Year: 2014
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: contexts have been studied in the past.The chapters that follow use evidence from across the region's societies-from Neolithic Turkey to Bronze Age Jordan, from ancient Egypt and Sudan to the Arabian Gulf and Mesopotamia.In each, authors bring at least two different, yet complementary, analytical techniques together to investigate how ancient Near Eastern societies remembered and commemorated the dead.While no chapter offers a perfect vision of collaboration, many demonstrate how teams of researchers with different skillsets-osteological analysis, faunal analysis, culture history and the analysis of written texts, and artifact analysis-offer ways to interpret ancient Near Eastern mortuary contexts in a richer and more robust light.This chapter prepares readers for the studies to follow, introducing key issues surrounding the investigation of death, memory, and commemoration in ancient Near Eastern mortuary contexts.The chapter begins with a brief survey of the segmented roles that mortuary archaeologists, osteologists, bioarchaeologists, and cultural historians have played in analyses.When these disciplinary genealogies are placed side by side, a clearer vision for intersecting interests and moments of collaboration becomes apparent.The discussion then examines how recent scholarship on social memory in the humanities and social sciences provides a framework for investigating practices of remembering and commemorating the dead in ancient Near Eastern societies.Mortuary contexts, structured depositions shaped by both conscious and unconscious intentions, are sites of memory and are the result of memory work.Different modes of mortuary analysis can shed light on aspects of memory work, whether it is osteological data that can reconstruct the osteobiography of the interred person, the material cultural analysis of objects, or historians and epigraphers building a cultural context around the interment event.This chapter concludes with an overview of the different chapters in this book, illustrating how each speaks to issues raised in broader discussions. INVESTIGATING MORTUARY CONTEXTS IN ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN SOCIETIES Mortuary ArchaeologyThe skewed emphases in the analysis of ancient Near Eastern mortuary contexts are explained by the fact that investigations have developed along distinct disciplinary trajectories that worked in relative isolation from each other.The most dominant trajectory has been mortuary archaeology, whose principal focus has concerned materials associated with the deceased, such as the objects interred with the body or the architectural design of tombs.A
Authors: Benjamin W. Porter, Alexis T. Boutin
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3139066364