What you see is what you believe: Mortuary Ideology and transmutations in Funerary Practice at the advent of the Xiongnu Empire in Mongolia.

Summary

This paper examines the intersection of mortuary ritual and beliefs, at the edge between funerary ideology and religion. The formation of the Xiongnu polity in the 3rd century BCE in what today is Mongolia included the introduction of new funerary regimes that conspicuously upended previous mortuary traditions. Xiongnu mortuary practice breaks a millennium-long convention of east-west orientation of funerary monuments and accompanying inhumations, the creation of visibly prominent and highly variable stone monuments, and a general low investment in grave-goods in the funerary assemblage. Instead, Xiongnu mortuary monuments are oriented north-south, are placed in areas with low visibility, shift the locus of material and labor investment, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to the funerary assemblage, and introduce marked standardization throughout the funerary repertoire, from monument form to the inclusion and placement of grave-goods. Here I question if Xiongnu mortuary practices represent the introduction of new religious ideas, and argue that they imply the strategic implementation of new ideational constellations that subvert the instantiation of commemorative narratives celebrating local lineages of leadership. While Xiongnu funerary repertoires may have referenced new cosmological beliefs, they above all stressed the adoption of, and inclusion in, a distinctively "Xiongnu" political economy.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Untangling the Intangible: Reconstructing Ideologies, Beliefs, and Religion in the Past

Keywords

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