Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
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Funerary Practices, Funerary
Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
KIRSI O. LORENTZ
Abstract
Archaeologists have excavated mortuary contexts and the remains of the dead since
the beginning of activity within their discipline. The study of these remains has taken
place under different rubrics, including burial archaeology, mortuary archaeology,
archaeology of the dead, funerary archaeology, osteoarchaeology, human bioarchaeology, and archaeology of death. The study of mortuary contexts and accompanying
artifacts has largely taken place in separation from the study of the human remains.
Does the study of the remains of the dead, and the contexts within which these are
found, constitute an archaeology of death, or an archaeology of funerary remains,
as tacitly implied by the titles of numerous publications focusing on such remains?
Recently it has been claimed that we have never had an archaeology of death (Robb).
Indeed a search for published archaeological research focusing on the concept of
death, and the variation of conceptualizations of death in past societies, currently
produces scant results. Archaeological publications with titles that refer to funerary
remains tend to focus on selected aspect(s) of funerary practice, mostly those related
to the disposal of the dead, whether through burial or other means. If we take the
term funerary to mean that which pertains to funeral rites or burial, it is clear that
a wider range of evidence needs to be considered for a comprehensive funerary
archaeology to emerge. This essay focuses on the current status and future potential of archaeological research on funerary practices, contexts, and death. Calls for
bringing the human body, the corpse, and the skeleton into the center stage in studies of mortuary archaeology have already been made by many, and attempted by
a few. Key issues for future archaeological research on death and funerary practice
include ensuring a true research emphasis on past conceptualizations of death, considering a wider range of evidence pertaining to death and funerary practice (not
just burial or other body disposal contexts), and as necessitated by the latter, finding a way to successfully integrate research traditionally conducted within widely
different disciplinary realms.
INTRODUCTION
This essay considers the current status and future potential of archaeological research on funerary practices, contexts, and death. Most archaeological
work to date has worked with tacit definitions of death and funerary practice,
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
taking for granted that we all know what is meant by death and what funerary
refers to. Yet death is notoriously difficult to define even in modern medical
contexts: If we define death as the moment at which life ends, we soon run
into the lack of consensus on how to define life. If death is the cessation of
all biological functions that sustain a living organism then is a brain-dead
patient on life support successfully gestating a fetus (Miller, 2009) dead or
alive? Western historical attempts to define the exact moment of death have
relied on cessation of heartbeat and breathing but cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), life support technologies, organ transplants and pacemakers
rendered this definition problematic. Subsequently, the medical profession
has relied on permanent (vs transient) suspension of consciousness, as indicated by cessation of electrical activity in the brain. As archaeologists we do
not need to resolve the question of how to diagnose (the moment, or the process of) death in our own societies, but rather to strive to investigate how
different societies in the past may have defined and conceptualized death,
and how, and if these conceptualizations can be accessed through the material remains of those societies. Like for studies of gender, the basis for initiating truly challenging and fruitful archaeological research on death is to be
founded on the problematizing and (re)definitions of the concept of focus.
Archaeological publications with titles that refer to funerary remains tend
to focus on selected aspect(s) of funerary practice, mostly those related to
disposal of the dead, whether through burial or other means. Such focus is
practical in terms of the relatively straightforward identification of contexts
involving disposal of the dead, but highly selective and incomplete when
it comes to funerary practices as a whole. If we take the term funerary to
mean that which pertains to funeral rites or burial, it is clear that a wider
range of evidence needs to be considered for funerary archaeology. Funerary activity can be said to take place before, at and after death, the latter
including both activity taking place within the interval between death and
disposal of the dead, as well as activity after the disposal. Research focusing
on burial contexts with the aim to understand burial practices may perhaps
better be described as mortuary archaeology. Research on questions such as
what can grave goods tells us about, for example, long distance trade belongs
within economic archaeology. Like other kinds of archaeological remains and
contexts, burials and skeletal remains can be employed by archaeologists
to address questions within several different subdomains of archaeological
inquiry.
The broader significance of studying death and funerary practices within
archaeology could be said to be that understanding death is key to understanding life. Further, burials as a type of archeological find context are ubiquitous. Archaeologists have excavated mortuary contexts and the remains of
the dead since the beginning of activity within their discipline, amassing a
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
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substantial amount of data, finds and remains that need to be analyzed and
interpreted. While study of death and funerary practice cannot simply be
reduced to the study of burials, understanding death is key to interpretation
of burial contexts.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
In the absence of classic foundational research directly on the topic of death in
past societies (Robb, 2013, p. 441), or fully fledged investigations of the range
of funerary action, detailed studies of mortuary contexts and the artifacts
included within these can be seen as classic foundational research relevant
here. Scientific studies of archaeological human remains can also be included
within this broad category. The study of mortuary contexts and the remains
of the dead has taken place under different rubrics, including burial archaeology, mortuary archaeology, archaeology of the dead, funerary archaeology,
osteoarchaeology, human bioarchaeology, and archaeology of death. Studies
of the mortuary contexts and accompanying artifacts have largely taken place
in separation from the study of the human remains.
Some widely accepted findings (it is not possible to be exhaustive within the
limitations of space here) from these domains of research activity, practiced
separately, include the following, relating to understandings of the nature of
burials, of gender, and of the place of skeletal remains in our analyses.
1. Burials are not a direct reflection of society, but rather “the burial of the
dead is a powerful arena through which relationships of status, power,
and inequality in the living society can be structured” (Nilsson Stutz
& Tarlow, 2013, p. 8). Processual archaeologists (see, e.g., Binford, 1971;
Saxe, 1970; O’Shea, 1984; Brown, 1971) attempted to infer social organization of past societies from the archaeological burial record focusing on degree of elaboration of mortuary practices, land use, labor cost,
and other variables, followed by the post-processualist and neo-Marxist
focus on the role of mortuary practices in “constituting, negotiating, and
legitimating relationships of power and inequality” (Tarlow & Nilsson
Stutz, 2013, p. 8; Parker Pearson, 1999; Barrett, 1990; Chapman, 2013).
2. Gender cannot be assigned according to a binary, universal scheme on
the basis of grave goods, nor do these unambiguously reflect the lived
gender identity of the deceased. “Now a range of approaches focus on
the ways in which funerary rites help to construct gender as a social
variable and to structure gendered relationships throughout society”
(Tarlow & Nilsson Stutz, 2013, p. 11; Sofaer & Sorensen, 2013).
3. Osteological analyses of human skeletal remains have the potential to
contribute to mortuary analyses beyond the classic age and sex data,
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
with crucial information regarding the primary versus secondary nature
of burials, as well as other contextually relevant data (see, e.g., Gowland
& Knusel, 2006).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Perhaps the single most dramatic extension to classic foundational research,
as to moving forward with archaeological studies of death and funerary practice, are the calls for bringing the human body, the corpse and the skeleton into the center stage in studies of mortuary archaeology. While for an
observer outside the discipline it may seem obvious that the dead body and
its remains should have occupied a central place in research focusing on
contexts the very existence of which is dependent on the dead body, studies of burial and other disposal contexts for the dead have often sidelined,
if not completely overlooked human remains. Gowland and Knusel lament
the “long tradition in funerary archaeology of overlooking the skeletal evidence and privileging the objects as the focus of analysis” (2006, p. xi). The
traditional focus on human made material culture in burial contexts is also
challenged by the practitioners of “archaeothanatology,” and demands are
made to centralize the raison d’etre of burial contexts, the body (Duday, 2009,
p. 6). Until now, “the unfortunate impression that the deceased has been
placed as an offering to a ceramic vessel or to a flint projectile point, rather
than the other way round” (Duday, 2006, p. 30) often prevails when looking
at the relative importance afforded to the different components of burials in
publications.
Another domain within which advances have been made concerns the
understanding of what the find position of the excavated remains of the
bodies represents. Through positional analyses (e.g., Duday, 2009; Beckett
& Robb, 2006), analyses of intrinsic aspects of bone preservation (Bello &
Andrews, 2006), aspects of decomposition of the corpse (Duday, 2006), and
bone element representation within disposal contexts (Andrews & Bello,
2006) exciting advances are suggested allowing evidence-based inference
making regarding the original positioning of fleshed corpses in disposal
contexts (whether burial or other), and their potential subsequent manipulation following the original deposition, as opposed to displacement or loss
by taphonomic agents or animal disturbance. Such inferences are crucial for
the archaeology of funerary practice, allowing the investigation of the burial
context, and the position of human remains within it, as a dynamic system,
which changes through time. A large-scale application of standardized
methods of this kind has the potential to extend our understanding of
cultural variation in burial practices of the past.
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
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Cutting-edge writing that truly undercuts the bases on which the “archaeology of death,” has rested questions whether the study of the remains of the
dead, and the contexts within which these are found, constitute an archaeology of death. Recently it has been claimed that “in spite of a generation
of claims to the contrary, we have never had an “archaeology of death””
(Robb, 2013, p. 441). Indeed a search for published archaeological research
focusing on the concept of death, and the variation of conceptualizations of
death in past societies, currently produces scant results. While we have, as
a field, recovered “a staggering number of dead people” (ibid.) and developed theories for making sense of them (e.g., the Saxe–Binford hypothesis
and theories on collective burial, monuments, and memory) this does not
amount to “seriously theoriz[ing] death itself as an event or process” (ibid.).
Studying the remains of the dead, and the contexts within which they were
found, for insights into past social organization, ethnic affiliation, cultural
relationships, long distance trade and other aspects of past lives does not constitute an archaeology of death (ibid.), but belongs rather to other domains
of archaeological inquiry (Duday, 2009, p. 6).
Death remains a “straightforward” biological fact in our current archaeological writing. Robb makes the comparison between a potential archaeology of death and gender archaeology, thereby drawing attention to the need
to problematize the relationship between biology and culture when investigating such concepts. He goes on to state that “natural” processes … take
place within the social conditions of existence and in many ways are created
through an inseparable interplay of social action and biological potential or
response (Robb, 2013, p. 441; Sofaer, 2006). Death as a concept is far from
straightforward.
Does the study of the remains of the dead, and the contexts within which
these are found, constitute a funerary archaeology, or an archaeology of
funerary remains? As discussed above, there has been a selective focus on
burial contexts within publications the title of which incorporates the term
funerary archaeology. Evidence for funerary practices taking place before, at
and after death (including the time interval between death and the disposal
of the dead body, as well as following disposal) is hardly discussed currently.
While there are a number of papers focusing on evidence for funerary action
not just at the time of initial disposal, but also during the time following
the initial disposal of dead bodies (Chapman, 2010; Lorentz, 2014), it is a
rare paper that attempts to find evidence and make inferences regarding the
funerary practices and preparations taking place before death (save research
on Egyptian contexts), at death, and/or during the time interval between
death and the disposal of the body (save the extensive work on Egyptian
mummification, and some work on new world mummies).
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Arising from the points made so far within this essay we can begin discerning some of the key issues for future archaeological research on death and
funerary practice. While it would be challenging to be comprehensive in such
an effort, the remit from the editors of this collection of papers absolves the
authors from doing so. An agenda of important steps and questions for future
research should include at least the following: (i) a true research emphasis on past conceptualizations of death, and the management and cultural
elaboration of death; (ii) considering a wider range of evidence pertaining to
death and funerary practice (not just burial or other body disposal contexts),
and as necessitated by these, and (iii) finding a way to successfully integrate
research traditionally conducted within widely different disciplinary realms.
In order to proceed toward an archaeology of death we need to actively
focus on death, attitudes toward and conceptualizations of death, and the
management and cultural elaboration of death. Tarlow and Nilsson Stutz
(2013, p. 5) note “an increasing focus on understanding burials in recent
years, not only as a reflection of life, but also as the result of the human
encounter with death.” They maintain that such archaeological inquiries
have placed death at their center, exploring such dimensions as power,
ritual, the dead body, and emotion (ibid.). Whether, and if so when, coherent
theoretical and methodological frameworks for an archaeology of death
emerge from these and the directions Robb (2013) outlines remains to
be seen.
Researching death and attitudes toward it, its management and cultural
elaboration should not necessarily be restricted to focus on human death
only. Death occurs for animals, as well as for plants. Both of these kinds of
deaths have been culturally elaborated, as attested by ethnographies. Death
may also be seen to occur for material culture items. Full exploration of the
cultural conceptualization of death, past and present, requires focus not only
on human death, but also on the death of nonhuman entities. It should not
come as a surprise that much can be learned of a society’s attitudes toward
death in general through a scrutiny of evidence relating to death of other
beings than humans. While there seems yet to be no archaeological writing relating to the death of plant organisms, it is not inconceivable that the
death of, for example, large or communally significant trees would have been
elaborated on culturally. Relevant evidence on conceptualizations of death
as regards animals may include separate burials of animals, textual sources,
depictions, and remains of dead animals in contexts that are not related to
burial or subsistence. Hambleton advocates “taking a biographical approach
to the analysis and interpretation of animal remains, exploring the details of
the “life” of an animal’s remains after its death” (2013, p. 492).
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
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There is an emergent body of archaeological writing about death and animals, in comparison with and contextualized with human burial data. Losey
et al. link the mortuary treatment of animals (dogs and wolves) to the treatment of human dead, and argue that at death particular animals with specific
life histories required mortuary rites similar to those of their human counterparts (2011, p. 174). Burials of dogs within grave cuts of their own (and not
as inclusions to human burials) have been found in widely diverse ancient
societies in different parts of the world, ranging from fourth-century Athens,
to Early Neolithic Siberia, and to a Chribaya context in Peru (AD 900–1400).
A cat burial was found at Neolithic Parekklisha-Shillourokambos in Cyprus
(Vigne, Guilane, Debue, Haye, & Gerard, 2004). Changes in the treatment
of a wide variety of dead animals in ancient Egypt, through time, provides
an opportunity to explore not only sociocultural understandings of death in
particular cultural contexts, but also the question of how we as archaeologists should and could go about exploring conceptualizations of death in the
past. As in the case for humans, the evidence on which explorations of the
concept of death as regards animals in past societies can be based on is not
limited only to burial evidence, but should also include other contextual, textual (where available), and pictorial evidence, such as in the case of the death
of animals within Roman arenas (Lindstrom, 2010). If we accept that, as Hambleton (2013, p. 492) suggests, “the transition between the death of an animal
and the deposition of its remains” may involve “many changes in meaning
and identity, with parts of the animal taking on roles as commodities for consumption, economic, political or social currency, and as objects of functional
and/or symbolic importance,” what can this tell us about sociocultural concepts of death, and the death of (different species of) animals in particular?
Such questions remain unexplored, and may prove to be fruitful avenues of
exploration in the future.
Another aspect that can be explored when focusing on past conceptualizations of death is the death of material culture items, be it structures or
artifacts. Molloy et al. (2014, p. 307) refer to the death of a Bronze Age house
accompanied by decommissioning of household objects in an Early Minoan
site. Peltenburg (1991) discusses the destruction of a Cypriot Chalcolithic
ceramic house model and the accompanying anthropomorphic figurines
in similar terms. The intentional manipulation, destruction, and burial of
anthropomorphic cruciform picrolite figurines in Chalcolithic Cyprus (Goring, 1992) can also be seen as actions possibly relating to the “death” of these
artifacts. Ethnographies illustrate how it is possible for items of material
culture to die. It is necessary to scrutiny the contextual archaeological record
for potential evidence of such concepts—decommissioning, destruction,
modification, and (burial) treatment in similar ways to human or animal
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
dead may give clues to allow their identification in contexts without texts or
sufficiently detailed depictions.
While the focus of archaeological funerary studies has indeed been
grossly incomplete without the proper integration of human skeletal
studies (Gowland & Knusel, 2006)—a phenomenon hopefully soon of the
past—archaeological studies of funerary practice can be seen to suffer from
another kind of exclusion also: their standard focus on reconstructing the
practices relating to the disposal of the dead, rather than considering all
possible evidence for the full range of funerary behavior (including funerary
actions taken before and at death, and between death and disposal, as well
as following disposal). The use of the term funerary has been very narrow,
excluding all but the obvious data sources: human remains and burial
contexts. Instead, future studies in funerary archaeology should set out to
evaluate what other kinds of evidence there might be for a fuller range of
funerary behavior. This may admittedly be easier in archaeological contexts
with text or depictions, but this should not mean that funerary archaeology
can simply abandon all effort to look beyond burials. The disposal of the
body, be it through burial or otherwise, is only a part of the succession of
events and processes involved in funerary practices. A potential starting
point for exploring the range of different kind of material remains that may
result from funerary ritual at different points in the succession of events
and funerary action is to scrutinize existing ethnographies for relevant
information, in combination with the extensive writing on death within
anthropology and other disciplines—or better still, instigate a program of
collaborative research with social or cultural anthropologists, ensuring that
data relevant to funerary material culture and physical remains of funerary
action is both observed and recorded in required detail and in context. Such
information can serve in extending our imaginations as to what aspects of
the material remains in the archaeological record may be relevant to the
exploration of funerary practices, and how material culture forms an active
part of funerary practices—or at the very least make us aware of the scale of
what we are unable to retrieve.
Finding a way to successfully integrate research traditionally conducted
within widely different disciplinary realms, pertinent to the exploration of
death and funerary practice in the past, may not be easy as it is not simply
a question of collaboration of different specialists working on different
kinds of source data, but rather necessitates an active desire to venture
over disciplinary divides and engage in building theoretical frameworks
and methodologies. This requires archaeologists, human bioarchaeologists
and other human remains specialists, social and cultural anthropologists,
sociologists of death, historians and art historians, zooarchaeologists,
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
9
archaeobotanists, and philosophers focusing on death, willing to collaborate, and most importantly of all, willing to communicate and translate
across disciplinary divides, and to find ways to resolve issues with different
terminologies and disciplinary prioritizations. Disciplinary fields have their
own conferences, journals and other fora of dissemination and discussion—
creating new fora within which discussions on integrated research on death
and funerary practice could take place frequently enough and with critical
mass, would be costly. Challenges as to successfully engaging with such
research in the future also include reaching a better understanding of death
(and life) in our own society, and scrutinizing how our own concepts of
death and funerary practice may tint or even discolor the images we so
painstakingly set out build of the past.
Scope and scale of the required studies for an archaeology of death to begin
emerging therefore varies from the ontological exploration of death and life
in our own societies to bring better awareness of our own starting points as
researchers, to large-scale, fully interdisciplinary, and better still, integrated
studies of conceptualizations of death in a wide range of past societies
(based on detailed individual studies of each) from different periods and
geographical settings. For funerary archaeology, both small-scale (context
and site specific) and large-scale (landscape, regional, and chronological
approaches, building on the small scale) studies should be undertaken,
with focus on exploring the full range of funerary practice and its material
remains. The magnitude of the required resources, in both time and funds,
is substantial.
It is possible to envisage that one of the key debates to emerge will focus on
the efforts to construct a consistent body of theory, as well as systematic methods, for investigating death in past societies. As regards research on funerary
practices, debates focusing on whether or not we can hope to recover and/or
identify evidence for funerary practices other than disposal (e.g., burial) contexts in archaeological settings with no textual evidence are likely to emerge.
The search for evidence for the full range of funerary practices and ritual
requires a probing approach specific for each context. What is available as
relevant evidence in one place may be absent in another.
Further issues driving debate forward may involve questions such as how
to investigate change in conceptualizations of death, how to approach the
interplay of the ideal versus reality in terms of funerary action (negotiations
of cultural ideals of death and ideal funerary processes in the form of actual
processes and events that took place), and how to investigate these phenomena materially through the archaeological record.
Methods of archaeothanatology (highly detailed observation of human
remains and their relation to each other, their position within the disposal
context and in relation to any anthropogenic feature, such as a tomb cut,
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
undertaken in the field) have been deemed too time consuming by some at
this age of restrictions on the timeline available for excavation (Cannon, 2007,
p. 252)—digital recording through, for example, 3D laser scanning in the
field could be explored to see whether such a technological approach would
provide a timeline advantage, as well as an opportunity for post-excavation
comparisons with other contexts at a level previously not feasible.
The emerging issues from archaeological exploration of conceptualizations
of death and funerary practices will likely have relevance to several different
subdomains of archaeology, including the archaeologies of body, gender and
age, as well as archaeologies of the individual, personhood, and cosmology,
to mention just a few. As understanding death involves understanding life,
archaeology of death, when and if it truly emerges, will inform many aspects
of archaeologies dealing with a variety of facets of life. It may also reasonably
be expected that any advances and debates within the emerging archaeology of death, and a newly expanded funerary archaeology, will have relevance to anthropology, sociology, and history of death, dying, and funerary
practice.
In conclusion, although the terms funerary archaeology and archaeology of
death have been around for quite some time now, they are yet to emerge in a
truly comprehensive manner, especially so for the latter—a full exploration
of death in all its variety in ancient societies encompasses much more than
analyzing the remains of dead humans and the material culture that accompanies them. To begin on the road toward understanding the vast variety
in human conceptualization and approaches to death in the past, we need to
explore the variety in human conceptualizations and approaches to life in the
past—the life and death of humans, but also of animals, plants, and material
culture.
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Saxe, A. A. (1970). Social dimensions of mortuary practices (Doctoral dissertation). University of Michigan.
Sofaer, J., & Sorensen, M. L. S. (2013). Death and gender. In S. Tarlow & L. Nilsson
Stutz (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of death and burial (pp. 527–541).
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Sofaer, J. (2006). The body as material culture: A theoretical osteoarchaeology. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Vigne, J.-D., Guilane, J., Debue, K., Haye, L., & Gerard, P. (2004). Early taming of the
cat in Cyprus. Science, 304(5668), 259.
FURTHER READING
Ariès, P. (1974). Western attitudes toward death: From the Middle Ages to the present.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bloch, M., & Parry, J. P. (1982). Death and the regeneration of life. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Duday, H. (2009). The archaeology of the dead: Lectures in archaeothanatology. Oxford,
England: Oxbow Books.
Gowland, R., & Knusel, C. (2006). Social archaeology of funerary remains. Oxford, England: Oxbow Books.
Metcalf, P., & Huntington, R. (1991). Celebrations of death: The anthropology of mortuary
ritual (2nd revised edn). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Parker Pearson, M. (1999). The archaeology of death and burial. Stroud, England: Sutton
Publishing.
Robb, J., & Harris, O. J. T. (2013). The body in history: Europe from the palaeolithic to the
future. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Tarlow, S., & Nilsson Stutz, L. (Eds.) (2013). The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of
death and burial. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
KIRSI O. LORENTZ SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Kirsi O. Lorentz is Assistant Professor at the Cyprus Institute and
its Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center (STARC),
having previously held a faculty position at Newcastle University. She
received her doctorate from University of Cambridge (Trinity College).
Her research focuses on human bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology,
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
13
and archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. She has
conducted fieldwork in Cyprus, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Turkey, and other parts
of the world.
http://www.cyi.ac.cy/index.php/starc/about-the-center/starc-ourpeople/itemlist/user/88-kirsi-lorentz.html
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-
Funerary Practices, Funerary
Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
KIRSI O. LORENTZ
Abstract
Archaeologists have excavated mortuary contexts and the remains of the dead since
the beginning of activity within their discipline. The study of these remains has taken
place under different rubrics, including burial archaeology, mortuary archaeology,
archaeology of the dead, funerary archaeology, osteoarchaeology, human bioarchaeology, and archaeology of death. The study of mortuary contexts and accompanying
artifacts has largely taken place in separation from the study of the human remains.
Does the study of the remains of the dead, and the contexts within which these are
found, constitute an archaeology of death, or an archaeology of funerary remains,
as tacitly implied by the titles of numerous publications focusing on such remains?
Recently it has been claimed that we have never had an archaeology of death (Robb).
Indeed a search for published archaeological research focusing on the concept of
death, and the variation of conceptualizations of death in past societies, currently
produces scant results. Archaeological publications with titles that refer to funerary
remains tend to focus on selected aspect(s) of funerary practice, mostly those related
to the disposal of the dead, whether through burial or other means. If we take the
term funerary to mean that which pertains to funeral rites or burial, it is clear that
a wider range of evidence needs to be considered for a comprehensive funerary
archaeology to emerge. This essay focuses on the current status and future potential of archaeological research on funerary practices, contexts, and death. Calls for
bringing the human body, the corpse, and the skeleton into the center stage in studies of mortuary archaeology have already been made by many, and attempted by
a few. Key issues for future archaeological research on death and funerary practice
include ensuring a true research emphasis on past conceptualizations of death, considering a wider range of evidence pertaining to death and funerary practice (not
just burial or other body disposal contexts), and as necessitated by the latter, finding a way to successfully integrate research traditionally conducted within widely
different disciplinary realms.
INTRODUCTION
This essay considers the current status and future potential of archaeological research on funerary practices, contexts, and death. Most archaeological
work to date has worked with tacit definitions of death and funerary practice,
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
taking for granted that we all know what is meant by death and what funerary
refers to. Yet death is notoriously difficult to define even in modern medical
contexts: If we define death as the moment at which life ends, we soon run
into the lack of consensus on how to define life. If death is the cessation of
all biological functions that sustain a living organism then is a brain-dead
patient on life support successfully gestating a fetus (Miller, 2009) dead or
alive? Western historical attempts to define the exact moment of death have
relied on cessation of heartbeat and breathing but cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), life support technologies, organ transplants and pacemakers
rendered this definition problematic. Subsequently, the medical profession
has relied on permanent (vs transient) suspension of consciousness, as indicated by cessation of electrical activity in the brain. As archaeologists we do
not need to resolve the question of how to diagnose (the moment, or the process of) death in our own societies, but rather to strive to investigate how
different societies in the past may have defined and conceptualized death,
and how, and if these conceptualizations can be accessed through the material remains of those societies. Like for studies of gender, the basis for initiating truly challenging and fruitful archaeological research on death is to be
founded on the problematizing and (re)definitions of the concept of focus.
Archaeological publications with titles that refer to funerary remains tend
to focus on selected aspect(s) of funerary practice, mostly those related to
disposal of the dead, whether through burial or other means. Such focus is
practical in terms of the relatively straightforward identification of contexts
involving disposal of the dead, but highly selective and incomplete when
it comes to funerary practices as a whole. If we take the term funerary to
mean that which pertains to funeral rites or burial, it is clear that a wider
range of evidence needs to be considered for funerary archaeology. Funerary activity can be said to take place before, at and after death, the latter
including both activity taking place within the interval between death and
disposal of the dead, as well as activity after the disposal. Research focusing
on burial contexts with the aim to understand burial practices may perhaps
better be described as mortuary archaeology. Research on questions such as
what can grave goods tells us about, for example, long distance trade belongs
within economic archaeology. Like other kinds of archaeological remains and
contexts, burials and skeletal remains can be employed by archaeologists
to address questions within several different subdomains of archaeological
inquiry.
The broader significance of studying death and funerary practices within
archaeology could be said to be that understanding death is key to understanding life. Further, burials as a type of archeological find context are ubiquitous. Archaeologists have excavated mortuary contexts and the remains of
the dead since the beginning of activity within their discipline, amassing a
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
3
substantial amount of data, finds and remains that need to be analyzed and
interpreted. While study of death and funerary practice cannot simply be
reduced to the study of burials, understanding death is key to interpretation
of burial contexts.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
In the absence of classic foundational research directly on the topic of death in
past societies (Robb, 2013, p. 441), or fully fledged investigations of the range
of funerary action, detailed studies of mortuary contexts and the artifacts
included within these can be seen as classic foundational research relevant
here. Scientific studies of archaeological human remains can also be included
within this broad category. The study of mortuary contexts and the remains
of the dead has taken place under different rubrics, including burial archaeology, mortuary archaeology, archaeology of the dead, funerary archaeology,
osteoarchaeology, human bioarchaeology, and archaeology of death. Studies
of the mortuary contexts and accompanying artifacts have largely taken place
in separation from the study of the human remains.
Some widely accepted findings (it is not possible to be exhaustive within the
limitations of space here) from these domains of research activity, practiced
separately, include the following, relating to understandings of the nature of
burials, of gender, and of the place of skeletal remains in our analyses.
1. Burials are not a direct reflection of society, but rather “the burial of the
dead is a powerful arena through which relationships of status, power,
and inequality in the living society can be structured” (Nilsson Stutz
& Tarlow, 2013, p. 8). Processual archaeologists (see, e.g., Binford, 1971;
Saxe, 1970; O’Shea, 1984; Brown, 1971) attempted to infer social organization of past societies from the archaeological burial record focusing on degree of elaboration of mortuary practices, land use, labor cost,
and other variables, followed by the post-processualist and neo-Marxist
focus on the role of mortuary practices in “constituting, negotiating, and
legitimating relationships of power and inequality” (Tarlow & Nilsson
Stutz, 2013, p. 8; Parker Pearson, 1999; Barrett, 1990; Chapman, 2013).
2. Gender cannot be assigned according to a binary, universal scheme on
the basis of grave goods, nor do these unambiguously reflect the lived
gender identity of the deceased. “Now a range of approaches focus on
the ways in which funerary rites help to construct gender as a social
variable and to structure gendered relationships throughout society”
(Tarlow & Nilsson Stutz, 2013, p. 11; Sofaer & Sorensen, 2013).
3. Osteological analyses of human skeletal remains have the potential to
contribute to mortuary analyses beyond the classic age and sex data,
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
with crucial information regarding the primary versus secondary nature
of burials, as well as other contextually relevant data (see, e.g., Gowland
& Knusel, 2006).
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Perhaps the single most dramatic extension to classic foundational research,
as to moving forward with archaeological studies of death and funerary practice, are the calls for bringing the human body, the corpse and the skeleton into the center stage in studies of mortuary archaeology. While for an
observer outside the discipline it may seem obvious that the dead body and
its remains should have occupied a central place in research focusing on
contexts the very existence of which is dependent on the dead body, studies of burial and other disposal contexts for the dead have often sidelined,
if not completely overlooked human remains. Gowland and Knusel lament
the “long tradition in funerary archaeology of overlooking the skeletal evidence and privileging the objects as the focus of analysis” (2006, p. xi). The
traditional focus on human made material culture in burial contexts is also
challenged by the practitioners of “archaeothanatology,” and demands are
made to centralize the raison d’etre of burial contexts, the body (Duday, 2009,
p. 6). Until now, “the unfortunate impression that the deceased has been
placed as an offering to a ceramic vessel or to a flint projectile point, rather
than the other way round” (Duday, 2006, p. 30) often prevails when looking
at the relative importance afforded to the different components of burials in
publications.
Another domain within which advances have been made concerns the
understanding of what the find position of the excavated remains of the
bodies represents. Through positional analyses (e.g., Duday, 2009; Beckett
& Robb, 2006), analyses of intrinsic aspects of bone preservation (Bello &
Andrews, 2006), aspects of decomposition of the corpse (Duday, 2006), and
bone element representation within disposal contexts (Andrews & Bello,
2006) exciting advances are suggested allowing evidence-based inference
making regarding the original positioning of fleshed corpses in disposal
contexts (whether burial or other), and their potential subsequent manipulation following the original deposition, as opposed to displacement or loss
by taphonomic agents or animal disturbance. Such inferences are crucial for
the archaeology of funerary practice, allowing the investigation of the burial
context, and the position of human remains within it, as a dynamic system,
which changes through time. A large-scale application of standardized
methods of this kind has the potential to extend our understanding of
cultural variation in burial practices of the past.
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
5
Cutting-edge writing that truly undercuts the bases on which the “archaeology of death,” has rested questions whether the study of the remains of the
dead, and the contexts within which these are found, constitute an archaeology of death. Recently it has been claimed that “in spite of a generation
of claims to the contrary, we have never had an “archaeology of death””
(Robb, 2013, p. 441). Indeed a search for published archaeological research
focusing on the concept of death, and the variation of conceptualizations of
death in past societies, currently produces scant results. While we have, as
a field, recovered “a staggering number of dead people” (ibid.) and developed theories for making sense of them (e.g., the Saxe–Binford hypothesis
and theories on collective burial, monuments, and memory) this does not
amount to “seriously theoriz[ing] death itself as an event or process” (ibid.).
Studying the remains of the dead, and the contexts within which they were
found, for insights into past social organization, ethnic affiliation, cultural
relationships, long distance trade and other aspects of past lives does not constitute an archaeology of death (ibid.), but belongs rather to other domains
of archaeological inquiry (Duday, 2009, p. 6).
Death remains a “straightforward” biological fact in our current archaeological writing. Robb makes the comparison between a potential archaeology of death and gender archaeology, thereby drawing attention to the need
to problematize the relationship between biology and culture when investigating such concepts. He goes on to state that “natural” processes … take
place within the social conditions of existence and in many ways are created
through an inseparable interplay of social action and biological potential or
response (Robb, 2013, p. 441; Sofaer, 2006). Death as a concept is far from
straightforward.
Does the study of the remains of the dead, and the contexts within which
these are found, constitute a funerary archaeology, or an archaeology of
funerary remains? As discussed above, there has been a selective focus on
burial contexts within publications the title of which incorporates the term
funerary archaeology. Evidence for funerary practices taking place before, at
and after death (including the time interval between death and the disposal
of the dead body, as well as following disposal) is hardly discussed currently.
While there are a number of papers focusing on evidence for funerary action
not just at the time of initial disposal, but also during the time following
the initial disposal of dead bodies (Chapman, 2010; Lorentz, 2014), it is a
rare paper that attempts to find evidence and make inferences regarding the
funerary practices and preparations taking place before death (save research
on Egyptian contexts), at death, and/or during the time interval between
death and the disposal of the body (save the extensive work on Egyptian
mummification, and some work on new world mummies).
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Arising from the points made so far within this essay we can begin discerning some of the key issues for future archaeological research on death and
funerary practice. While it would be challenging to be comprehensive in such
an effort, the remit from the editors of this collection of papers absolves the
authors from doing so. An agenda of important steps and questions for future
research should include at least the following: (i) a true research emphasis on past conceptualizations of death, and the management and cultural
elaboration of death; (ii) considering a wider range of evidence pertaining to
death and funerary practice (not just burial or other body disposal contexts),
and as necessitated by these, and (iii) finding a way to successfully integrate
research traditionally conducted within widely different disciplinary realms.
In order to proceed toward an archaeology of death we need to actively
focus on death, attitudes toward and conceptualizations of death, and the
management and cultural elaboration of death. Tarlow and Nilsson Stutz
(2013, p. 5) note “an increasing focus on understanding burials in recent
years, not only as a reflection of life, but also as the result of the human
encounter with death.” They maintain that such archaeological inquiries
have placed death at their center, exploring such dimensions as power,
ritual, the dead body, and emotion (ibid.). Whether, and if so when, coherent
theoretical and methodological frameworks for an archaeology of death
emerge from these and the directions Robb (2013) outlines remains to
be seen.
Researching death and attitudes toward it, its management and cultural
elaboration should not necessarily be restricted to focus on human death
only. Death occurs for animals, as well as for plants. Both of these kinds of
deaths have been culturally elaborated, as attested by ethnographies. Death
may also be seen to occur for material culture items. Full exploration of the
cultural conceptualization of death, past and present, requires focus not only
on human death, but also on the death of nonhuman entities. It should not
come as a surprise that much can be learned of a society’s attitudes toward
death in general through a scrutiny of evidence relating to death of other
beings than humans. While there seems yet to be no archaeological writing relating to the death of plant organisms, it is not inconceivable that the
death of, for example, large or communally significant trees would have been
elaborated on culturally. Relevant evidence on conceptualizations of death
as regards animals may include separate burials of animals, textual sources,
depictions, and remains of dead animals in contexts that are not related to
burial or subsistence. Hambleton advocates “taking a biographical approach
to the analysis and interpretation of animal remains, exploring the details of
the “life” of an animal’s remains after its death” (2013, p. 492).
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
7
There is an emergent body of archaeological writing about death and animals, in comparison with and contextualized with human burial data. Losey
et al. link the mortuary treatment of animals (dogs and wolves) to the treatment of human dead, and argue that at death particular animals with specific
life histories required mortuary rites similar to those of their human counterparts (2011, p. 174). Burials of dogs within grave cuts of their own (and not
as inclusions to human burials) have been found in widely diverse ancient
societies in different parts of the world, ranging from fourth-century Athens,
to Early Neolithic Siberia, and to a Chribaya context in Peru (AD 900–1400).
A cat burial was found at Neolithic Parekklisha-Shillourokambos in Cyprus
(Vigne, Guilane, Debue, Haye, & Gerard, 2004). Changes in the treatment
of a wide variety of dead animals in ancient Egypt, through time, provides
an opportunity to explore not only sociocultural understandings of death in
particular cultural contexts, but also the question of how we as archaeologists should and could go about exploring conceptualizations of death in the
past. As in the case for humans, the evidence on which explorations of the
concept of death as regards animals in past societies can be based on is not
limited only to burial evidence, but should also include other contextual, textual (where available), and pictorial evidence, such as in the case of the death
of animals within Roman arenas (Lindstrom, 2010). If we accept that, as Hambleton (2013, p. 492) suggests, “the transition between the death of an animal
and the deposition of its remains” may involve “many changes in meaning
and identity, with parts of the animal taking on roles as commodities for consumption, economic, political or social currency, and as objects of functional
and/or symbolic importance,” what can this tell us about sociocultural concepts of death, and the death of (different species of) animals in particular?
Such questions remain unexplored, and may prove to be fruitful avenues of
exploration in the future.
Another aspect that can be explored when focusing on past conceptualizations of death is the death of material culture items, be it structures or
artifacts. Molloy et al. (2014, p. 307) refer to the death of a Bronze Age house
accompanied by decommissioning of household objects in an Early Minoan
site. Peltenburg (1991) discusses the destruction of a Cypriot Chalcolithic
ceramic house model and the accompanying anthropomorphic figurines
in similar terms. The intentional manipulation, destruction, and burial of
anthropomorphic cruciform picrolite figurines in Chalcolithic Cyprus (Goring, 1992) can also be seen as actions possibly relating to the “death” of these
artifacts. Ethnographies illustrate how it is possible for items of material
culture to die. It is necessary to scrutiny the contextual archaeological record
for potential evidence of such concepts—decommissioning, destruction,
modification, and (burial) treatment in similar ways to human or animal
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
dead may give clues to allow their identification in contexts without texts or
sufficiently detailed depictions.
While the focus of archaeological funerary studies has indeed been
grossly incomplete without the proper integration of human skeletal
studies (Gowland & Knusel, 2006)—a phenomenon hopefully soon of the
past—archaeological studies of funerary practice can be seen to suffer from
another kind of exclusion also: their standard focus on reconstructing the
practices relating to the disposal of the dead, rather than considering all
possible evidence for the full range of funerary behavior (including funerary
actions taken before and at death, and between death and disposal, as well
as following disposal). The use of the term funerary has been very narrow,
excluding all but the obvious data sources: human remains and burial
contexts. Instead, future studies in funerary archaeology should set out to
evaluate what other kinds of evidence there might be for a fuller range of
funerary behavior. This may admittedly be easier in archaeological contexts
with text or depictions, but this should not mean that funerary archaeology
can simply abandon all effort to look beyond burials. The disposal of the
body, be it through burial or otherwise, is only a part of the succession of
events and processes involved in funerary practices. A potential starting
point for exploring the range of different kind of material remains that may
result from funerary ritual at different points in the succession of events
and funerary action is to scrutinize existing ethnographies for relevant
information, in combination with the extensive writing on death within
anthropology and other disciplines—or better still, instigate a program of
collaborative research with social or cultural anthropologists, ensuring that
data relevant to funerary material culture and physical remains of funerary
action is both observed and recorded in required detail and in context. Such
information can serve in extending our imaginations as to what aspects of
the material remains in the archaeological record may be relevant to the
exploration of funerary practices, and how material culture forms an active
part of funerary practices—or at the very least make us aware of the scale of
what we are unable to retrieve.
Finding a way to successfully integrate research traditionally conducted
within widely different disciplinary realms, pertinent to the exploration of
death and funerary practice in the past, may not be easy as it is not simply
a question of collaboration of different specialists working on different
kinds of source data, but rather necessitates an active desire to venture
over disciplinary divides and engage in building theoretical frameworks
and methodologies. This requires archaeologists, human bioarchaeologists
and other human remains specialists, social and cultural anthropologists,
sociologists of death, historians and art historians, zooarchaeologists,
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
9
archaeobotanists, and philosophers focusing on death, willing to collaborate, and most importantly of all, willing to communicate and translate
across disciplinary divides, and to find ways to resolve issues with different
terminologies and disciplinary prioritizations. Disciplinary fields have their
own conferences, journals and other fora of dissemination and discussion—
creating new fora within which discussions on integrated research on death
and funerary practice could take place frequently enough and with critical
mass, would be costly. Challenges as to successfully engaging with such
research in the future also include reaching a better understanding of death
(and life) in our own society, and scrutinizing how our own concepts of
death and funerary practice may tint or even discolor the images we so
painstakingly set out build of the past.
Scope and scale of the required studies for an archaeology of death to begin
emerging therefore varies from the ontological exploration of death and life
in our own societies to bring better awareness of our own starting points as
researchers, to large-scale, fully interdisciplinary, and better still, integrated
studies of conceptualizations of death in a wide range of past societies
(based on detailed individual studies of each) from different periods and
geographical settings. For funerary archaeology, both small-scale (context
and site specific) and large-scale (landscape, regional, and chronological
approaches, building on the small scale) studies should be undertaken,
with focus on exploring the full range of funerary practice and its material
remains. The magnitude of the required resources, in both time and funds,
is substantial.
It is possible to envisage that one of the key debates to emerge will focus on
the efforts to construct a consistent body of theory, as well as systematic methods, for investigating death in past societies. As regards research on funerary
practices, debates focusing on whether or not we can hope to recover and/or
identify evidence for funerary practices other than disposal (e.g., burial) contexts in archaeological settings with no textual evidence are likely to emerge.
The search for evidence for the full range of funerary practices and ritual
requires a probing approach specific for each context. What is available as
relevant evidence in one place may be absent in another.
Further issues driving debate forward may involve questions such as how
to investigate change in conceptualizations of death, how to approach the
interplay of the ideal versus reality in terms of funerary action (negotiations
of cultural ideals of death and ideal funerary processes in the form of actual
processes and events that took place), and how to investigate these phenomena materially through the archaeological record.
Methods of archaeothanatology (highly detailed observation of human
remains and their relation to each other, their position within the disposal
context and in relation to any anthropogenic feature, such as a tomb cut,
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
undertaken in the field) have been deemed too time consuming by some at
this age of restrictions on the timeline available for excavation (Cannon, 2007,
p. 252)—digital recording through, for example, 3D laser scanning in the
field could be explored to see whether such a technological approach would
provide a timeline advantage, as well as an opportunity for post-excavation
comparisons with other contexts at a level previously not feasible.
The emerging issues from archaeological exploration of conceptualizations
of death and funerary practices will likely have relevance to several different
subdomains of archaeology, including the archaeologies of body, gender and
age, as well as archaeologies of the individual, personhood, and cosmology,
to mention just a few. As understanding death involves understanding life,
archaeology of death, when and if it truly emerges, will inform many aspects
of archaeologies dealing with a variety of facets of life. It may also reasonably
be expected that any advances and debates within the emerging archaeology of death, and a newly expanded funerary archaeology, will have relevance to anthropology, sociology, and history of death, dying, and funerary
practice.
In conclusion, although the terms funerary archaeology and archaeology of
death have been around for quite some time now, they are yet to emerge in a
truly comprehensive manner, especially so for the latter—a full exploration
of death in all its variety in ancient societies encompasses much more than
analyzing the remains of dead humans and the material culture that accompanies them. To begin on the road toward understanding the vast variety
in human conceptualization and approaches to death in the past, we need to
explore the variety in human conceptualizations and approaches to life in the
past—the life and death of humans, but also of animals, plants, and material
culture.
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Goring, E. (1992). Secondary treatment of prehistoric figurines: An example from
chalcolithic cyprus. In G. K. Ioannides (Ed.), Studies in honour of Vassos Karageorghis
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Gowland, R., & Knusel, C. (2006). Introduction. In R. Gowland & C. Knusel (Eds.),
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Nilsson Stutz, L., & Tarlow, S. (2013). Beautiful things and bones of desire: Emerging
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NY: Academic Press.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Parker Pearson, M. (1999). The archaeology of death and burial. Stroud, England: Sutton
Publishing.
Peltenburg, E. (1991). Lemba archaeological project 11.2: A ceremonial area at Kissonerga.
Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology. (pp. 70–73). Gothenburg, Sweden: Paul
Astroms Forlag.
Robb, J. (2013). Creating death: An archaeology of dying. In S. Tarlow & L. Nilsson
Stutz (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of death and burial (pp. 441–457).
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Saxe, A. A. (1970). Social dimensions of mortuary practices (Doctoral dissertation). University of Michigan.
Sofaer, J., & Sorensen, M. L. S. (2013). Death and gender. In S. Tarlow & L. Nilsson
Stutz (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of death and burial (pp. 527–541).
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Sofaer, J. (2006). The body as material culture: A theoretical osteoarchaeology. Cambridge,
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cat in Cyprus. Science, 304(5668), 259.
FURTHER READING
Ariès, P. (1974). Western attitudes toward death: From the Middle Ages to the present.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bloch, M., & Parry, J. P. (1982). Death and the regeneration of life. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Duday, H. (2009). The archaeology of the dead: Lectures in archaeothanatology. Oxford,
England: Oxbow Books.
Gowland, R., & Knusel, C. (2006). Social archaeology of funerary remains. Oxford, England: Oxbow Books.
Metcalf, P., & Huntington, R. (1991). Celebrations of death: The anthropology of mortuary
ritual (2nd revised edn). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Parker Pearson, M. (1999). The archaeology of death and burial. Stroud, England: Sutton
Publishing.
Robb, J., & Harris, O. J. T. (2013). The body in history: Europe from the palaeolithic to the
future. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Tarlow, S., & Nilsson Stutz, L. (Eds.) (2013). The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of
death and burial. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
KIRSI O. LORENTZ SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Kirsi O. Lorentz is Assistant Professor at the Cyprus Institute and
its Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center (STARC),
having previously held a faculty position at Newcastle University. She
received her doctorate from University of Cambridge (Trinity College).
Her research focuses on human bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology,
Funerary Practices, Funerary Contexts, and Death in Archaeology
13
and archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. She has
conducted fieldwork in Cyprus, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Turkey, and other parts
of the world.
http://www.cyi.ac.cy/index.php/starc/about-the-center/starc-ourpeople/itemlist/user/88-kirsi-lorentz.html
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