The Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains

Rebecca Gowland, Christopher Knusel

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781782972709
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Human bones form the most direct link to understanding how people lived in the past, who they were and where they came from. The interpretative value of human skeletal remains (within their burial context) in terms of past social identity and organisation is awesome, but was, for many years, underexploited by archaeologists. The nineteen papers in this edited volume are an attempt to redress this by marrying the cultural aspects of burial with the anthropology of the deceased.

Table of contents

• Table of contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The intrinsic pattern of preservation of human skeletons and its influence on the interpretation of funerary behaviours
• 2. Pattern in human burial practice
• 3. L’archéothanatologie ou l’archéologie de la mort (Archaeoethnoanatology or the Archaeology of Death)
• 4. Neolithic burial taphonomy, ritual, and interpretation in Britain and Ireland: a review
• 5. Cremation ... the cheap option?
• 6. Companions in death: the roles of animals in Anglo-Saxon and Viking cremation rituals in Britain
• 7. La Tène dietary variation in Central Europe: a stable isotope study of human skeletal remains from Bohemia
• 8. Immigrants on the Isle of Lewis – combining traditional funerary and modern isotope evidence to investigate social differentiation, migration and dietary change in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland
• 9. Ageing the past: examining age identity from funerary evidence
• 10. Gender, bioarchaeology and human ontogeny
• 11. The gendered skeleton: anthropological interpretations of the bony pelvis
• 12. The osteology of monasticism in Medieval England
• 13. Text, space and the evidence of human remains in English Late Medieval and Tudor disease culture: some problems and possibilities
• 14. ‘Of no more use to men than in ages before?’: the Investiture Contest as a model for funerary interpretation
• 15. Skeletal evidence and contexts of violence in the European Mesolithic and Neolithic
• 16. Beneath the façade: A skeletal model of domestic violence
• 17. Fragmentation of the body: comestibles, compost, or customary rite?
• 18. Altering identities: body modifications and the pre-Columbian Maya
• 19. The living dead and the dead living: burials, figurines and social performance in the European Mid Upper Palaeolithic
• Index