Interpreting a ritual funerary area at the Early Neolithic site of Tell Qarassa North (South Syria, late 9th millennium BC) (original) (raw)
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Original Synthetic Report: Study of Neolithic human graves from Tell Qaramel in North Syria
International Journal of Modern Anthropology, 2010
Youssef Kanjou was born the 1 / 11 / 1971 in Aleppo city, Syria He received his doctorate in Anthropology from the National University Autonomy of Mexico. He is director of the excavation department of the Aleppo museum, Ministry of culture, Syria. He participates in an excavation mission relating to Neolithic and Palaeolithic periods in northern Syria.
Funerary rites in a Neolithic nomad community in Southeastern Arabia - the case of al-Buhais 18
Documenta Praehistorica 35: 143-152, 2008
Al-Buhais 18 is a Neolithic site in the United Arab Emirates. It consists of a graveyard with more than 420 individuals, an ancient spring, and a campsite. It is interpreted as a central place for a group of mobile herders in the 5th millennium BC. More than 24 000 ornamental objects have been found, many of them in a secure funerary context, making it possible to reconstruct ornamental ensembles, and shedding light on specific rules concerning the way jewellery was worn by different sub-groups of the population. Based on these observations, some hypotheses are developed on the intentions and beliefs structuring mortuary practices and the role of jewellery within these rites. Finally, questions of continuity and change in mortuary practices can be addressed by comparing al- Buhais 18 with other, younger, sites in the region.
In 2002, excavations at Qatna, a Bronze Age palatial site located in Syria, uncovered an elite tomb complex underneath the Royal Palace. The multi-room chamber tomb, associated grave goods, and skeletal remains illustrate some of the clearest archaeological evidence of a Bronze Age Near Eastern ancestor cult that heavily relied on feasting activities and kinship networks. Mesopotamian textual sources refer to this as kispum, and Ugaritic sources show possible parallels in funerary traditions, albeit with different vocabulary. These potential parallels in texts, as well as archaeological practices, such as subfloor burials that permeated Mesopotamia and the Levant in the Middle Bronze Age, raise questions about why societies with such different material culture and development trajectories might have practiced similar burial beliefs and rituals. Analyzing Middle Bronze Age sites in Syria as specific case studies in a wider Mesopotamian and Levantine context illuminates the parallels in these burial traditions. An emphasis on kinship through feasting-centric funerary rituals allowed the individuals in Israel, Syria, and Mesopotamia to retain a sense of self and identity in a world where borders and political dynasties were constantly shifting between different cultural groups. This essentially created a pan-Near Eastern mortuary practice, with localized variety and quirks.
The Outdoor Communal Neolithic Cemetery of Tell el Kerkh, Northwest Syria
Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden, 2020
People in the Neolithic Near Eastern societies buried their dead in various locations. Most often the deceased were buried in the settlement associated with certain building structures and in courtyards. However, excavations in the northern Levantine Neolithic sites have revealed real cemeteries for the first time in this period. In this context, the excavations at Tell el-Kerkh (northwestern Syria) have revealed a unique outdoor communal Pottery Neolithic cemetery. This cemetery was utilized for inhumation of the deceased regardless of age and sex. Up to the 2010 excavation season, the cemetery was confirmed within layers 6-4 of the Rouj 2c phase, dated to between 6400-6200 cal. BC., and revealed c.241 individuals, which suggests the continuous use of the cemetery over hundreds of years. The cemetery at Tell el-Kerkh is considered one of the oldest outdoor communal cemeteries discovered in the Near East, so far. This paper will introduce the excavation results, how the cemetery was uncovered and the distribution of burials in each layer.
Early farming communities located in the ancient Near East participated in unique mortuary practices throughout the Neolithic period (9300-4700 B.C.). These practices include a "skull cult," which involved preserving and honoring human skulls apart from the rest of the skeletons. Interpretations of the meaning behind this "skull cult" have been a major focus of archaeology. In this thesis, I critique previous work interpreting the skull cult, particularly Kathleen Kenyon's theory of a venerated male ancestor skull cult, and explore Ian Kuijt's theory on the social role of these mortuary ritual practices, giving insight into the emergence and evolution of social complexity within these developing societies. Ethnographic accounts supporting Kuijt's theory of community-based mortuary practices and their significance in understanding the societal structure during the Neolithic period suggest that while people of the Neolithic Near East were preserving the skeletal remains of their ancestors, it may not have been for veneration purposes, but rather a mortuary rite allowing the deceased to transition to the afterlife, all while preserving and renewing the social relationships involved in the community.
NOTE: Volume 2 is available on request. This thesis examines ritual and social structure in the Southern Levantine Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, through a detailed study of the cemetery at Tell es-Sa’idiyeh (Jordan). The cemetery phases examined date broadly from the late thirteenth to tenth centuries BCE, and consist of approximately 300 burials. Two socio-historical settings are of relevance here. The first (13th-12th Centuries BCE) relates to a final phase of Egyptian economic and military domination in the region. The second (11th-10th/9th Centuries BCE) relates to a widespread re-emergence of local semi-independent polities in the Central Valleys after the collapse of the Late Bronze Age city-states and the Egyptian withdrawal. It is argued that responses to widespread socio-political, cultural and economic changes in the Late Bronze-Early Iron Age transition had a significant impact on social structure and kinship relations – affecting the ways in which the dead were perceived and treated by the living. Through a combined quantitative and contextual study of the burial data, aspects of variability in the expression of social rank, age and gender, and cultural identity in the Sa’idiyeh cemetery are examined, and in turn compared and contrasted with ‘living’ societal models. Elements of continuity and change are explored, including attitudes to the body, variability in the deposition of grave-objects, and aspects of commemoration, re-use and cemetery organization. The relationship between ritual and social structure is examined through a ‘rites of passage’ framework that breaks down the burial context both temporally and spatially. It is argued that aspects of status and identity (as expressed by the living survivors) were partly formulated and transformed through the deposition of special objects and the elaboration of ritual space. These actions helped to create and reproduce social distinctions through ritual performance and memory. The results of this analysis provide new insights into the societies of the Jordan Valley in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. In the 13th-12th Centuries, ‘death-styles’ at Sa’idiyeh are seen as reflecting social inequalities and unstable relationships between dominant foreign powers and local elites, with evidence for ritual innovation, elite emulation, and individualized status expression in death. In the 11th-10th Centuries, changing socio-economic and political conditions contributed to the formation of a more ‘egalitarian’ social structure, with emerging gender inequalities and expressions of associative status that emphasized kinship relations within commemorative death rituals.
Journal of Religion, 2022
Find the full article at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/719821 Ritual cannot be studied in a vacuum. It is a process that differentiates and gains meaning in its role within its broader social system. This article addresses a major methodological issue in the archaeology of ritual, that there is no consensus on how to interpret ritual in past cultures. This study develops a methodology for identifying ritual in the archaeological record, one that is broadly applicable to archaeological contexts in different regions and combines theoretical approaches to ritualization with methods from household archaeology. To understand ritual’s function within a social system, it must be contextualized against the entire repertoire of a group’s activities. Thus, spatial analyses of all finds throughout different spaces must be conducted in order to reconstruct the range of past human behaviors in different types of spaces. This approach creates a well-founded platform for investigating use variability among ritual and nonritual spaces, and how ritual differentiates itself from other actions. As a case study, this methodology is applied to the Middle and Late Bronze Age southern Levant. The findings shed new light on our understanding of religion in the region, including the primacy of large-scale consumption in public ritual contexts. Contrasting contemporary houses and palaces, little on-site storage and food preparation is detected in ritual settings. The social, anthropological, and religious implications of the divergences identified between ritual and nonritual action and contexts are far-reaching, including the discovery of a hitherto undetected religious ethos and bringing into question whether southern Levantine temples were considered houses of gods.