Mortuary archaeology (Other Keyword)
176-200 (294 Records)
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 at the Pre-Columbian Site of Indian Creek, Antigua - Preliminary Results (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the preliminary results from recent excavations at Indian Creek, Antigua that have helped identify, document, and recover four late period Saladoid burials. Despite this being the longest continuously inhabited site on Antigua, and one of the longest continuously inhabited sites in the Caribbean, only one other complete burial has been...
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...
Mothers on the Move? Sex- and Age-Related Differences in 87Sr/86Sr in Late Bronze-Early Iron Age Tilburg-Udenhoutseweg, the Netherlands (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The urnfield cemetery of Tilburg-Udenhoutseweg was excavated in 2020 yielding a total of 230 cremation graves dating to the Late Bronze-Iron Age. The cremation graves were distributed over the entire cemetery as part of burial monuments, in clusters, or as individual graves. Osteological analyses of all the cremation...
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...
Mummies and Mortuary Monuments Revisited: A Bioarchaeological Perspective on Ayllus and Open Sepulchers (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. Open sepulchers (chullpas) are typically thought to have marked the social and territorial boundaries of Andean ayllus, corporate landholding groups based on descent. This proposed relationship between chullpas and ayllus follows from colonial-era accounts of Andean mortuary practices and finds empirical support in the...
“A Name Comes First and the Story Follows”: Archaeology, Story Maps, and the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery Project (2024)
This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout her career, Patricia Richards conveyed experience and knowledge through storytelling. Impassioned and insightful, these stories often reveal episodes forgotten by written history. As one example, the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) represents thousands of stories,...
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...
New Identities and Changing Funerary Practices in the Mid–Late 2nd Millennium BC in the Carpathian Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from Middle to Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 – 1300 BC) in the Carpathian Basin encompassed a broad range of changes in material culture, settlement, and societal organization. While the narratives have somewhat shifted from the traditional model that primarily associated these changes with the arrival of the Tumulus culture population, and...
New Multi-disciplinary Studies Re-shape our Understanding of Neolithic Peopling and Biocultural Adaptations in Western Liguria (Northwestern 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. Beginning in the mid-1800s, about 200 burials and an undefined number of scattered human remains have been reported from several caves and rock shelters in western Liguria. The skeletal series, excavated following the methodology of the time, were considered likely/probably/possibly "Neolithic" or "Middle Neolithic",...
New Research on Andean Mummies at the Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, Belgium (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Royal Museums of Art and History preserves seven complete or partial Andean mummies. Three are still surrounded by textiles in the form of funerary bundles. Four others lacked textile remains but were probably also held up by ties and fabric. For the museum and for Belgium, one of them is very important because he was made famous thanks to the...
Non-metric Traits and the Influence of Cranial Modifications: A Case Study from the South-Central Andes (2018)
Non-metric cranial traits and craniometric scoring are often used as a quicker and cheaper alternative to genetic markers when analyzing biological distance within and between populations. However, in populations with intentional artificial cranial modifications, the only option is scoring non-metric cranial traits since the craniometrics are too heavily affected by the modifications. Studies have shown that although non-metrics are the best alternative, some traits cause a bias that can differ...
A Novel Application of δ15N Values to Segregate Human and Non-Human Remains (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are routinely tasked with sorting and identifying osseous remains in complex assemblages. When dealing with non-diagnostic fragments or significant taphonomic alterations, a straightforward determination of human or non-human based on osteological analysis is not always feasible. This study tests the use of nitrogen isotope delta values...