Session: #522

Content:

Death is omnipresent because it is the end of life for all living creatures, but also because almost all History has been characterised by high mortality rates, which increase further during times of crisis and war. This has been experienced by collective identities and has forged a social memory that has been translated into ideologies and spiritual experiences to prepare us for the afterlife. It has also had a deep repercussion on urban and rural landscapes: the ways in which people died, grieved, were buried and remembered is a reflection, and a consequence, of society’s main characteristics. The Medieval Mediterranean provides a very interesting area for addressing these topics, since the Jewish, Islamic and Christian cultures developed different rituals and material expressions related to death and dying that have generated extremely wealthy archaeological evidences -cemeteries, types of tombs, grave goods, monuments, skeletal remains, etcetera. Deathscapes were frequently used uninterruptedly over time, which favours the historic-archaeological analysis of the origins, evolutions and consolidations or disappearance not only of rituals or topographies, but also of beliefs, behaviors and social practices.
We aim to explore the Medieval societies in the Mediterranean (5th to the 12th centuries) through all the aforementioned aspects, creating an opportunity to see larger changes and connections across traditional cultural divides. We would like to examine the materiality of death for a better understanding of the world of the living. This session welcomes papers that offer reflections on the individuals and their larger belonging communities and how they dealt with death; on inhumation rituals, on the role of necropolises as landscape organisers, on the topography of deathscapes and other material manifestations related to death, from monumental architectures and spaces to smaller domestic artefacts, and a large etcetera.

Session: #522

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