Necrontology: Housing the Dead in Precontact Labrador and Greenland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Conventional treatment of the dead varied substantially across the Inuit world. Bodies might be deposited in carefully constructed cairns next to settlements or more simply exposed on the land or sea ice. It also varied locally depending on understandings of the afterlife, how individuals were conceptualized in death, the circumstances of death, and the deceased’s relationships to the living, as appears to have been the case in precontact Labrador and Greenland. Although a boulder pile overlying a simple crypt is the most widespread form of mortuary treatment, distinctly house-like cairn morphologies occur, some are associated with detached caches of mortuary offerings, and their placement on the landscape varied substantially. Many are clustered in cemeteries close to settlements, but some are idiosyncratically situated on elevated outcrops or next to isolated ponds. If the manner of disposal of the dead speaks to an ontology of death and the afterlife – a "necrontology" - as archaeologists conventionally assume, then the Inuit version was clearly complex.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22802