Hunter-gatherer mortuary variability: toward an explanatory model (original) (raw)
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Here we report on the discovery of two infant burials dating to ∼11,500 calibrated years (cal) B.P. at the Upward Sun River site in central Alaska. The infants were interred in a pit feature with associated organic and lithic grave goods, including the earliest known North American hafted bifaces with decorated antler foreshafts. Skeletal and dental analyses indicate that Individual 1 died shortly after birth and Individual 2 was a late-term fetus, making these the youngest-aged late Pleistocene individuals known for the Americas and the only known prenate, offering, to our knowledge, the first opportunity to explore mortuary treatment of the youngest members of a terminal Pleistocene North American population. This burial was situated ∼40 cm directly below a cremated 3-y-old child previously discovered in association with a central hearth of a residential feature. The burial and cremation are contemporaneous, and differences in body orientation, treatment, and associated grave goods within a single feature and evidence for residential occupation between burial episodes indicate novel mortuary behaviors. The human remains, grave goods, and associated fauna provide rare direct data on organic technology, economy, seasonality of residential occupations, and infant/child mortality of terminal Pleistocene Beringians.
2012
In surveying mortuary ritual data regarding prehistoric North American peoples and how artifacts found in those burials correlate to differences based on social status or sex, one would hypothesize that in egalitarian societies, no differences would be found in the grave goods, body positioning, or grave location of the members of that particular society. Conversely, one would expect a hierarchal society to show definitive distinctions in every one of those factors of burial. In addition, as most prehistoric North American cultures seem to be patrilineal, one would also assume variations in mortuary patterns would be found among those of different sex or different social gender. The focus of this paper is to find what the mortuary data reveals regarding these anticipated results.
PNAS, 2014
Materials and Methods Human Remains Materials and Methods Following a skeletal inventory, osteometric measurements were taken of all complete and refitted elements. The approximate ages of Individuals 1 and 2, along with length and weight of the latter, were then estimated using several standard techniques (1-8). Aging based on the state of deciduous crown development follows (9) and (10). These two methods account for multiple formation stages to facilitate precision in aging young individuals; however, both are based on European reference groups. A third method adjusted for aging Native Americans (11) is also used, but is primarily based on eruption times so in this case is more subjective. Recording of the 22 dental nonmetric traits in the deciduous crowns of Individual 1 was effected using the method of Sciulli (12). With exception, this method emulates the Arizona State University Dental Anthropology System (ASUDAS) (13) and other previous approaches for the study of permanent teeth. The utility of these traits is well known (14-15). Briefly, they have minimal inter- and intra-observer recording error rates, are easily identifiable, represent all dental morphogenetic fields, are not sexually dimorphic and, of most importance, because they are evolutionarily conservative with a high genetic component in their expression (16-18), are excellent markers for biodistance analyses (19). Beyond simply making them available to interested researchers, these data are included to show that the USR site inhabitants apparently possessed a Sinodont-like dental pattern (16) present in all Northeast Asians and Native Americans; there are researchers who believe that some early immigrants had alternate origins and/or possess a morphologically simpler Sundadont pattern (16). The success of sex estimation in infant skeletal remains differs by element and feature(s), but has most often been attempted using mandible and ilium morphology (20-24); that approach was followed here. Accuracy rates also vary by sex and among samples if derived from different populations (24). Still, Schutkowski (21) reported accuracy rates of up to 95%, though his work is based on samples of European and European-derived skeletal remains. And, many researchers are dubious that skeletal sexing of infants can be done at all. Therefore, the successful extraction of viable (nuclear or mitochondrial) aDNA is a crucial step toward final sex determination
Evolutionary Anthropology, 2020
Mortuary behavior (activities concerning dead conspecifics) is one of many traits that were previously widely considered to have been uniquely human, but on which perspectives have changed markedly in recent years. Theoretical approaches to hominin mortuary activity and its evolution have undergone major revision, and advances in diverse archeological and paleoanthropological methods have brought new ways of identifying behaviors such as intentional burial. Despite these advances, debates concerning the nature of hominin mortuary activity, particularly among the Neanderthals, rely heavily on the rereading of old excavations as new finds are relatively rare, limiting the extent to which such debates can benefit from advances in the field. The recent discovery of in situ articulated Neanderthal remains at Shanidar Cave offers a rare opportunity to take full advantage of these methodological and theoretical developments to understand Neanderthal mortuary activity, making a review of these advances relevant and timely.
Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, 2019
In 1940, Gretchen Cutter and a WPA crew conducted excavations in the Mound Wi o 5 at the Fisher site in Will County, Illinois. We examined those materials as part of our reanalysis of the Fisher site excavations by George Langford and the University of Chicago. The mound's material culture correlates with the Des Plaines phase but contains strong connections to the east, especially with Albee phase mortuary practices. Calibrated 14 C dates and Bayesian modeling place the Des Plaines phase as contemporary with the Mound Wi o 5 mortuary's primary use during the ninth to eleventh centuries. There is isotopic evidence of a mixed C 3 /C 4 diet with some maize consumption. Mound Wi o 5 represents the only Terminal Late Woodland collective mortuary facility currently known in northeastern Illinois. The identification of such multigenerational communal Terminal Late Woodland mortuary practices lends support to the contention that they provided the cultural base for the emergence of the distinctive Langford Tradition accretional mortuary mounds.
Burial is a uniquely human behavior. Among the mortuary behaviors of extant societies, burial constitutes one of many practices concerning the treatment of the dead. Examples are curation (the carrying around of the dead either of the entire corpse or of a preserved part); diverse forms of interest in the dead body (e.g., dismembering, cannibalism, veneration of parts); "abandonment" on the landscape; funerary caching; and other practices, including variously complex forms of inhumation (formal burial) (Pettitt 2011, 8-10). The interest of archaeologists specifically in burial is a default of the archaeological record due to the higher likelihood of the preservation of physical evidence when burial has taken place. In the case of mortuary practices, the commonalities of observable behaviors in cross-cultural ethnographic studies allow anthropologists to draw analogies between the present and the past. Such inferences are evaluated through taphonomic studies and contextual analyses of the human fossils. Necessary criteria for identifying burials include completeness of skeletal remains found within horizons of human occupation, elimination of natural processes of interment, stratigraphic indications of interments (e.g., burial pits or sealed contexts of skeletal remains), and osteological evidence for treatment of the corpse (Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 1992; Gargett 1999). Typically, arguments for intentional Paleolithic burials need to be based on a consilience of several lines of evidence. As an outcome of this epistemological approach, identifications of Paleolithic burials are necessarily carried out on a case-by-case basis rather than being generated from top-down overarching theory and ensuing hypotheses.
Burial is perceived as one of the human cultural reactions to the phenomenon of death. As is the case with other practices related to the social realm, mortuary practices (including interment) conform to established conventions of the particular society en acting those practices. Among recent humans, mortuary practices are related to religious beliefs, cosmologies, and the social and economic status of the dead and of those burying them. Such insights are gained from observations on, and the documentation of, cross-cultural patterns ofbehaviour. Indeed, inferences can be drawn from behavioural patterns shared by extant hum ans and other nonhum an primates (see Pettitt 2011). As archaeologists, however, we retrieve evidence of only those past behaviours-including mortuary practices-that resulted in material remains. It is from these that we need to identify, interpret, and evaluate the social norms and beliefs of prehistorie human groups. Our interpretative framework-Le. the middle range the ory with whieh the issue of prehistoric mortuary practices is approached-hinges on cross-cultural ethnographic studies, which reveal the rules of observable behaviours. It is from this starting point that we may draw analogies between the present and the past.