Session: #95

Regular session

An abundance of Middle and Late Bronze Age burials has been excavated all over the Central and Eastern Mediterranean in the last decades and has widely increased our knowledge about burial types, material culture and their social dimensions. However, only recently excavations have focused more on the remains of social practices during and after burials, like treatments of the dead corpse, the use of fire even apart from cremation, or manipulations of burial goods and bones. It has become clear that especially in the case of collective burials like in the Aegean, burial practices were much more complex than just depositing the corpse: bones were broken, bodies mixed up, segregated, objects broken and reassembled, primary funerary sets were rearranged reflecting the intention to assign new meaning to the past. Every burial must be seen as a management and reconstitution of the past and the netherworld. Sophisticated fieldwork procedures based on geoarchaeology, spatial analysis, and cutting-edge scientific approaches in bioarchaeology and geochemistry, have been increasingly important for our understanding. Our session aims to bring together scholars working on second-millennium BCE burials in the Mediterranean, who integrate different approaches to unravel past social practices surrounding burials and their meanings, essential for the constitution of the community of the dead and the living.

Mediterranean Bronze Age, Burial practices, Multidisciplinary approaches

no

no

no

no

no

Elisabetta Borgna (Italy) ¹

Marco Bettelli (Italy) ²
Claudio Cavazzuti (Italy) ³
Ioanna Moutafi (Germany) ⁴
Philipp Stockhammer (Germany) ^4,5