Mortuary Monuments Research Articles

Mineralogy and Sourcing of a Stone Bead Industry Found in Communal Cemeteries Associated with Eastern Africa's First Pastoralists, ca. 5000 b.p.

ABSTRACT This article describes the mineralogy and sources for a spectacular stone bead industry associated with the first pastoralists in eastern Africa ca. 5000–4000 cal b.p. Around Lake Turkana, northwest Kenya, early pastoralists constructed at least seven mortuary monuments with platforms, pillars, cairns, and stone circles. Three sites—Lothagam North, Manemanya, and Jarigole—have yielded assemblages of stone and ostrich eggshell beads that adorned interred individuals. Mineralogical identification of the stone beads reveals patterns of material selection, including notable differences among the pillar sites. Geological sourcing indicates use of many local raw materials and two (amazonite and fluorite) whose known sources lie > 200 km away. The data suggest that bead-making represented a significant investment by early pastoralists in personal ornamentation. New sociopolitical factors emerged, such as access to grazing grounds and water, and definitions of self and society manifested in novel mortuary traditions as people coped with a drying, cooling climate.

Saxo Grammaticus's Account of the Viking Age Site on the Danish Island of Hjarnø in Gesta Danorum

Saxo Grammaticus's Account of the Viking Age Site on the Danish Island of Hjarnø in <i>Gesta Danorum</i>

Cosmology, ancestors and mortuary monuments: Principles of political authority in the Rapayán and Tantamayo region of the upper Marañón in the central Andes of Peru during the Late Intermediate Period (1000-1450 CE)

This paper addresses the cosmological foundations of political authority in the Rapayán-Tantamayo region of the highlands of Peru during the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1450 CE). The people of this region organized their residential settlements around large and elaborate multi-storied tombs where mummified founding ancestors dwelled. The evidence presented reveals that selected families at each settlement built their houses at the foot of these above-ground tombs. By doing so, they controlled the access to the communities’ founding ancestors who were thought to hold cosmological vitalizing energy necessary for the reproduction of the collectivity. Using ethnohistorical analogy, I argue that the heads of such households, through privileged interactions with potent deceased, acted as intermediaries between the life-giving force of primordial ancestors and the well-being of their community. The manifestations of political authority built around the relationship of specific individuals with powerful ancestors represent one of the main contributions of this investigation as the relational agency among these protagonists has proven difficult to identify in the archaeological record elsewhere in the Andean highlands. The results of our investigation therefore contrast with interpretations emphasizing the collective agency of “ancestors” in the legitimization processes of depersonalized cooperate political authority.

Memory Work and Place-Making over the Longue Durée at Jecosh, Peru (340 b.c.–a.d. 1630)

ABSTRACT This article explores temporality at the village of Jecosh (Ancash, Peru) using a place and social memory framework. Through excavations and materials analysis of domestic and mortuary contexts, we consider the memory work involved in making and re-making place at Jecosh over the longue durée. Initial site settlement coincided with the rise of Huarás villages in the 4th century b.c.; continued site occupation in the Recuay era expanded upon Huarás practices and included the remodeling of residences and new funerary rituals. People abandoned Jecosh around a.d. 1100, but later groups constructed mortuary monuments on the site’s western edge during the 14th century a.d. Eventual resettlement of Jecosh in the 15th century a.d. during Inka times included the adoption of old buildings and practices alongside site expansion. We argue that long-term site occupation does not necessarily indicate stasis; throughout regional transformations, people at Jecosh adapted memory work practices to claim and create place.

What an artist saw. Tracing the local iconographic tradition for the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari

An unusual iconographic motif—a fringed piece of linen—depicted in the Chapel of Hatshepsut, part of the queen’s temple at Deir el-Bahari, is examined in this paper as an illustration of the interest, well attested in Hatshepsut’s reign, in past artistic models/sources. The Chapel of Hatshepsut was intended for the mortuary cult of the female pharaoh, while the motif under discussion appears to have been inspired by decoration earlier by 500 years, found inside a burial chamber cut into the rock cliff of North Asasif, which is a natural continuation of the Deir el-Bahari amphitheater. The tomb (TT 311) belonged to Khety, a courtier of the Eleventh Dynasty pharaoh Mentuhotep II Nebhepetra. Assuming the validity of this iconographic link, the question arises concerning the accessibility of decorated burial chambers from the Eleventh-Dynasty in this area and their possible role as “pattern books” in the design of the early Eighteenth Dynasty private and royal mortuary monuments. In addition, the paper addresses the issue of the Chapel of Hatshepsut serving as a monumental “pattern book” for the Late Period Theban tombs.

Traces of the Dahaean and Sarmatian Cultural Legacy in Ancient Turan and Old Rus

This study examines the migrations of the Dahae and Sarmatians—the two related early nomadic peoples of Middle Asia and Eastern Europe—directed to the south and west of their homeland. Archaeological, written, and folkloric sources make it possible to trace the migrations of the Dahae and Sarmatians over several centuries preceding the spread of Islam in Central Asia and of Christianity in Old Rus. The study focuses on mortuary monuments, temples, and sanctuaries, cross-shaped in plan view, of migrants and their descendants. A detailed analysis of the major southward migration of Dahae from the Lower Syr-Darya in the late 3rd to early 2nd BC is presented. This migration had a considerable effect on ethnic and cultural processes in Middle Asia. The migration aimed at conquering the lands of Alexander the Great’s descendants, who were rapidly losing control over them. Features of Dahaean culture are noticed in town planning, architecture, mortuary rites, armor, etc. over the entire territory they had captured. Southward migration of the descendants of the Dahae—people of the Kaunchi and Otrar cultures—from the Syr-Darya, led by the Huns, was part of the Great Migration. The Kaunchi people headed toward the oases of Samarkand and Kesh, the Otrar people toward the oasis of Bukhara, and those associated with the Dzhetyasar culture toward the Qarshi oasis. It is demonstrated that while the cross-shaped plan view of religious structures turned into the eight-petaled rosette, the fu neral rite did not change, remains of burials and charcoal are observed everywhere. Relics of the ScythoSarmatian legacy are seen in the culture of Old Rus. For instance, remains of the sanctuaries of Perun are walls and ditches arranged in a cruciform or eight-petaled fashion, fi lled with charcoal and bones of sacrifi ced animals, with a statue of the supreme Slavic deity, in the center. Early sanctuaries of Perun in Kiev and Khodosovichi were cruciate in plan view, while later ones on the banks of the Zbruch and the Volkhov rivers had octopetalous plans. Apparently they were infl uenced by the architectural traditions of Dahae and Sarmatians, who took part in the ethnogenetic processes in both Old Rus and Turan.

Alcohol, ancestors, and the house: Exploring ritual use of beer at Kirikongo, Burkina Faso

This paper explores the evidence for beer production, consumption, and ritual use at Kirikongo (100–1650 CE), a well-preserved archaeological site located in Mouhoun Province, western Burkina Faso. The site is comprised of thirteen anthropogenic mounds (tells) that were formed through sequential ritual processes that created ancestor shrines through either construction of dedicated mortuary monuments or transformation of domestic spaces and buildings. Tombs and architectural emplacements were accompanied by discrete accumulations of fauna, botanical remains, and material culture, the latter of which likely represents personal or familial belongings. Within these ceramic assemblages, there are significant numbers of small highly decorated consumption vessels, tri-pod ritual vessels likely connected to use of liquids, and large vessels consistent with beer production. Based upon contextual analysis of ceramics, cultural practices related to ancestors, and evidence from a destroyed ritual complex with intact material culture and ritualized use of sorghum, this paper argues that beer was likely used at Kirikongo both in the social life of the community and in rituals related to ancestors. The nature of sorghum beer production may have influenced the overall absence of sorghum in macrobotanical samples.

Of Winged Women and Stone Tombs: Identity and Agency through Iron Age Lycian Mortuary Architecture

The people collectively named the Lycians in modern scholarship are the best represented of the western Anatolian first millennium BC cultures in terms of philological, historical, and archaeological data. This article seeks to better understand the meanings behind Iron Age Lycian mortuary monuments and religious images, and how they reflect Lycian identity and agency in a time of political turmoil. By studying the Lycian mortuary landscape, tombs and images, we can begin to comprehend Lycian perceptions of the afterlife, religion and cultural identity. In particular, we look to the images of the so-called “Harpies” and “Running Men” to better understand evidence of the afterlife, connections to the past and the creation of their own identity of what it means to be Lycian. The study of Lycian mortuary trends, monumental architecture, and religion gives us a small but tantalizing view into the Lycian understanding of religion and death, and how they wielded their own culture as a tool for survival in a politically fraught world.

Mounds, Towns, and their Surrounds: An Archaeological, Historical, and Geophysical Approach to Burial Mounds, Residential Space, and Cultural Landscapes of the Late Woodland Springwells Site (a.d. 800–1400) at Historic Fort Wayne, Detroit

ABSTRACTHistoric Fort Wayne is located on the Detroit River in a landscape of heavy industry and marginalized urban neighborhoods (figure 1). Geophysical survey south of the Fort Wayne Mound—a Late Woodland Period burial mound enclosed by the Fort—indicates that pre-contact residential structures may be preserved at the site. Residential sites with mortuary monuments are uncommon in southeastern Michigan and represent an opportunity to better understand variation in Late Woodland settlement. Our approach combines existing archaeological research, historical records, and non-invasive geophysical survey in a culturally sensitive Native American site context presently unavailable for conventional archaeological excavation. We examine archaeological and historical records from Springwells and Late Woodland period settlements in the region to contextualize geophysical evidence from the site. The research prioritizes protection of Native American heritage sites in urban contexts together with ongoing archaeological interpretation of the Late Woodland cultural Landscape.

Over Rock and Under Stone: Carved Rocks and Subterranean Burials at Kipia, Ancash, AD 1000 – 1532

AbstractResearch in the Andes has yielded evidence for a complex association between settlement sites and mortuary monuments, tied to concepts of death, ancestor veneration and water. The Huaylas-Inca and later Spanish colonial site of Kipia in the Cordillera Negra of the Ancash Highlands, North-Central Andes is a multi-faceted site, that contains a small settlement core, and a cosmological centre which includes carved rocks (huancas), niches and offerings. This, in turn backs onto a necropolis composed of a series of subterranean tombs (pukullo). In association, these features directly reference the surrounding agro-pastoralist landscape. In particular they evoke neighbouring lakes as possible foci of ethnogenesis or pacarinas. The relation between ceremonial sites and cemeteries is crucial to understanding Andean concepts of death and renewal. In this article, alongside a detailed description of the site, we provide a preliminary analysis of the contents of one of the pukullo. In turn, these results are placed within their landscape context to discuss issues related to sacrality, water and death.

Isotopic evidence for ceremonial provisioning of Late Bronze age khirigsuurs with horses from diverse geographic locales

Khirigsuurs are communal ritual and mortuary monuments that featured prominently on Late Bronze Age pastoralist landscapes of the Mongolian steppe through the mid-late second millennium to early first millennium cal BC. Khirigsuurs sustained ceremonies that legitimized the relationship between the deceased and the participants, facilitated the formation of new alliances, and emphasized integration and cohesion between mobile pastoralist communities through monument building, ritual horse slaughter, and feasting. Horses played a prominent role in ceremonial activities conducted at khirigsuurs, their heads and hooves regularly deposited in small stone satellite mounds as part of publically visible ceremonies associated with mortuary celebrations that simultaneously integrated mobile pastoralist communities. Here, strontium and oxygen isotopic analyses of sequentially sampled teeth of horses from khirigsuurs located in the Khanuy Valley, a major center of monumental activity situated north of the Khangai mountains in Mongolia, indicate horses from distant locales were ceremonially placed in khirigsuur satellite mounds, while patterned seasonal variation in carbon isotopes suggests horses were fodder provisioned during the winter months. These isotopic data suggest horses were well cared for, reflecting their status as a prestige animal, and were key to facilitating regionally integrative ceremonial activities conducted at khirigsuurs that brought together people from geographically distant mobile communities.

The Smiling Abbot: Rediscovering a Unique Medieval Effigial Slab

The article reports on a newly re-discovered fragment of a recumbent effigial slab commemorating Abbot Hywel (‘Howel’), most likely an abbot of the Cistercian house of Valle Crucis, near Llangollen (Denbighs.). The slab was probably carved very early in the fourteenth century, and could have covered the abbot’s burial place. The stone was dislocated and fragmented at an unknown point in the abbey’s history, and most likely removed from the site during the nineteenth-century clearance of the abbey ruins. It was briefly reported on in 1895 and has been lost to scholarship subsequently.If indeed from Valle Crucis, the stone is the only known effigial slab commemorating a Cistercian abbot from Wales, and a rare example from Britain. Given that few similar Cistercian abbatial monuments have been identified from elsewhere, the ‘Smiling Abbot’, although only a fragment, is a significant addition to the known corpus of later medieval mortuary monuments. The article discusses the provenance, dating, identification and significance of the monument, including the abbot’s distinctive smile. The stone sheds new light on mortuary and commemorative practice at Valle Crucis Abbey in the early fourteenth century.

Living different lives: Early social differentiation identified through linking mortuary and isotopic variability in Late Neolithic/ Early Chalcolithic north-central Spain.

Variation in burial location and treatment is often observed in the prehistoric archaeological record, but its interpretation is usually highly ambiguous. Biomolecular approaches provide the means of addressing this variability in a way not previously possible, linking the lives of individuals to their funerary treatment. Here, we undertake stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses on a substantial sample of 166 individuals from a series of broadly contemporary Late Neolithic/ Early Chalcolithic (3500 to 2900 cal BC) mortuary monuments (El Sotillo, Alto de la Huesera, Chabola de la Hechicera and Longar) and caves (Las Yurdinas II, Los Husos I and Peña Larga) within a very spatially restricted area of north-central Spain, with sites separated by no more than 10 km on average. This spatial and temporal proximity allows us to focus on the question at the appropriate scale of analysis, avoiding confounding variables such as environmental change, diachronic trends in the subsistence economy, etc. The results demonstrate a statistically significant difference in human δ13C values between those interred in caves and those placed in monuments. The difference appears to be correlated with fine-grained environmental factors (elevation/ temperature/ precipitation), suggesting that use of the landscape was being divided at a very local scale. The reasons for this partitioning may involve differential social status (e.g. those interred in caves may be of lower standing with more restricted access to the valley’s arable resources) or economic specialization (e.g. upland herding vs. valley farming) within the same community or, alternatively, different populations performing different funerary practices and following distinct subsistence economies in some respect. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the development of social differentiation and community specialisation on the scale of the immediate lived landscape.

7 Living Among the Dead: Establishing and Maintaining Community in Northern Albania

ABSTRACTWhile bioarchaeology and mortuary analysis are inextricably woven into the study of past populations, modern communities provide valuable insight into the complex relationships between past and present. Population movements, both past and present, affect community dynamics and can be traced through careful, diachronic study of regional mortuary monuments and practices. The northern Albanian province of Shkodër is an ideal testing ground for examining social changes accompanying the regional movement of both people and things. I contend that Bronze Age and modern communities have used mortuary monuments, mounds, and cemeteries, similarly, to encourage and discourage social contextual interaction.

Commemorating Dwelling: The Death and Burial of Houses in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia

Current debates on the ontology of objects and matter have reinvigorated archaeological theoretical discourse and opened a multitude of perspectives on understanding the past, perspectives which have only just begun to be explored in scholarship on Late Iron Age Scandinavia. This article is a critical discussion of the sporadic tradition of covering longhouses and halls with burial mounds in the Iron and Viking ages. After having stood as social markers in the landscape for decades or even centuries, some dwellings were transformed into mortuary monuments — material and mnemonic spaces of the dead. Yet, was it the house or a deceased individual that was being interred and memorialized? Through an exploration of buildings that have been overlain by burial mounds, and by drawing on theoretical debates about social biographies and the material turn, this article illuminates mortuary citations between houses and bodies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Ultimately, I question the assumed anthropocentricity of the practice of burying houses. Rather, I suggest that the house was interwoven with the essence of the household and that the transformation of the building was a mortuary citation not necessarily of an individual, but of the entire, entangled social meshwork of the house.

Citations in Stone: The Material World of Hogbacks

This article explores a meshwork of citations to other material cultures and architectures created by the form and ornament of house-shaped early medieval recumbent stone monuments popularly known in Britain as ‘hogbacks’. In addition to citing the form and ornament of contemporary buildings, shrines, and tombs, this article suggests recumbent mortuary monuments referenced a far broader range of contemporary portable artefacts and architectures. The approach takes attention away from identifying any single source of origin for hogbacks. Instead, considering multi-scalar and multi-media references within the form and ornament of different carved stones provides the basis for revisiting their inherent variability and their commemorative efficacy by creating the sense of an inhabited mortuary space in which the dead are in dialogue with the living. By alluding to an entangled material world spanning Norse and Insular, ecclesiastical and secular spheres, hogbacks were versatile technologies of mortuary remembrance in the Viking Age.

Frightful neighbourhood

Hugo Anderson-Whymark, Duncan Garrow and Fraser Sturt are to be congratulated on an important find and a robust evaluation of its significance. As they point out, it was Roger Jacobi who first introduced the notion that Britain had been culturally isolated from the continent following the flooding of the English Channel; this was on the basis of stylistic differences between the microlithic assemblages found in the two areas in the later Mesolithic. Equally, although Villeneuve-Saint-Germain communities were established in Normandy early in the fifth millennium BC, and Chassey/Michelsberg groups in the Pas-de-Calais perhaps six hundred years later, the material evidence of their cross-Channel relations with British and Irish hunter-gatherers is limited. On this basis, the view has developed that indigenous people in Britain would have been unaware of the developing Neolithic in France and Belgium. Consequently, they would have had no familiarity with domesticated plants and animals, polished stone tools, ceramics, large timber buildings and mortuary monuments until such innovations were brought to these islands by migrating agriculturalists at the end of the millennium. If Mesolithic people played any part at all in the Neolithic transition, it would only have been after the arrival of settlers on these shores.

Returning and reuse: Diachronic perspectives on multi-component cemeteries and mortuary politics at Middle Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Tara, Ireland

Archaeologists studying multi-component cemeteries have argued that the societies who reused cemeteries were motivated by connecting to the past. However, often overlooked are the potential roles of mortuary events and sites as key social and political venues for creating, contesting, and unmaking relationships and identities for the later community independent of a connection to the past. In this paper, I explore the social and political roles that mortuary rituals at the Mound of the Hostages, Tara, Ireland played during the Middle Neolithic (3350–2800 BC) and Early Bronze Age (2300–1700 BC).Tara’s emergence as a regional mortuary center occurred only several hundred years after its initial reuse by Early Bronze Age peoples. Just as importantly, the burial activity that marked Tara as special in the Early Bronze Age was very brief, revealing that the regional centralization at Tara was ultimately unsuccessful. The analysis of cemetery formation at Tara is only possible due to the development of a fine-grained site specific chronology. These results have broad implications for how we understand cemetery formation, the reuse of mortuary monuments, and the dynamics of social complexity in prehistoric societies.

The Social, Spatial, and Bioarchaeological Histories of Ancient Oman project: the mortuary landscape of Dhank

The Social, Spatial, and Bioarchaeological Histories of Ancient Oman (SoBO) project has conducted three seasons of survey and excavation in north-western Oman. Focus- ing on third-millennium BC archaeological features, this project is unique because of the combination of geospatial survey and bioarchaeological excavation of mortuary monuments in and around the town of Dhank. Here we report our initial findings, define our survey area and techniques and discuss excavated funerary structures and associated radiocarbon dates from both charcoal and human skeletal remains. This report presents preliminary results that introduce this new project on the prehistoric mortuary landscapes of Oman and highlight the techniques the SoBO team employs to examine Bronze Age communities in this rural location.

The sea their graves: an archaeology of death and remembrance in maritime culture

A classic of its type the closest comparison is the legendary Weibust s Deep Sea Sailors, and I would hazard to suggest that this book may come to hold a similarly important place in the scholarship of maritime ethnography. Joseph Flatman, author of Ships and Shipbuilding in Medieval Manuscripts This innovative study provides an important analysis of Anglo-American mariners attitudes toward death, the dead, and commemoration. It will be valuable to all interested in historic maritime culture and mortuary practices, and reveals a distinctive mariner subculture which also influenced their families back home. Harold Mytum, author of Mortuary Monuments and Grounds of the Prehistoric PeriodLike other groups with dangerous occupations, mariners have developed a close-knit culture bound by loss and memory. Death regularly disrupts the fabric of this culture and necessitates actions designed to mend its social structure. From the ritual of burying a body at sea to the creation of memorials to honor the missing, these events tell us a great deal about how sailors see their world.Based on a study of more than 2,100 gravestones and monuments in North America and the United Kingdom erected between the seventeenth and late twentieth centuries, David Stewart expands the use of nautical archaeology into terrestrial environments. He focuses on those who make their living at sea one of the world s oldest and most dangerous occupations to examine their distinct folkloric traditions, beliefs, and customs regarding death, loss, and remembrance.David J. Stewart, assistant professor of nautical archaeology at East Carolina University, is a contributor to Burial at Sea.A volume in the series New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology, edited by James C. Bradford and Gene Allen Smith