near-surface ancient architectural remains. The analysis of the primary archival aerial photograph employed for this study reveals the archaeological visibility of the site as it had been captured approximately 15 years before its rescue excavation in the 1980s. The outcomes from the enhancement and interpretation of the archival aerial photograph supplement known archaeological information of the area and elucidate the understanding of the spatial distribution of the tombs as well as the geographic extent of the necropolis.

How might landscapes be better designed to accommodate increasing cremation practices in Europe?

Death is one of those universal parameters of life, yet very little attention is given to it in neither the work of planning practitioners nor that of landscape research. During the 19th and 20th century’s many Western societies turned to cremation as a more sanitary, less costly and space saving way of human disposal. This paper highlights the cemeteries and crematoria as two types of facilities associated with cremation practices in Poland and in selected European countries. On the basis of analyses of contemporary funerary landscapes for cremation practices from Europe (31 objects from 9 countries) a catalog (‚pattern book‘) of design solutions was developed. Countries were selected on the basis of similarity to Poland in the aspect of the dominant religion (Austria, France, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia), convergent provisions of cemetery and funeral law (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Slovenia, Sweden), and index of average population served by 1 crematorium (Belgium). Moreover, assessment of Polish contemporary places for cremation (39 objects) was developed. To strengthen the multifaceted meaning of funerary landscape and to link it more with the landscape, design considerations and potential outcomes for improved cemetery design accommodating cremation practices and burial was developed. The funerary landscape is defined as a specific type of landscape that focuses on the phenomenological relation between death, disposal of the body in the environment and the social memory of the group participating in the remembrance of the burial.

Tomb architecture and distribution in the Eastern Necropolis of Nea Paphos, Cyprus

Tomb architecture and distribution in the Eastern Necropolis of Nea Paphos, Cyprus&#x0D; The Eastern necropolis of Nea Paphos is one of the most significant funerary landscapes of Cyprus, primarily because of its connection with the capital of the island during the Hellenistic and Roman times, and therefore of importance for the archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean. The first systematic exploration of the site took place in the 1980s in the form of rescue excavations. Only limited research has been undertaken since then. This article discusses the necropolis based on unpublished material from the rescue excavations. It presents the tombs’ architecture; partially reconstructs the burial ground; reveals the extension of the necropolis; triggers questions related to the dynamics between nearby necropolis, and its potential correlation to satellite habitation sites.

Le necropoli urbane di Pisa tra tarda antichità e basso medioevo : analisi preliminari

This contribution is part of the University of Pisa Research Project (PRA) entitled «Funerary landscapes between ritual and society. New approaches to the study of the necropolises in the ancient world», coordinated by Anna Anguissola. The biennial project is aimed at studying necropolises in different contexts, both spatial and chronological. The study in question aims to investigate the urban necropolises of Pisa from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages, through methods of spatial and social network analysis. It concerns (a) the study of the distribution and typology of burials in urban areas; (b) the ethnic, social, and (where possible) family composition of cemetery areas; (c) the dissemination as open data. This paper focuses on (a) the collection of the data relating to the burials found in the city of Pisa in their complete diachrony; (b) the creation of a relational database and a GIS project; (c) the development of quantitative and spatial analyses. The formalization of the data and their graphic description as elements placed in the space allows to recontextualize at spatial and typological level all the available information concerning each burial (anthropological data, outfit, type of deposition, container, etc.), and to carry out exploratory, quantitative and spatial analyses which allow to shed light on the funeral rites and the demography of Pisa over the centuries.

The first cup marks from the territory of Poland and their archaeological context

Abstract Thus far, prehistoric rock art has not been featured in the discourse concerned with the archaeology of Poland due to the absence of finds there belonging to this category. This text presents the very first identified specimens of cup marks in the present-day territory of Poland; all differ significantly in terms of context, which consequently determines the potential for interpreting the finds. The first is a boulder which was put in place as grave-marker at a Wielbark Culture site dated to Late Iron Age. The find appears to overlap with the general pattern of regularities observed in the funerary rituals of the Wielbark communities. The second instance is an isolated boulder with cup marks – most likely positioned ex situ – discovered at Wilcza (Greater Poland). Regarding the latter, available information contributes little to determination of chronology of the cup marks and the original location of the boulder in the landscape, thus obscuring the primary function of the feature. The third boulder yielded the most contextual information; it is situated within a complex of numerous Middle Bronze Age barrows in Smoszew, at a site which constitutes a part of the Bronze Age cultural landscape that has survived in the Krotoszyn Forest in southern Greater Poland. For the authors, this very feature served as a basis for a contextual and chronological analysis of rock art which has hitherto remained unknown in Poland. In light of obtained data, the cup-marked boulder from Smoszew should be approached as an element of the funerary landscape created by the Tumulus Culture community and evidence of broader cultural processes which linked particular regions of Europe in the Bronze Age.

Buried in the archives: cemeteries and mausolea in Tripolitania

AbstractMuch extant research on monumental burial structures considers mausolea in isolation from one another, both spatially and temporally, separating them from the more extensive cemeteries that either pre-existed or were built up around them. This paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing archive-based project studying Tripolitanian Roman-period funerary landscapes, specifically investigating the relations between mausolea and their adjacent cemeteries. These relations start to help us understand the patterns in the burial traditions of the region and demonstrate the importance of the ongoing interaction between the living and the monuments of the dead. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the importance of archival research, especially in areas that are inaccessible due to conflict.

The spatial structure of Galician megalithic landscapes (NW iberia): A case study from the Monte Penide region

It is well known that Neolithic megalithic landscapes are the result of complex locational logics governing where communities chose to site their funerary monuments. These logics in turn respond to broader environmental and cultural affordances, and the relationship between these has been a major topic in the megalithic archaeological literature for the last few decades. Thanks to new approaches in spatial statistical modelling, there is now considerable opportunity to revisit traditional megalithic locational concepts from a more systematic point of view, not least in Galician studies (NW Iberian Peninsula). In the paper that follows, we apply such a modelling approach to a large set of megalithic monuments located in the south of Galicia (Monte Penide and surroundings) with a view to exploring locational choices, spatial hierarchy and territoriality in these funerary landscapes. The results indicate that the distribution of megalithic mounds in this region reflects a preference for locations with particular environmental properties, while at a more local scale the spacing of these mounds seems to reflect some kind of social partitioning of the landscape. Via spatial cluster analysis and a further novel method for testing site hierarchy, we conclude that the mound sizes within nine different mound clusters exhibits a non-random hierarchical structure, with a larger mound per group and smaller ones around that, and with what appears to be a preference for the large monument to be at or near the meeting point of several watersheds and upland ridge-routes.

Astronomy and Feng Shui in the projects of the Tang, Ming and Qing royal mausoleums: A satellite imagery approach

The royal Chinese mausoleums of the Tang, Ming and Qing Chinese dynasties are astounding ensembles of monuments, conceived and built to assure immortality in the afterlife and perennial fame on Earth for the emperors. To this end, a series of cognitive elements were embodied in the funerary landscapes selected for such monuments, including astronomy, general topography and traditional Chinese “geomancy”. Taking advantage of satellite imagery and paleo-magnetic data analysis, I investigate this issue from a general perspective. In particular, a simple but rigorous approach is developed to determine whether the magnetic compass was used in the planning of such monuments.

‘There Buds the Laurel’: Nature, Temporality, and the Making of Place in the Cemeteries of Roman Italy

Using the necropolis environments of the Vesuvian region of Imperial period Italy as a case study, this paper examines the ways in which multiple, overlapping, and temporally specific senses of place were associated with Roman funerary landscapes. In particular, it explores the role of the agency of the natural environment—e.g. the more-than-human or ‘planty’ agency of trees, plants, flowers, and fruits—in the creation of these places, arguing that they are best understood as the dynamic product of in the moment experiences. Focusing on issues of temporality and sensory perception, it is demonstrated that, just as place was itself always in the process of becoming, so too were many of the elements which produced it. Consequently, this study offers a new perspective on the ephemerality of place which foregrounds the currently undervalued material agency of the more-than-human world in the construction of Roman experiences, identities, and knowledge.