Mortuary archaeology (Other Keyword)
1-25 (294 Records)
Excavations at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in 1991 and 1992 recovered 1649 individuals associated with Milwaukee County’s practice from the mid-1800s through 1974 of providing burial for institutional residents, unidentified or unclaimed individuals sent from the Coroner’s Office, and community poor. In 2013, Historic Resource Management Services of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee recovered an additional 632 individual coffin burials representing...
Accessing the Inaccessible: Late Intermediate Period Chachapoya Collective Mortuary Practices at Diablo Wasi, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The complexity in mortuary traditions across the Chachapoyas region ranges from single individual interments to large, commingled mortuary caves, as well as including constructed sarcophagi and shared open chambers high on cliff faces. Variation within sites and across funerary complexes demonstrates individuality in...
An Accounting of the Dead: Historical Epidemiology and Big Data in the Arch Street Project (2018)
As of the beginning of September 2017, the remains of over 250 individuals were recovered from the building site at 218 Arch Street. While the presence of bodies in what was once the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia burial ground should not surprise us, contemporary documents and written histories of the congregation state that all burials had been moved to the Mount Mariah Cemetery in the mid-nineteenth century. The abundance of human remains left on the original site raises questions for...
Adversaries and Ancestors: A Comparison of Two Skull Caches from Northwest Honduras (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At La Sierra, in the Naco Valley, the crania of five individuals were discovered in a niche at the front of a Late Classic (AD 600-950) house. Each skull was sitting on its own plate surrounded by obsidian blades. Sixteen kilometers to the southwest, at the site of El Coyote, an ossuary containing two interment episodes of at least fourteen individuals...
Amber Runs through It: The Centralization of Wealth and Power in Late Prehistoric Lika, Croatia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistoric cultural and sociopolitical development in the mountainous region of Lika, Croatia is still poorly understood despite over a century of archaeological excavations. Traditional cultural-historical narratives based on grave good typologies suggest that a unified regional culture, the Iapodians, emerged at the end of the...
Analysis of Entheses Development and Implications on Labor in Late Medieval 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. Studies of human behavior and habitual muscle use through analysis of entheses, or muscle insertion sites on the skeleton, continue to be an important way of examining labor among people in the past. In this study, we analyze entheses development on the skeletons of individuals from the recently discovered and excavated late medieval site of Gać in...
Ancestor Veneration or Funeral Practices? An Examination of Recuay Mortuary Variability in the Basin of Puccha (Ancash) between AD 200-900 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mortuary studies have followed different perspectives, such as ancestor veneration mostly based on intrasite analysis. This paper examines the regional distribution of Recuay's funeral practices and its implications for ancestor worship studies. Radiocarbon dates available for the valley show an occupation between AD 200-900, and it correlates with the...
The Ancestral Remains of the Cheslatta T'en: A Rare Burial Site from the Middle Holocene in Central British Columbia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the fall of 2020, human ancestral remains were discovered eroding out of the bank of a lake within the traditional territory of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, at the northern end of the Canadian Plateau. In 2021 more remains were found at the same location. At the request of the Cheslatta t’en archaeologists conducted salvage excavations to protect and...
Ancient Manganism in the Andes: A Bioarchaeological View (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Chinchorro people of northern Chile used manganese as part of their mortuary rites (7000–3000 BP). Chinchorro artifacts (n = 12) reveals the presence of manganese up to 64% measured with portable X-ray fluorescence. In addition, bone chemistry analysis from Chinchorro mummies (n = 68) using atomic absorption spectrometry reveals for the first...
Animals for the Ancestors: Comparing Animal Use in Funerary Rites at Ancient Hualcayán, Peru (AD 1–1000) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents recent analysis of faunal materials from three distinct funerary structures at Hualcayán, Ancash, Peru, in order to assess differences in taphonomic environments and funerary practices through interred faunal remains. This study compares species representation, bone modifications, and fragmentation from Early Intermediate Period and Middle...
Applying Geophysical Prospection to Interpret Historical Burial Practices at Two Cemeteries on St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean (2021)
This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research examines the relationship between the Old Church Cemetery and the Jewish Cemetery on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius. These cemeteries are located near each other, yet the people buried in them had different religious ideologies and social positions....
Approaches to Scale in Highly Commingled Contexts: A Case Study from Roncesvalles (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the ossuary of El Silo de Carlomagno, located in Roncesvalles (Navarre, Spain), have generated more than 680,000 human bones dating from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries CE. The subject of ongoing archaeological research, the site represents one of the largest commingled assemblages ever studied, with a...
Archaeological Relocation of Five Historic Cemeteries in North-Central Tennessee (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Spring of 2020 Wood E&IS embarked on the removal and relocation of graves associated with five late 19th- early 20th- century historic cemeteries located in rural north-central Tennessee. The cemeteries were deemed eligible for the National Register; therefore, graves were removed archaeologically. Each cemetery was mapped using noninvasive geophysical...
An Archaeology of Aesthetics: the Socio-Economic and Ideological Elements of Coffin Plate Selection at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church (2013)
Material shifts among decorative coffin fittings reflect how past populations conceptualized death, memory, and social status. Coffin plates recovered during the excavation of four burial vaults (ca. 1820-1843) associated with the Spring Street Presbyterian Church, New York City, were simple and uniform in design, inscribed only with the names, ages, and death dates of the individuals with whom they were interred. This paper examines the socio-economic and ideological elements that may have...
Archaeology of Death across the International Border: Research among the Hohokam and Trincheras Archaeological Groups (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I will explore similarities and differences between mortuary practices and concepts of embodiment of the dead from Hohokam Classic Period (AD 1150 to 1450/1500) sites in the Tucson Basin and from the Cerro de Trincheras, Sonora (ca. AD 1300 to 1450). I will discuss challenges and opportunities for conducting bioarchaeology...
Archaeothanatological Analysis of Mortuary Practices in the Prehistoric Sonoran Desert and Implications for Interpreting Sickness through Postmortem Processing (2018)
The La Playa archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert represents one of the earliest agricultural settlements in northwest Mexico. Over 310 mortuary features have been uncovered during salvage excavations since the site was discovered in 1930, revealing a wide variability in mortuary practices that may reflect specific treatments for pathological or transgressive individuals after death. This paper describes analyses of burials uncovered during the 2017 field season utilizing the...
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust in Caddoan Mortuary Ritual (2018)
Sediment of varied textures and colors, ash among them, is highlighted from deliberately burnt Harlan-style charnel houses. These were erected in sub-mound pits. In one rendition that followed an earlier house burning, light gray ash alternates in the superior, or upward, position with the black charcoal layer of a collapsed burnt thatch and cane roof. The ash was levelled as a platform. This completed a mortuary cycle linked lineally to subsequent pyramidal mound construction. In other cases...
Beads, Burials, and African Diaspora Archaeology: Documenting a Pattern of Black and White Bead Use within African-American Mortuary Contexts (2018)
African Diaspora Archaeology has its roots in Plantation Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s. One artifact initially associated with enslaved contexts was the simple blue-glass bead (though other colors were recovered), recognized by some as signifying African-derived culture and beliefs, and by others as a controversial and potentially erroneous stereotype. Simultaneously emerging in the 1970s was the field of historical mortuary archaeology, where graves of African-Americans as well as...
Believers in the Highlands: Burying the Muslim Dead at the Qarakhanid Site of Tashbulak (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islam spread into Central Asia via the Arab invasions of the 7th century CE. According to current historical narratives, Islam’s first footholds were lowland urban centers, with Islam only slowly infiltrating the highlands. New research, presented here, challenges the idea that highland areas were a barrier to Islam. This paper...
A Bioarchaeological Analysis of Antemortem Post-cranial Trauma Patterns within the Archaic Greek Cemetery of Phaleron (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Phaleron cemetery dates to the Greek Archaic Period (700–480 BCE), a time of great political and social upheaval. Textual accounts from the Archaic period are limited, making bioarchaeological analysis integral to understanding the lived experiences of everyday ancient Athenians. This project...
Bioarchaeological Analysis of Preclassic Human Remains Recovered from a Lime Kiln, El Mirador, Guatemala (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary findings pertaining to the exhumation and bioarchaeological examination of a collection of Preclassic period human remains recovered from a lime kiln in El Mirador Basin, Guatemala. The disarticulated and fragmented skeletal remains of nine individuals were compressed into a...
A Bioarchaeological Approach to the Social Construction of Community Identities in Mountain Landscapes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Huarochirí Manuscript has made legendary the social relationships of pre-Columbian groups inhabiting the Andean mountain landscape that ascends steeply from the present-day coastal capital city of Lima, Peru, to the high-altitude Huarochirí Province. In this famous collection of ethnohistoric narratives, authored in the indigenous...
Bioarchaeology of Care in Three San Francisco Bay Area Muwekma Ohlone Ancestral Sites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation applies Tilley and Cameron’s 2014 Index of Care to the mortuary population of three ancestral Muwekma Ohlone sites that were excavated in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2016- 2022 (CA-ALA-565/H, CA-ALA-677/H, and CA-ALA-704/H). These sites include the remains of 147 individuals dating between approximately 2200-110 cal BP. This...
The Bioarchaeology of Greater Chiriquí: Challenges, Finds, and Future Directions (2018)
Greater Chiriquí, the pre-Columbian cultural sphere encompassing western Panama and southern Costa Rica, has been subjected to intense looting activities since the mid-19th century. Nevertheless, archaeological exploration of the area to date has successfully contextualized the nature and transitions of non-perishable material culture. However, organic remains rarely survive in funerary contexts due to the high acidity of the soil, high humidity, and high precipitation in this region. Human...
The Bioarchaeology of None: Recovery and Analysis of an Historic Coffin from Fort McAllister State Park, Georgia. (2016)
In the spring of 2013, the office of the Georgia State Archaeologist was contacted by personnel from Fort McAllister State Park in Richmond Hill, GA, concerning what appeared to be an historic coffin eroding out of the marsh edge. Emergency salvage excavation was conducted to recover the remaining portions of the coffin. Initial field analysis indicated a sharp shouldered, hexagonal style coffin. Neither the lid nor any mortuary hardware was recovered. The coffin’s location is within the...