Mortuary archaeology (Other Keyword)
101-125 (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 ubiquity of open sepulcher type funerary contexts in the Andean highlands is a salient fact. Previous work and new surveys in the Pamparomás and Chaclancayo valleys of the Upper Nepeña Drainage have identified more than 60 such funerary contexts. Over the past two years, systematic excavations of selected sites coupled...
From Villanovan to Etruscan Mortuary Goods: The Ceramic Assemblages of Four Seventh-Century BCE Pit Graves from the Site of San Giuliano (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The San Giuliano necropolis, located within the Marturanum Regional Park in northern Lazio, Italy, is well-known for its hundreds of Villanovan and Etruscan graves. As part of our mission to understand the patterns of human habitation at the site from the ninth...
Gender Differentiation in Jewish Memorials: An Ethnoarchaeological Examination of the Headstones in the B'nai Israel Cemetery (2015)
An ethnoarchaeological approach to the study of historic cemeteries and associated gravemarkers offers a tested and non-invasive methodology which can garner insight into the collective and personal identity of individuals within and between specific cultural groups. For the investigation of the Jewish diaspora, such enthoarchaeological studies have proven to be one of the richest sources of data on religious and cultural practices related to death and burial. Past studies have examined...
Genomic Data from Paquimé: Understanding the Cultural and Genetic Ties of the Site (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paquimé, located in the Casas Grandes region of Northern Mexico, presents a rich cultural tradition with ties to populations to the South and North. Ancient mitochondrial DNA from Paquime’s occupants has not provided evidence of large-scale in-migration that led to the fluorescence of the site, as some scholars have hypothesized. This paper focuses on...
GIS in Vertical Spaces: An Examination of Location and Clustering of Mortuary Contexts at the Cliff Site of La Petaca, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geographic Information Systems are often applied to archaeological contexts to analyze spatial patterns within a site and ascertain social structure and identity. Vertical sites, however, pose a problem for GIS since most analyses must occur on the horizontal plane. This is particularly troublesome for studying the Chachapoya, a Late Intermediate Period group...
Gone and All but Forgotten: An Overview of St Henry’s Cemetery (11S1742), East St. Louis, IL, 1866–1908 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. St. Henry’s Catholic Cemetery (11S1742) in East St. Louis, IL, was interring largely German and Irish individuals from 1866 to 1908. As part of growing urbanization and societal sanitation concerns, the cemetery was closed and buried individuals were supposedly relocated by 1926. By 1951, the Illinois National Guard Armory was constructed on the site and...
Hammer on Vampires: Reconceptualization of So-Called Deviant Funerary Practices of Early Medieval Slavs (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Central Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Slavic “deviant” funerary practices and dealings with certain dead—including decapitations, mutilations, or crushing cadavers with stones—have been of interest for mortuary archaeologists for many years. The explanation that researchers turned to most often was the one describing these practices as apotropaic in nature, as means of subduing the...
Harappan Necropolis of Rakhigarhi, India: Archaeology and Bioanthropology (2018)
The number of Harappan cemeteries so far systematically surveyed is far less than that of contemporary settlements. Necropolis site at Rakhigarhi (India) was reported earlier but in small scale investigation. Our investigation for the last three seasons (2013 to 2016) was thus designed for improving this lacuna. We first classified each burial and analyzed statistically. The Harappan people practiced rather humble burial custom, but few were found differently and these burials look more...
Health and Disease during the Ecuadorian Formative: A Case Study from Buen Suceso (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ecuadorian Formative Period (3800-300 BC) is known for the creation of ceramics, a transition towards agriculture, and the development of sedentary settlements along the Pacific coast. These social and economic changes were often associated with declines in health, as people ate less varied agricultural diets and increasingly encountered pathogens...
Health and Mortuary Treatment in Early Bronze Age Transylvania (2018)
Copper and gold resources from Southwestern Transylvania played a critical role in the emergence of inequality in European Late Prehistory. Communities in this metal-rich landscape, however, remain poorly understood. Though the highly visible tombs in the Apuseni Mountains where these communities buried some of their dead have been known to local archaeologists for decades, very little is known about the backdrop of health and disease in the region. Here, we present one of the first...
Health Status of the Inhabitants of the Medieval Village and Town in Greater Poland (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Central Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studying living conditions of any population in the past using indirect indicators such as skeletal lesions is challenging, as their occurrence can be connected and influenced by different factors such as individuals’ immune systems. However, porous skeletal lesions (porotic hyperostosis, cribra orbitalia), and linear enamel hypoplasias (LEH),...
Health, Mobility, and Burial Practices: Lifeways and Deathways at Aventura, Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human remains are found in a variety of contexts at Aventura: as primary burials below the floors of houses, as secondary burials or caches also below the floors, and even in middens. The preservation of the bone is very poor and therefore the recovery of individuals is often less than 25%. This sometimes makes...
Historical and Bioarchaeological Investigation of the Evansville State Hospital Cemetery (12VG598), Vanderburgh County, Indiana (2018)
In 2014, Cultural Resource Analysts, Inc., conducted the archaeological relocation of graves from the Evansville State Hospital Cemetery. At the request of Beam, Longest, and Neff, LLC, on behalf of the City of Evansville and the Indiana Department of Transportation, the graves of 31 individuals who were patients at the reform-era hospital between circa 1890 and 1928 were relocated in advance of construction of a pedestrian bridge. The population consisted primarily of young to middle adults,...
Historical Craniotomy and Autopsy Practices at the Milwaukee County Institutional Grounds Poor Farm Cemetery (2015)
The Milwaukee County Institutional Grounds Poor Farm Cemetery (MCIG) served as the burial ground for county institutions, including the coroner’s office and the Milwaukee County Hospital. This paper describes craniotomy practices in particular, and autopsy practices more generally, evidenced by the population from the MCIG Cemetery. In addition, this research attempts to distinguish between craniotomies and autopsies carried out by the coroner’s office versus the Milwaukee County Hospital to...
The History and Archaeology of Burials Excavated from the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg and the Powder Magazine (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Individuals Known and Unknown: Case Studies from Two Burial Contexts at Colonial Williamsburg" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent archaeological discovery of two different burial contexts within Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area has provided the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Department of Archaeology opportunities to employ new strategies for the study and treatment of human remains. Methodologically...
Housing the Dead, Assembling Kin: The Construction and Use of Chullpa Tombs during the Middle Horizon in the Callejón de Huaylas Valley, 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. In the highland Andes, archaeologists often emphasize the late prehispanic era (post-1000 CE) when examining the widespread mortuary tradition of interring the deceased in above-ground tombs known as chullpas. Our understanding of this practice during the preceding centuries, however, remains limited due to the smaller...
How the Skeletal Remains of Romanian Reflect the Culture and Daily Life of the Medieval Period (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval Romania’s history is riddled with gaps caused by destructive invasions against the Ottoman Empire, among others. With a fractured and understudied history, bioarchaeology emerges as a potent tool to unveil the concealed facets of this era, ranging from dietary habits and religious inclinations to vocational pursuits, physical traumas, and burial...
Hoxie Farm: Bioarchaeology of a Late Prehistoric Community in Northeastern Illinois (2018)
The Upper Mississippian (A.D. 1400-1500) Hoxie Farm site is one of the best documented late prehistoric sites in Cook County, Illinois. In 1953, Elaine Bluhm and David Wenner from the Field Museum of Natural History organized a volunteer crew of professional and avocational archaeologists to salvage portions of the site in advance of construction of the first interstate highway (I-80) in Illinois. In 2000-2003, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) conducted additional excavations at...
Identification of Bilateral Congenital Radioulnar Synostosis in an Early Horizon Burial from the Site of Atalla, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeological research can help trace the development and distribution of rare pathologies across space and time, aiding in our understanding of how past peoples experienced and made sense of a variety of conditions and diseases. Congenital radioulnar synostosis (CRUS), a developmental condition resulting in fusion of the proximal radius and ulna, is one...
Identifying Patterned Variability in Preclassic-Postclassic Maya Mortuary Practices in the Belize River Valley (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Classic period (AD 300-900) Belize River Valley was a complex political landscape of numerous semi-autonomous Maya polities. Many began their emergence at the end of the Early Preclassic period (1200-900 BC), consolidated their political power in the Late Preclassic, and subsequently underwent collapse in the Terminal Classic period (AD 750-900/1000). The...
If the Dead Could Return: The Politics of World War II Era Human Remains in Eastern Europe (2017)
Although World War II (WWII) hostilities ended in 1945, still today the graves and remains of both combatants and civilians continue to be unearthed, especially in Eastern Europe. These discoveries of graves become entwined with the dynamic physical and geopolitical landscapes, whereby the post-human remains take on new, contested identities. Their unique identifications to name or nationality are sublimated, as their collective national or ethnic identities become prioritized. Combatants...
Illuminating Complex Mortuary Rituals in a Cemetery from Bronze Age Eastern Hungary (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age Körös Off-Tell Archaeology Project (BAKOTA) has excavated 84 burials from a Bronze Age cemetery (Békés 103) located in the Lower Körös Basin in Eastern Hungary. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the cemetery was used for several hundred years, with the most active phase between 1600 and 1280 cal BC, a time that has been associated with the...
In Awe Of Death: A Comparative Analysis Of Glass Viewing Windows In American Caskets and Coffins (2017)
A comparative analysis of glass viewing windows present within interments during the Victorian Era and into the early twentieth century provides a unique perspective on the socioeconomic status of black and white communities throughout this time period, as well as an interpretation of assumptions made as to which individuals purchased these adornments for their dearly departed. This study examines Freedman’s Cemetery in Dallas, Texas, as well as seventy-nine other historic black and white...
In the Heart of the Inca: An Osteobiography at Huanacauri (Cusco, Peru) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study takes an osteobiographical approach to describe the archaeological significance and life history of the only known individual buried within Huanacauri (Cusco, Peru), one of the most sacred sites in the Inca Empire (ca. 1400-1533 CE). Given the significant location of the burial—in the center of the place the Incas perceived as the foundation of...
An In-Depth Study of the Arma Veirana Pierced Shells and Pendants used as Grave Goods (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. During the 2017 excavation season at Arma Veirana, a cave site located in the Italian pre-Alps, a Final Epigravettian burial was discovered. Careful excavation of the feature has uncovered an important number of grave goods comprised of over 80 perforated marine shells. The majority of these ornaments were made from...