Mortuary Ritual Research Articles

Mortuary Rituals and the Suttee among Mapuche Chiefdoms of Pampa-Patagonia: The Double Human Burial of Chimpay (Argentina)

This article discusses a Mapuche Indigenous mortuary context of the nineteenth century from the middle valley of the Negro River in northern Patagonia, Argentina, which is characterized by a double burial of a man and a woman. The use of both archaeological and ethnohistorical data allows us to hypothesize that the burial is of a man with a high status in the political and military hierarchy (cacique or capitanejo) and that the corpse of the woman was one of his wives who was sacrificed so she could accompany the man in his trip to Allhue Mapu, the land of souls. We contextualize this site with existing knowledge about the suttee practice in the Pampas and Norpatagonia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This case is an example of the burial ritual known as suttee that occurred between the last decades of Indigenous autonomy (1850–1880) and the first decades after the state conquest of their territory (1880–1900).

The Mortuary Stela of Tetiankh: Family Piety and Social Networkلوحة تيتي-عنخ الجنائزية (العساسيف 2018-1068-1)

Edition of a mortuary stela from the XVIIIth Dynasty discovered in 2018 inside the surrounding walls of Theban Tomb 33. The offering scenes on this monument of outstanding quality depict relatives of the deceased, both close kin and prominent Theban administrative officials, such as the famous Ineni, overseer of the two granaries of Amun. In addition, the commentary aims to show in what way this monument fits into a series of mortuary stelae that showcase intergenerational family piety and social network in a kind of iconogenealogical staging. From this perspective, the study of a dozen monuments from the New Kingdom highlights the patterning of mortuary rituals according to the networks of family and social solidarity.

Human remains under the microscope of funerary taphonomy: Investigating the histological biography of the decaying body in the prehistoric Aegean

Funerary practices and especially the manipulation of the dead body have in the last decades become a central focus in prehistoric Aegean mortuary research. Variation in the character of human remains recovered from a rich array of mortuary contexts in varying state of articulation suggests that the dead were subject to a diverse range of mortuary rites. Taphonomic analysis of skeletal remains has been more recently employed by bioarchaeological research in the prehistoric Aegean with a view to understanding modes of pre- and post-burial treatment and reconstructing funerary activities. Recent studies of modern and archaeological bone have shown that bacterial bioerosion of internal bone microstructures is related to taphonomic processes which affect soft tissue decomposition and thus varies in ways which correspond to early post mortem funerary and corpse treatment. This paper presents the histotaphonomic analysis by thin section light microscopy of 108 human bones (107 individuals) from eleven Aegean human skeletal assemblages dating from the Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age. The results show variation in bacterial attack in different burial environments and often in the same deposit, which is more likely to reflect early taphonomic processes rather local soil circumstances. The microscopic analysis is combined with macroscopic (taphonomic surface modifications) and contextual information to discriminate between different formation mechanisms of skeletal assemblages and make inferences about funerary treatment and manipulation of the deceased. High levels of bacterial attack in Neolithic articulated and disarticulated samples suggest primary soil burial soon after death. Minoan bone assemblages provide evidence of considerable variation in levels of diagenesis, suggesting divergent taphonomic histories, whereas the results from Mycenaean sites are consistent with the deposition of fresh, intact bodies in chamber tombs, resulting in rapid skeletonisation by invertebrates and limited bone exposure to bacteria associated with soft tissue decomposition.

Burial practices in the early mid-Holocene of the Wallacean Islands: A sub-adult burial from Gua Makpan, Alor Island, Indonesia

Mortuary contexts in geographical and chronological settings such as islands are key to investigating human migration pathways, population replacements, diet, health, occupational activities, belief systems as well as other aspects of social behaviour. Located between Mainland Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Island Southeast Asia is of particular interest in this respect. As yet, however, few complete burials predating the Neolithic have been recovered and described from within this vast region.This paper presents a sub-adult burial from Gua Makpan, Alor Island, Indonesia, which is dated to the early mid-Holocene. The anatomical description and bioskeletal profile of the remains is complemented by the analysis of mortuary practices. Our results suggest a delayed primary burial or a secondary treatment, where long bone diaphyses were removed prior to interment. The stratigraphical position of the remains indicates that the skeleton was not interred in anatomical position, which supports the hypothesis of secondary treatment of the remains.The mortuary practices documented in the sub-adult burial from Gua Makpan are compared to burial practices documented for sites from elsewhere in Island Southeast Asia. We assess differences and similarities in mortuary treatments, that could inform on shared mortuary rituals across this maritime region and changing social practices with human migrations, or the introduction of new burial practices.

Isotopic insights into the jar-and-coffin mortuary ritual of the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia

AbstractThe use of coffins and jars as funerary receptacles was common across Southeast Asia. During the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries AD, cremation was the dominant mortuary tradition on the Angkorian plains, but in the Cardamom Mountains to the south, contemporaneous groups practised a unique burial tradition involving the deposition of un-cremated bone in exposed ceramic vessels and log coffins. The authors present the first geochemical analysis of individuals from this highland culture, specifically the site of Phnom Pel. The childhood diets of those interred in jars and coffins may have been sourced from different areas within the Cardamom Mountains, suggesting that the individuals came from discrete groups.

The politics of placing the dead in Bronze Age Transylvania

Where people bury their dead is a critical part of mortuary rituals. This paper examines the relationship between the placement of the dead within a landscape and the social roles of the dead in the lives of the living. We examine the distribution of mortuary sites in southwest Transylvania during the Early and Middle Bronze Age (2700–1500 BCE), a period of significant socioeconomic transformation. We document a shift in the locations of cemeteries that is linked to the changing roles of the dead within society. During the Early Bronze Age, people placed their dead in highly visible tomb cemeteries in upland landscapes with access to metal and highland pasture. We argue that the living used mortuary practices to contest access to resources. During the Middle Bronze Age, however, people were primarily cremated and buried in flat urn cemeteries in similar contexts as settlements. We argue that this transition signifies changing institutions of metal procurement as well as a shift in the roles of the dead in the lives of the living. The analysis of cemetery placement has significant potential for revealing the organization and evolution of how bodies are used for political purposes in a broad range of geographic and chronological contexts.

The Good Death and the Materiality of Mourning: Nineteenth- to Twentieth-Century Coastal Ireland

Drawing on folklore, oral history, songs, historic ethnography, literature, and archaeology, this study investigates the economic, social, and material evidence of traditional late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century wakes along coastal Ireland through the lens of an archaeological case study on the island of Inishark. We analyze material practices of “good” and “bad” deaths, and explore the myriad ways that islanders used everyday material culture in mortuary rituals, particularly wakes and funerals. We argue that material culture could hold multiple symbolic valences throughout its history, especially everyday items used in ritual contexts. Finally, we describe the material residues associated with mourning practices on Inishark.

Revealing and Revelling in the Floods on Country: Memory Poles within Toonooba

Revealing and Revelling in the Floods on Country: Memory Poles within Toonooba

Flint ‘figurines’ from the Early Neolithic site of Kharaysin, Jordan

During the Early Neolithic in the Near East, particularly from the mid ninth millennium cal BC onwards, human iconography became more widespread. Explanations for this development, however, remain elusive. This article presents a unique assemblage of flint artefacts from the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (eighth millennium BC) site of Kharaysin in Jordan. Contextual, morphological, statistical and use-wear analyses of these artefacts suggest that they are not tools but rather human figurines. Their close association with burial contexts suggests that they were manufactured and discarded during mortuary rituals and remembrance ceremonies that included the extraction, manipulation and redeposition of human remains.

Uncollected Bones and Ambiguous Loss: Okinawan Mourning Rituals in the Northern Mariana Islands.

The study expounds upon the psychological concept of 'ambiguous loss,' proposed by Pauline Boss. The article attempts to broaden the concept's individualistic focus by offering a more ethnographically nuanced and socioculturally contextualized application of the concept. It examines how Okinawan WWII survivors, who repatriated from the Northern Mariana Islands after the war, relied on their belief system to make sense of 'abnormal' deaths during war, and the lack of proper mortuary rituals usually conducted for 'normal' deaths. The article argues that religio-spiritual rituals during their pilgrimages to the Marianas were the means with which those struggling with ambiguous loss attempt to deal with their psychological trauma and spiritual pain. It is also argued, however, that the uncollected bodies/bones continue to haunt the bereaved families, so their struggle with the loss cannot come to a complete 'closure,' resulting in their repeated visits to the sites of their loved ones' violent deaths.

“If you die a bad death, we give you a bad burial:” Mortuary practices and “bad death” among the Akan in Ghana

This article describes features of bad deaths and their associated mortuary rituals among the Akan of Ghana. Data were obtained through semi-structured interviews with 30 Akan cultural experts. In Akan culture, bad deaths are associated with brief, perfunctory mortuary rituals. There is no washing, keeping of wake over the body, nor any presentation of grave goods, and no bidding of farewell to the decedent. Every effort is made to expunge the decedent from the memories of the lineage. Contravening prescribed customary rites for bad deaths is believed to cause disasters for the lineage, including recurrent bad deaths.

The Dialectical of Life and Death in Contemporary Sōka Gakkai

Doctrinal reasoning, the practice of chanting nam-myōho-renge-kyō and its vision for kōsen-rufu has been how Sōka Gakkai (SG) promulgated Nichiren Buddhism. This paper explores, in an in-depth anthropological manner, how doctrinal issues matter significantly in the meaning of funeral practices in contemporary SG. So-called Friend Funerals have become widely common and demonstrate how SG members’ understanding of death and mortuary rites differ in some significant ways from common practices in Japan. To understand why specific funeral rituals are not in and of themselves considered of primary importance when a person dies in SG, this paper discusses its reading of key tenants of Nichiren Buddhism. What hotoke or buddha means is commonly seen in Japan as something achieved upon death facilitated by specific funeral rites. How such views fundamentally differ in SG is explored here based on long-term fieldwork and participant observation, as well as interviews and review of its doctrine. The research suggests that SG members engage in a cross-generational endeavour for kōsen-rufu where personal actions—what could be described as the ‘political’ existence of this life—matters but in a non-dualistic way as this simultaneously becomes the sphere that ‘transcends’ that contemporary existence. How one views death is not only seen as something relevant at the end of life, nor only to those remaining, but is taken as a reality that becomes the impetus for giving deeper meaning to how one acts in daily life as part of a cross-generational movement.

Animitas in the Araucanía: Mourning and Tragedies Crystallized in the Public Space

The animita is installed in the public space unrelated to any formal or institutional regulation, it is incorporated into the citizen’s traffic at the specific place where a tragedy has occurred; or where a violent or accidental death has occurred (murders or children murders, suicides, accidents to pedestrians, delinquents or travellers). The blood spilled together with candles lighted by the mourners, demarcates the point of orientation for the soul of the deceased and it will be the place where a new animita, (temple house), or whatever the constructive imaginary on a small scale permits. It is there where life and death give way to the ineffable; where the deceased becomes a Popular Saint through favours granted, and, thanks to them, he or she will be able to atone for his or her sins and conclude their mission, abruptly truncated in life. The animitas are incorporated into the urban or rural architectural scene, presenting themselves as areas for devotion and indirectly as a reminder of the fragility of life. Because they’re part of communal heritage and take place as social warrens, they represent a challenge for the architectural planning of the city and its road connectivity networks. The tension between the practices of the mortuary rite of the past and the present warns us about the challenges to think and reflect on the new intelligent city, which must dialogue in a respectful and sustainable way with its secular manifestations and its roots in cultural identity in southern Chile.

‘Which Way?’ Big Man, Road Man, Chief: Bernard Narokobi's Multifaceted Leadership Career

ABSTRACT Among the topics that Bernard Narokobi addresses in his numerous writings is the place of traditional Melanesian leadership styles in a modern Papua New Guinea. This article explores Narokobi's leadership status to show how far-reaching and multifaceted his leadership career was: he was at once a traditional Melanesian bigman, a chief, and a modern public figure. The actions he took in these roles were for him a matter of the highest principle, something that at times had severe political consequences. Because in Melanesia the scope of the ritual that takes place upon an individual's death is an index of their status, an analysis of the mortuary rituals undertaken upon Narokobi's death provides insight into the significance of his leadership at every level from his clan up to the national level of Papua New Guinean society.

As above so down below: location and memory within the Neo-Assyrian mortuary cult

ABSTRACT Understanding mortuary ritual provides new perspectives for interpreting spatial collective memory and the relationship between elite and non-elite practices. Aššur serves as a case study to investigate the mortuary cult of the Neo-Assyrian period via ‘necrogeography’ in Mesopotamia. This study compares the textual sources to architectural and material features of elite and non-elite spaces in which burials and tombs were located. Neo-Assyrian domestic burials and their associated cults are then compared to the royal tombs and rituals surrounding the death of rulers. Concepts of space and memory from the theoretical works of Pierre Nora and Mircea Eliade are applied to Mesopotamian ideas of death and the afterlife to understand the necrogeographies of Assyrian burials in relation to the living. This conceptualizes location and memory in relation to sacred and profane space, concluding that burials were intentionally placed to establish a link to the underworld, benefitting both the deceased and the living.

Ancient history and new beginnings: necrogeography and migration in the North American midcontinent

ABSTRACT Creation of deathscapes is integral to human place-making and the construction of our past, present, and future. As people practice mortuary rituals and related behaviours, space and time are conflated as they engage with spatial, temporal, and ideological aspects of the landscape, existing deathscapes, and ritual objects. Migration episodes offer an important spatio-temporal context for examining the construction of deathscape, and at the same time, insight into the new deathscape practices can help inform the migration event itself. Through the use of a case study with a well-documented migration event and mortuary program data from the North American midcontinent, we examine the intersections of time and space in the construction of deathscape among the post-migration Oneota tradition (ca. AD 1300–1400). In a contentious landscape dominated by Mississippian peoples, the newcomers created ties to their new location by actively creating and practising new traditions while maintaining important links to their own history.

Death in Beijing

Alma Maximiliane Karlin (1889–1950) was a world traveller, writer, journalist, and collector from Slovenia. She embarked on an eight-year journey around the world in November 1919, in the course of which she published a series of travel sketches in the Cillier Zeitung, a local German-language newspaper. In one of these she reported on funerary rituals and mourning practices in China. After returning to Europe, she was to cover the same topic in her three‑volume travelogue, published between 1929 and 1933.
 In this paper we analyse these two early accounts of Chinese funerary rituals by Alma Karlin. We also consider some material objects linked to mortuary rites and ancestor worship that she brought back from her voyage in order to gain a broader understanding of her views on Chinese attitudes towards the dead. Supported by a close reading of material and textual sources on Chinese funeral practices, we compare her treatment of the subject with other accounts written by Slovenian missionaries to China in the early twentieth century. In addition to discussing certain personal elements in these accounts, we attempt to place them in their socio‑historical context.

Unique Infant Mortuary Ritual at Salango, Ecuador, 100 BC

The human head was a potent symbol for many South American cultures. Isolated heads were often included in mortuary contexts, representing captured enemies, revered persons, and symbolic “seeds.” At Salango, a ritual complex on the central coast of Ecuador, excavations revealed two burial mounds dated to approximately 100 BC. Among the 11 identified burials, two infants were interred with “helmets” made from the cranial vaults of other juveniles. The additional crania were placed around the heads of the primary burials, likely at the time of burial. All crania exhibited lesions associated with bodily stress. In this report, we present the only known evidence of using juvenile crania as mortuary headgear, either in South America or globally.

Mortuary Pottery and Sacred Landscapes in Complex Hunter-gatherers in the Paraná Basin, South America

Tubular pottery comprises certain peculiar artifacts that were produced by late Holocene complex hunter-gatherer societies in southeastern South America for unknown purposes. Some authors have related them to mortuary behaviour which has also been suggested by historical sources, while others have considered domestic use. In this paper, the technical, compositional and functional properties of these artifacts are explored in order to contrast both hypotheses, given an example of how technical analysis allows the identification of special pottery within archeological contexts. This analysis includes a study of the fabrics involved using low and high magnification, thin sections, Scanning Electron Microscopy, Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy, Mössbauer Spectroscopy, Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy and fatty acid profiles. The results show that these tubular artifacts are not fit structurally for utilitarian purposes and show no evidence of domestic use. Based on these results and on historical data, it can be postulated that they were used as part of mortuary rituals, thus becoming part of the select global group of pottery manufactured exclusively for mortuary purposes.

Transformation by Fire: Changes in Funerary Customs from the Early Agricultural to Early Preclassic Period among Prehispanic Populations of Southern Arizona

We examine the changes in funerary rituals from the Early Agricultural period (2100 BC–AD 50) to the Early Preclassic period (AD 475–750) and how these changes concurrently reflect changes in social relationships between the dead, their families, and the community. The predominant mortuary ritual in the Early Agricultural period was inhumation, possibly emphasizing a variety of identity intersections of the dead and the mourners in the treatment of the body while creating collective memories and remembrances through shared ways of commemorating the dead. An innovation in funerary practices in the form of secondary cremation appeared in the Early Agricultural period and was slowly but broadly adopted, representing new social dynamics within the society. Thereafter, secondary cremation became the main funeral custom. During the Early Preclassic period, the variation in body position and the type and quantity of objects found with individuals decreased. It is possible that the vehicle for displaying different identity intersections changed and was not placed in the body, per se, as much as in previous periods. However, the transformation characteristics of these funeral rituals and the increase in community investment could have fostered the building or reinforcing of stronger social ties that highlighted a “collective identity.”