Title:
The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of death and burial / edited by Sarah Tarlow and Liv Nilsson Stutz.
Author:
Tarlow, Sarah, 1967- editor.
Stutz, Liv Nilsson, editor.
Publication Information:
Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2013.
©2013
Call Number:
GT3170 .O94 2013
Abstract:
The archaeology of death and burial provides a privileged source of insight into the lives of people in the past. This kind of archaeological feature commonly includes the material remains of the dead, containing biological information of age, sex, pathologies, DNA profiles, and isotopic signals of diet and migration. The analysis of burials also provides archaeological information about how the dead were treated as part of the mortuary ritual, which gives the archaeologist insight into ritual practice, belief, and emotional responses to death, and also speaks more generally about social relationships among the living including identity, gender, and social rank. This volume offers an introduction to all these dimensions of the archaeology of death and burial. Contributions range from historical overviews of several different significant traditions relating to burials in the history of the discipline of archaeology. Other chapters examine recent methodologies to retrieve and analyse biological information, and contemporary theoretical approaches to the study of central issues in our discipline such as the body, identity, gender, emotion, religion, and ritual. The volume has an international profile with contributions from leading scholars around the world, providing case studies from a range of different cultural contexts. The volume also recognizes the central place of ethical considerations in the excavation, analysis, and exhibition of human remains and ritual artefacts, and provides different perspectives on the ethical implications for any archaeologist working with this kind of material. -- Publisher website.
Edition:
First edition.
ISBN:
9780199569069
Series:
Oxford handbooks
Oxford handbooks.
Physical Description:
xix, 849 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm.
Contents:
Beautiful things and bones of desire : emerging issues in the archaeology of death and burial / Liv Nilsson Stutz and Sarah Tarlow -- Approaches to death and burial: Cultural history, race, and peoples / Adam Stout ; Did prehistoric man bury his dead? : early debates on Palaeolithic burials in a national context / Nathalie Richard ; Death, burial, and social representation / Robert Chapman ; Death and the cultural entanglements of the experienced, the learned, the expressed, the contested, and the imagined / Susan Kus -- The nature of the evidence: The bioarchaeology of health and well-being : its contribution to understanding the past / Charlotte Roberts ; The use of DNA analysis in the archaeology of death and burial / Barbara Bramanti ; Stable isotope analysis of humans / Gunilla Eriksson ; Cremation : excavation, analysis and interpretation of material from cremation-related contexts / Jacqueline I. McKinley ; Contextualizing grave goods : theoretical perspectives and methodological implications / Fredrik Ekengren -- The human experience of death across cultural contexts: Death, memory, and material culture : catalytic commemoration and the cremated dead / Howard Williams ; African perspectives on death, burial, and mortuary archaeology / David Edwards ; The place of veneration in early South Asian Buddhism / Lars Fogelin ; The archaeology of death and burial in the Islamic world / Andrew Petersen ; Burial of the Christian dead in the later Middle Ages / Deirdre O'Sullivan ; The unburied dead / Estella Weiss-Krejci ; Upper Palaeolithic mortuary practices in Eurasia : a critical look at the burial record / Julien Riel-Salvatore and Claudine Gravel-Miguel ; Power and society : Mesolithic Europe / Chantal Conneller ; Archaeological study of mortuary practices in the eastern United States / James Brown ; The living and the dead in later prehistoric Iberia / Robert Chapman ; The powerful dead of the Inca / Peter Kaulicke ; Land ownership and landscape belief : introduction and contexts / Joshua Wright ; Megaliths in north-west Europe : the cosmology of sacred landscapes / Magdalena S. Midgley ; Creating death : an archaeology of dying / John Robb ; Treating bodies : transformative and communicative practices / Alexander Gramsch ; Preserving the body / Melanie Giles ; Cremations in culture and cosmology / Terje Oestigaard ; Identities in transformation : identities, funerary rites, and the mortuary process / Chris Fowler ; Death and gender / Joanna Sofaer and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen ; Ancient identities : age, gender, and ethnicity in ancient Greek burials / Gillian Shepherd ; Ethnicity and gender in Roman funerary commemoration : case studies from the empire's frontiers / Maureen Carroll ; Engendering ancestors through death ritual in ancient China / Alice Yao ; Death, emotion, and the household among the late Moche / Erica Hill ; Belief and the archaeology of death / Sarah Tarlow ; Insights into early mortuary practices of Homo / Erella Hovers and Anna Belfer-Cohen ; Equipping and stripping the dead : a case study on the procurement, compilation, arrangement, and fragmentation of grave inventories in New Kingdom Thebes / Claudia Näser -- The ethics and politics of burial archaeology: 'Sapient trouble-tombs'? : archaeologists' moral obligations to the dead / Geoffrey Scarre ; Looting matters : early Bronze Age cemeteries of Jordan's southeast Dead Sea Plain in the past and present / Morag M. Kersel and Meredith S. Chesson ; How ancients become ammunition : politics and ethics of the human skeleton / Joe Watkins ; In search of others : the history and legacy of 'race' collections / Cressida Fforde ; Repatriation, reburial, and biological research in Australia : rhetoric and practice / Colin Pardoe ; The archaeology and material culture of modern military death / Layla Renshaw ; The exhumation of civilian victims of conflict and human rights abuses : political, ethical, and theoretical considerations / Layla Renshaw ; Contested burials : the dead as witnesses, victims, and tools / Liv Nilsson Stutz.
