Mortuary archaeology (Other Keyword)
126-150 (217 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Small Things Unforgotten" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two iron firedogs, a tripod for a cauldron, a small amphora of Graeco Italian type, a bronze jug, glass vessels and Samian dishes. These are the objects selected for a catalogue record and for inclusion in the historic museum display of the 30 or so objects discovered in a Late Iron Age burial at Stanfordbury, Bedfordshire in southern England. But what about the...
The Mochicas under the Lambayeque Rule (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies have revealed that the Lambayeque society, primarily during the Middle Sicán period (AD 900–1100), was highly stratified and multiethnic. It is now inferred that the society was governed by a federation of the Lambayeque elite...
Modeling Late Prehistoric Mortuary Practice in the Middle Chincha Valley, Peru (2018)
This paper presents a model for mortuary practices associated with above-ground and semi-subterranean tombs known as chullpas, which date from the Late Intermediate Period (A.D. 1000-1400) to the Colonial Period (A.D. 1532 - 1825) in the middle Chincha Valley, Peru. Mortuary practices involve living-dead interactions that transform the status of the deceased. Historical sources and archaeological research suggest that chullpas in the south-central Andean highlands featured protracted living-dead...
Modelling skeletal disarticulation: using actualistic and comparative taphonomy to improve the analysis and interpretation of human burials (2017)
Skeletal disarticulation patterns can be diagnostic of environmental conditions (e.g. water flow), animal behavior (e.g. scavenging) and/or human action (e.g. intentional displacement of bones), aiding the reconstruction of the events that formed a burial feature. In archaeothanatology, a model of the ‘natural’ or ‘common’ sequence of disarticulation of the human skeleton at the joints has served as the basis to distinguish ‘natural’ bone displacement from human intervention. This model is...
A Molecular Networking Approach to Identifying Metabolites in GC-MS Spectra from the Gastrointestinal Contents of Mummies of Tarapacá-40 (Northern Chile, Formative Period, 1000 BCE–600 CE) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eight samples from the gastrointestinal tracts of mummies exhumed at the Formative cemetery site of Tarapacá-40 (Northern Chile, Formative Period, 1000 BCE–600 CE) were solvent extracted, silylated, methylated, and injected into a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS) to identify biologically relevant metabolites. The resultant .raw files of these...
Morhiss and Buckeye Knoll Cemetery Sites: A Comparison of Hunter-Gatherer Mortuary Chronologies and Traditions (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the Guadalupe River in Victoria County, Texas, Morhiss (41VT1) and Buckeye Knoll (41VT98) represent two of the oldest and largest hunter-gatherer cemeteries in the United States. Recent accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of 90 burials at the Morhiss site offers unique insights into its mortuary complex. AMS...
Mortuary Analysis and Bioarchaeology: A Survey of Integrative Approaches (2018)
In her chapter in the 2006 volume "Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains", Lynne Goldstein considered the intersection of mortuary analysis and bioarchaeology through a survey of articles from eight prominent archaeology journals (1995-2000). She concluded that significant work remained to be done to appropriately integrate the two fields. In our paper, we summarize Goldstein’s critiques and examine more recent publications in these same journals (2006-2016) to characterize...
A Mortuary Analysis of Adult and Child Burials of Río Viejo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mortuary practices are symbolically charged activities that vary depending on wealth, religion, manner of death, and even age. Recent excavations of the site of Río Viejo, Oaxaca, Mexico, suggest similar burial practices between adults and children during the Early Postclassic (AD 800–1100) and Late Classic (AD 500–800). The current understanding of burial...
Mortuary Analysis of St. Joseph Sanatorium, Albuquerque, New Mexico: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2018)
In 1984-1985 several sets of human remains were inadvertently discovered at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These remains were excavated by the University of New Mexico and the Office of Contract Archaeology. In all a total of 12 individuals were excavated from this previously forgotten cemetery. St. Joseph’s Hospital was established by the Sisters of Mercy in 1902 as a tuberculosis sanitarium for well-heeled clients to rest and recuperate in what was then thought of as one of...
Mortuary Archaeology of Burials from Two Swahili Stone Towns, Mtwapa and Manda, Dated to Circa 1600 CE. (2015)
Two ancient Kenyan Swahili sites were excavated over the course of five field seasons, from 2008-2012. Mtwapa (ca. 1000-1750 CE), located on the southern coast of Kenya, and Manda (ca. 800-1600 CE), located on the Northern coast, were once wealthy cosmopolitan polities involved in the Indian Ocean trade network. Both towns had populations of 5,000-10,000 at their height of occupation, and contained large central mosques. Mtwapa excavations occurred between 2008 and 2011 and produced a minimum...
Mortuary Archaeology, Burial Practices, and defining the Prehistoric Funerary Landscape on the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia (2017)
The ancestral burial practices among the peoples of the northwest coast of British Columbia have been well studied and documented by academics, heritage resource management professionals, and the First Nation Communities. Recent systematic surveys from archaeological impact assessments within the Sunshine Coast have yielded previously unidentified funerary archaeological features including various funerary petroforms atypical to this region. My aim is to revisit and define the types of...
Mortuary Customs at a Small Pueblo II Habitation Site in the Chuska Valley, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent data recovery investigations conducted by PaleoWest Archaeology as part of the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project uncovered four human burials at a small Ancestral Puebloan residential site (NM-Q-14-104) located in the Chuska Valley area of northwest New Mexico....
Mortuary Feasting at Sitio Drago, Panama and Elsewhere in Lower Central America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological materials recovered from a central burial mound at Sitio Drago, Panama are diverse and include many well-preserved vertebrate and invertebrate faunal remains. I examine these materials in context with the artifacts recovered in direct association with four coral slab tombs located at the heart of the site and then compare the observed...
Mortuary Landscapes and Placemaking through Veneration at the Maya Site of Colha (2018)
Traces of veneration are sedimented within the landscape and the collective memory of its occupants, transforming these spaces into places. Such palimpsests become potent, which, in the case of mortuary landscapes, can manifest in increasingly complex burial rituals through time. The 2017 excavations at Colha revealed a series of 9 interments in the main plaza of the 2000 sector, yielding a minimum number of 13 individuals. This mortuary area initially utilized during the Middle Preclassic was...
Mortuary multiplicity: Variability in mortuary treatment at a Late Prehistoric matrix village from Spain (2016)
At 113 ha, Marroquíes Bajos (Jaén, Spain) is one of the largest villages known for the Iberian Copper Age. Attention was first focused on the site in the 1960s after construction work underneath the modern city of Jaén unearthed a series of elaborate artificial burial caves. However, over the past several decades salvage excavations revealed even more mortuary areas at the site, including commingled depositions in enclosure ditches, primary and secondary inhumations in discrete subterranean...
Mortuary Patterns of a 18th Century Cemetery on Sint Eustatius (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Globalization and Colonialism through Archaeology and Bioarchaeology: An NSF REU Sponsored Site on the Caribbean’s Golden Rock (Sint Eustatius)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Little is known about the mortuary patterns of enslaved and freed Africans during the 18th to early 19th century on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius. Excavation and analysis of burials from a small 18th century cemetery...
Mortuary Practices of Later Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers in Northern Malawi (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Later Stone Age (LSA) hunter-gatherer mortuary practices are poorly understood in south-central Africa. Tropical climate and acidic soils hinder preservation, bioturbation is prevalent, and research coverage is sparse. The site of Hora 1, in the Mzimba District of Malawi, provides a rare opportunity to examine...
Mortuary Practices of the Vanished Medieval Village of Gać in Poland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Poland" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper is focused on the results of three seasons of archeological excavation in the vanished village of Gać, located in the central part of Greater Poland. More than 300m2 of the medieval cemetery were examined, revealing 159 burials. The vast majority of the dead were buried according to the Catholic rite. However, a few deviated significantly...
Mortuary Spaces as Social Power: Ceramic Exchange and Burial Practice at Safford Mound (8PI3) (2018)
Mortuary spaces often served as gathering points for disparate communities in the pre-Columbian past. The deep temporal associations of many burial mounds across the southeastern United States linked living societies to the ancestral landscape, thus creating a sense of social memory that penetrated both quotidian and ritualized social practice. Safford Mound (8PI3), a burial mound located near modern Tarpon Springs, Florida, embodies some of these characteristics. In this study, we qualitatively...
Mortuary Vessels at the Maya City of El Peru-Waka' (2018)
Residential burials are useful tools that help archaeologists better understand domestic ritual practices at the household level. With the household acting as a unit of social identity, funerary practices help archaeologists relate said practices to prominent trends of the time. These include, but are not limited to social and religious structures, identity, power, and social reproduction. One of the many types of artifacts that often appear in Classic Maya burials that are significant to burial...
Multidisciplinary Recovery of Previously Cremated Remains after Urban Wildfires (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Canine Resources for the Archaeologist" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A firestorm in Northern California in October 2017 brought with it the beginning of a new field in archaeology. This arose following the detection and recovery of cremated remains of previously deceased loved ones kept within the home that were left behind as family members fled for their lives. Locating these cremains saves their living relatives...
A multiscalar approach to medieval animal cremains: from bone microstructure to multiregional trends (2016)
Variability is a defining characteristic of early medieval pagan mortuary practice. Groups may have buried individual decedents in myriad ways all falling under the definition of ‘pagan.’ When the variability of a specific ritual practice is compared at the community rather than individual level, however, then local and regional trends emerge. One such ritual practice is the incorporation of animals into human cremations – a practice common in terminal Iron Age and early medieval mortuary...
A Needle Is Not Always a Needle: Reevaluating Gender-Related Objects from Classic Maya Burials (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Weaving-related objects, mainly spindle whorls and needles, found in prehispanic Maya burials are usually interpreted as an indication of either the identity of the deceased or the activities carried out in life. Such a symbolic approach is valuable in tracking the construction of identity in funerary contexts. However, it can be misleading in some contexts....
A New Approach to the Anyang Hsi-Pei-Kang Late Shang Royal Cemetery: A Social Archaeological Perspective (2018)
This presentation argues that the decision of the locations of the so-called royal tombs of the Anyang Hsi-Pei-Kang cemetery involved various social-strategic concerns. Although badly robbed, the excavations of the tombs yielded rich grave good assemblages, allowing archaeologists to approach to various elements of the theocratic authority of the late Shang kings. The reconstruction of the formation process of the cemetery has been attempted in the hope that the tombs can be assigned to the...
New Discoveries on Late Upper Paleolithic (Final Epigravettian) Funerary Behavior at Arene Candide (Finale Ligure, Italy) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Epigravettian "necropolis" at Arene Candide Cave (Finale Ligure), excavated in the 1940s, yielded a large Late Upper Paleolithic skeletal series consisting of 10 primary burials and six clusters of bones in secondary deposition, accumulated during two distinct phases separated by a few centuries (AMS dates spanning...