Food offerings and feasting in Bronze Age burial contexts from the Körös region, Hungary

Summary

While the collection and analysis of paleoethnobotanical material is increasingly common in settlement excavations, it still remains rare in burial contexts. Botanical material from cemeteries can provide important insights into mortuary practices and associative beliefs about the afterlife for investigated populations. Charred food remains may indicate food offerings or feasting around the burial site, as well as social inequality or aspects of the deceased’s personal identity. In the case of the Bronze Age cremations at Békés 103, the near-absence of preserved paleoethnobotanical material may indicate that the placement of food offerings on the pyre was not customary in the local culture, though rites involving uncharred food offerings or funerary feasts away from the burial site may have occurred. Alternatively, taphonomic processes could have affected the archaeobotanical assemblage. This study examines intra-site patterning to address this possibility as well as ritual variation within the cemetery. In addition, to aid in the interpretation of the charred seed remains that have been recovered, this study places Békés 103’s paleoethnobotanical material in comparison with similar assemblages from other European burial and prehistoric settlement contexts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Studying the Past with Fragments from the Fire: Student Research on an NSF-REU Field School

Keywords

Spatial Coverage