Celebrating the Dead: Placing Prehistoric Mortuary Practices in Broader Social Context (original) (raw)

Mortuary events were contexts in which ritual practices celebrated the dead and facilitated an array of social objectives. In the study of mortuary practices among prehistoric hunter-gatherers, much attention has been focused on political complexity and the identification of leaders and elites. Until recently, considerably less attention has been placed on aspects of social identity and discerning changes in social interaction as defined by attributes such as age, sex, and group membership. Diachronic developments in funerary rituals, as depicted in the archaeological record of mortuary events, provide a rare opportunity to gain insight into shifts in social interaction, intragroup dynamics, and ideology. We highlight this research orientation with two prehistoric examples where, based on other lines of evidence and general expectations, political complexity was increasing over time, yet mortuary practices suggest the opposite. These prehistoric case studies include the emergence of complex hunter-gatherers and then early agricultural village life in the southern Levant of the Near East, and the rise and persistence of complex hunter-gatherers in the San Francisco Bay area of western North America. Although widely separated in time and space, both took place in Mediterranean-type environmental settings, and both were correlated with larger populations, increased settlement permanence, resource intensification and storage, and rich ideological traditions. These examples were chosen because they share a number of contextual variables in common (both environmental and economic.), thereby facilitating comparative analysis. In both examples, unprecedented changes in socioeconomic strategies were correlated with a sudden, initial elaboration in mortuary practices. In each situation, a much larger segment of the society from a wider range of ages was buried with grave goods. Mortuary items were primarily personal adornment, and these practices were concentrated among younger members of society. Thereafter, despite continued intensification of economic and social activities, each case study revealed a striking decline in the number of burials with such goods and in the quantities per individual. These case studies reveal that the tempo of shifts in mortuary behavior can be rapid and multidirectional. Moreover, these changes can best be understood through consideration of the broader social context, rather than attempting to discern elites and status ascription. We argue that these mortuary events were settings in which ritual practices facilitated social integration and group solidarity, as well as active construction of social identities with respect to kin and non-kin, and peers and non-peers. These funerary practices provided an opportunity to reify new forms of community interaction and enhanced economic cooperation among peers that facilitated emerging cooperative activities.