Mortuary Analysis (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Wesp. Chelsi Slotten. Felipe Gaitan Ammann.

This research analyzes the funerary customs in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries as recovered through archaeological exploration in the Jesuit church named Templo San Ignacio in downtown Bogotá, Colombia. These skeletal remains illustrate how from the moment the church was constructed in 1610, the deposition of the deceased beneath the floor was an integral part of the occupation of this sacred space on the periphery of the Spanish colonial empire. While we recovered human remains from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Peters.

Anne Paul (1998) observed that the Paracas Necropolis embroiderers seem to explore all possible color repeat patterns in their mantle design. At the same time, a few dominant color combinations recur throughout the assemblage. Like speech, color is a system of difference, hues perceived relationally through contrast with those adjacent. Dyed color is produced by chemical processes on natural fiber with pre-existing tones, and changes over time in diverse environmental conditions. These factors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annmarie Delgado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study examines the social status of children in the Ancient Middle East, focusing on a fifth-century BCE cemetery at Tell el-Mazar, Jordan. Using mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology methods, the research aims to uncover how children were commemorated within their familial and communal contexts. Bioarchaeological methods will be employed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Shiner. Katie Hemer.

Recent excavations below the ruins of a 13th–16th AD century chapel dedicated to St Patrick, at Whitesands Bay, Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales revealed ninety well-preserved burials dating to the 7th–11th century AD. There was an unusually high concentration of non-adults buried at the site, including a number of foetuses and infants. Some of these young individuals received elaborate burial forms, including the use of quartz-topped burials and cross-inscribed grave markers. It is necessary to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo Burkholder.

Data from excavations at the site of Pisanay, a Late Intermediate Period "sanctuary" with some remains of Early Intermediate Period ceremonialism, can be used to frame a sort of "before and after" picture of Middle Horizon developments in the Sihuas Valley of Arequipa and the changing nature of cultural ties to the region. Most striking of these is the shifting pattern of materials ties impacted by the intervening influence of the Wari cultural horizon, seen in the ceramics and textiles...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Brewer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spanish colonization in the seventeenth century of what is now the U.S. Southwest changed the social, political, and religious landscape of the area. One of the stated purposes of the Spanish for colonizing new territories was to spread the word of God as deemed by the Catholic Church. Therefore, with Spanish colonists into what became Nuevo Mexico came...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Swenson.

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his analysis of Shang authority structures, Campbell attacks the search for ancient states in the archaeological record as founded on “an illusory and anachronistic projection of modern political contingencies” (2009:821). Indeed, a narrow focus on rational leadership strategies or the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, scholars have recognized ties between the Central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan and the Maya city of Tikal, particularly in the wake of a poorly understood event in AD 378. At Tikal, the strongest evidence for that connection comes from the southern edge of the site center, within a precinct centered around an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hutson.

In the ancient cities of Ur and Chan Chan, excavations revealed that when a lord died, dozens of servants were sometimes put to death and buried with the lord. Such examples of retainer sacrifice, also mentioned for Aztec kings and documented in Maya tombs, raise questions about slavery, violence, and subjectivity. David Graeber has argued that slavery played a key role in the origin of commercial systems. The transition at issue concerns the melding of human economies (which make and remake...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francesca Neri.

The burials from the Oak Creek Valley Pueblo and the Dewey Archaeological sites provide data for interpreting the mortuary practices and burial rituals of the Southern Sinagua and Prescott cultures. The variability exhibited in the burials uncovered at these sites, which include the remains of an adult male, two adult females, infant burials, and one dog, allows for an examination of mortuary practices as they relate to social structure and the role of children, symbolism, environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yitzchak Jaffe.

For his last SAA paper, Professor Chen Pochan talked about the Dian Yangfutou cemetery in Yunnan. He presented the results of an analysis that provided new meaning on its social structure. The Dian culture was an important entity on the periphery of the Warring States and early Han world, but apart from several references in Chinese historical documents little is known, but much is assumed, about them. Chen's study complemented previous Dian mortuary research with site-specific practices in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marilou Renard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El asentamiento de élite del Conjunto Norte Rancho Aserradero (Huasteca potosina) ha revelado un rico conjunto mortuorio. La variedad del reclutamiento, tanto en la selección de los individuos como en los objetos asociados y el tratamiento de los difuntos, es un testigo de la integración de estos contextos a la manifestación del poder político de la élite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliana Gómez. Jordan A Dalton. Colleen O’Shea. Noemi Oncebay.

This is an abstract from the "Developments through Time on the South Coast of Peru: In Memory of Patrick Carmichael" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mortuary Practices are political acts that are deeply embedded in political and social interactions. Complex N1 at the site of Las Huacas was the location of various burials during the Late Horizon (AD 1470–1532) and, possibly, early colonial period (AD 1532–1570). One such burial, was a large communal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hansen.

Archaeologists have long striven to interpret mortuary rituals as qualitative signs of a living people--indices of sex, gender, age, status, wealth, and craft. Though the doctrine "as in life, so in death" can have some merit for archaeological inquiry, viewing mortuary ritual in this manner ignores the social act itself, which is one of the most intimate, personal, and weighted actions humans produce, serving, among other roles, to return the society to homeostasis in the wake of the loss of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Petra Creamer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of mortuary material in archaeology has always related to subjects of identity, beliefs, and resources. Furthermore, it is one of our prime resources for understanding non-elite individuals in the premodern world, especially in societies where historical sources revolve around the ruling elites. This is certainly the case in the ancient Assyrian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Joyce.

Knowledge of Formative Period Mesoamerican archaeological sites often comes from narrow windows into buried sites. One feature has been a partial exception to this rule: burials. Groups of Formative Period burials, often accompanied by objects, have been recovered in many parts of Mesoamerica. Using models of mortuary treatment that saw burials as reflecting individual identity, burials provided one of the first ways researchers could examine the emergence of stratification within these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Montgomery.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After declaring tombs to be absent from the Patipampa archaeological record on the basis of our 2017 excavations, this presentation discusses two mortuary contexts discovered at the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000) site of Patipampa in the capital city of Huari. Excavated during our 2018 field season,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celise Chilcote-Fricker.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The characteristics and roles of the preconquest cultures that once existed in Central America have long been the subject of debate, the main focus of which revolves around the nature of their relationships to the surrounding Mesoamerican and Chibchan cultural areas. Largely accepted that no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Ambrose.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Terminal Pleistocene (14.6-12.8 ka) cemeteries of the Early African Humid Period (E-AHP) along the Nile in Sudan contain many skeletons with injuries (41.9% of burials) suggesting chronic intergroup warfare. During the Later AHP the Nile Valley was densely populated by hunter-gatherer-fisher communities of the Early Khartoum (EK) tradition (10.6-6...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Snider.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study addresses the contextual importance of human skeletal remains in identifying diachronic changes and constants in mortuary practices from the Mesambria necropolis, on the banks of the Black Sea in modern Nessebar, Bulgaria. Skeletal remains are the central element of mortuary practices but are often excluded from archaeological interpretation,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Corl. Kristina Solis. Robert J. Hard. Michelle Carpenter.

A series of mortuary sites on the Texas Coastal Plain provide a dataset useful for analyzing demographic change through examination of age profiles. Other archaeological data suggest that populations peaked during the Late Archaic period (4000-800 BP) and sharply declined during the Late Prehistoric period (800-350 BP). Analysis of the ratio of adults to young individuals has been used to identify rapid population growth among other populations. Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Texas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Quinn.

This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human remains are the most direct line of archaeological evidence of people in the past. The mortuary record, however, is the product of the complex interplay between social practices and taphonomic processes. To understand its formation and consequences for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Dupuy. Elissa Bullion. Galymzhan Kiyasbek. Erbolat Rakhmankulov. Aidyn Zhuniskhanov.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistoric site of Koken, located in the semiarid foothills of eastern Kazakhstan, records a deep history of human occupation spanning the Mesolithic to historical periods. Our research at Koken since 2019 has focused on an integrated habitation, rock art, and cemetery complex dating to the Bronze Age. We will present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Gaddis. Ariel Gruenthal-Rankin. Marissa Ramsier. Arkadiusz Koperkiewicz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The bioarchaeological analysis of trauma in skeletal remains provides insights into the lives and lifestyles of past populations. Conventionally, such analysis has focused on military-aged males, with less attention paid to other demographic groups. The late-medieval cemetery site at Bezławki, Poland, provides an opportunity for a relatively broad analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Tourigny.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Public pet cemeteries represent a relatively recent phenomenon in western European/North American societies. First appearing in the late 19th century in England, France and the United States, their numbers quickly expanded across these and other countries as people commemorated their non-human friends in new ways. The locations and organisation of these...