Burning Questions: The Bronze Age Cremation Cemetery at Galda de Jos, Romania

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cremation is a process of fiery transformation. In a few short hours, a body is changed into a new substance – cremains – that people collect from the cooled pyre, and which can be split apart or reassembled, moved or kept, circulated or buried. By analyzing cremains, we can reconstruct multi-stage secondary mortuary practices and address questions of when, where, how, and by whom were the dead burned and buried. In this study, we present new analyses of cremains at Galda de Jos, Alba County, Romania. This cemetery was discovered and excavated as part of a highway construction project. Galda de Jos is the most recent example of Middle Bronze Age (Wietenberg culture) cremation cemeteries where people came together to bury cremains in urns. New radiocarbon dates provide insight into the establishment, use, and abandonment of this cemetery. We situate the Galda de Jos cremation cemetery within the broader Middle Bronze Age in Transylvania, a time of population aggregation, social segmentation, and socioeconomic transformation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53234