Mortuary archaeology (Other Keyword)
151-175 (294 Records)
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 site of Sondor in the south-central Peruvian Andes is famously known as an Inca ceremonial center in Andahuaylas, Peru. Prior to Inca presence, Sondor was occupied by cultures from the Formative period to the Late Intermediate period (LIP), with the largest occupation by the Chanka during the LIP (AD 1000–1400)....
Making an Ancestor at Actuncan: Exploring the Origins, Health, Burial Treatment and Taphonomy of a Late Classic Maya Residential Eastern Structure (2018)
The patio adjacent to the eastern structure of Group 1 at the site of Actuncan served as a burial ground for generations. At least twelve individuals in more than seven graves were buried at one of the oldest residential groups at the site during the Late Classic period (AD 600-900). Eastern structures were used to bury revered ancestors in the Belize River Valley, but nearly all of the Actuncan Group 1 burials were disturbed by later burials. When was it acceptable to disturb an ancestor, and...
A Manteño Burial from Buen Suceso, Ecuador (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Spanish explorers arrived in South America, sea-faring Manteño peoples dominated much of the northern and central Ecuadorian coast. While Manteño sites and technologies are well-documented, particularly at large sites such as Cerro Jaboncillo, many questions about Manteño society and mortuary traditions remain, particularly concerning people who lived on...
Mapping God's Little Acre: Digital Documentation of Newport's Colonial African Burial Ground (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The remarkable site of God’s Little Acre (GLA), the historic African and African American section of Newport’s Common Burial Ground, comprises the largest surviving corpus of gravemarkers from a colonial era African cemetery anywhere in the United States. In 2019, members of the Rhode Island Historic Cemetery Advisory Commission...
Marine Shell from Burials in St. Henry’s Cemetery (11S1742), East St. Louis, IL (1866-1908) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 19th century, East St. Louis attracted immigrants to work in its centers of industry and was a hub for westward expansion. St. Henry’s Cemetery in East St. Louis, Illinois was the prominent Catholic cemetery within the area, serving the community from 1866-1908. Supposedly relocated by 1926, the cemetery site was then developed into a National Guard...
Mastoid Osteoma on the Skeleton of a Known Individual from the Bethel Cemetery (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project: Historical, Osteological, and Material Culture Analyses of a Nineteenth-Century Indiana Cemetery" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Elizabeth Poland was a member of one of the prominent families interred at the Bethel Cemetery, located in Indianapolis, IN; she died in 1896 at the age of 76. Her skeleton indicated several pathological conditions including pedal arthritis, vertebral...
Material Geographies of Multi-Family Neolithic Households (2018)
This paper explores how people within Neolithic villages were potentially connected to co-resident multi-family households, and considers the potential material footprint of multi-family households within Neolithic villages. As seen from ethnographic cases, in some cases residential buildings of House Societies had a range of functions including as dwelling locations, origin-places, council houses, or meeting-houses. Echoing other research this paper decouples the social unit of the House from a...
A Material Sentimentality: Exploring Childhood Via the Death Event at Freedman’s Cemetery, Dallas, Texas (1869-1907) (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This study explores childhood through materiality and the death event, focusing on the sentimentalization of children through funerary elaboration, the dressing of the corpse, and the inclusion of material objects in the grave. Specifically, I will explore the burial contexts of children (ages 0-15) from the 19th and early 20th...
The materiality of life and death: Dress ornaments and shifting identities at Hasanlu, Iran (2017)
The site of Hasanlu, Iran, was destroyed thoroughly by a marauding army in approximately 800 BCE, leaving a hulk of smoking rubble that was a virtual tomb for the hundreds of residents and combatants who weren’t able to escape its citadel. The excavations of Hasanlu, led by Robert H. Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, took place between 1956 and 1977, and uncovered a remarkable range of contexts containing personal ornaments within the relatively narrow historical horizon of...
The Maya Cranial Photogrammetry Project (2018)
The Maya Cranial Photogrammetry Project aims to create a large digital repository for the purpose of comparative shape analyses to test hypotheses relating to ethnic and political distinctions among ancient Maya groups. The shape of skeletons reflects a combination of genetic and environmental influences on development and thus comparison of skeletal variability provides an important means to reconstruct microevolutionary processes. In particular, because of its complex morphology the skull has...
Maya Dental Modifications: Insights from Ka’Kabish, Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigated the intentionally modified dentition found within chultuns at the Maya site of Ka’kabish, Belize. The site has a history spanning from the Middle Formative (800–600 BC) to the Postclassic (900–1500 AD) periods. The primary aim of this research was to closely examine the modified dentition, evaluate any dental pathologies present,...
Maya Funerary Practices and Their Significance in Reproducing and Maintaining Social Status and Identity: Evidence from Copan, Honduras, and Palenque, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Susan Gillespie remarked the importance of human body and funerary ritual in the process of transmission of memory and legitimation of social status among Maya royalty. Would this process be visible in domestic contexts, too? To answer this question, I chose to study domestic funerary record, context where an archaeologist can find the reflection of collective...
Medieval Transylvanian Church Burial Patterns and Demographics (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Papdomb archaeological site is located immediately outside the village of Văleni (Hungarian: Patakfalva), Romania in the historic region of Transylvania. Papdomb comprises the ruins of a medieval Székely church and its associated cemetery. Human interment within the walls of the church started in the second half of the 12th century and extended to the...
Methodological Approaches to Search and Recovery of World War II MIAs (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 78,000 US Service Personnel are still “Missing in Action” (MIA). From World War II, they are located in both the Pacific and European theatres. History Flight, a nonprofit organization, has dedicated over 10 years to the search and recovery of these US Servicemen who are still MIAs through a transdisciplinary approach. Initial steps logically stem from...
Middle Age Childhood: Bioarchaeology and Health of Children from a Medieval Cemetery Site (Gz10) in Giecz, 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. The medieval cemetery in Giecz (site 10) is part of a complex of the early Piast state stronghold (Giecz, Greater Poland voivodeship, Poland). The cemetery is dated to the eleventh–twelfth centuries. The site has been excavated since 2014 as Slavia Field School in Mortuary Archaeology. During the seasons 2014–2021, over 150 graves have been discovered....
A Miniature Brooch and Gaming Pieces: The Story of the Smaller Objects from the Late Iron Age Elite Burials of Southern England (2019)
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...
Misuse and Abandonment of African American Cemeteries: How Social Inequalities Persist in Death in the Post Civil War Southeast (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores how African American cemeteries in the Southeast have faced environmental and human threats, which makes it difficult for descendant communities to piece together their backgrounds. American law offers some protections against the intentional desecration of cemeteries, yet the maintenance and landscaping of individual cemeteries is left...
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...