Changing Social Spatiality in Mounded Funerary Landscapes

Summary

Funerary landscapes, as places where all fractions of society meet to honour the rituals of social and identity-building importance, can be used to attain an insight into group-specific attitudes towards spatiality. These attitudes allowed for people's engagement with various elements of their environment as a means of deliberate creation of lasting ritual landscapes. However, social spatiality in funerary contexts is not static, but subject to changes in the group's perception of both their landscape and their dead. Fifteen recently discovered tumulus sites in the region of Županjska Posavina in Eastern Croatia represent a unique ritual landscape and offer evidence for these changes which took place at the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age. Ongoing excavations at one of these sites, Purić-Ljubanj, have shown that, while maintaining the most visible elements of the ritual during this period, the people have changed the inner architecture of the mounds and stopped the spreading of the cemetery by inserting the new mounds between the already existing ones. The results from these excavations may serve to determine how the reinterpretation of the ritual and the existing landscape may give rise to new forms of expression of local identity in prehistory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Global Perspectives on the Archaeology of Ritually Mounded Landscapes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14877