Full Description
Death, grief and funerary practices are central to any analysis of social, anthropological, artistic and religious worlds. However, cemeteries - the key conceptual and physical site for death - have rarely been the focus of archaeological research. 'Prioritizing Death and Society' examines the structure, organisation and significance of cemeteries in the Southern Levant, one of the key areas for both migration and settlement in both prehistory and antiquity. Spanning 6,000 years, from the Chalcolithic to the present day, 'Prioritizing Death and Society' presents new research to analyse the formation and regional variation in cemeteries. By examining both ancient and present-day - nationally Jewish - cemeteries, the study reveals the commonalities and differences in the ways in which death has been and continues to be ritualised, memorialised and understood.
Contents
List of figures, List of tables, Acknowledgements, Part I: Introduction, 1. Introduction, 2. Binary oppositions, logical gaps and thick descriptions, Part II: Chalcolithic cemeteries, 3. Chalcolithic cemeteries: winks, twitches and faked twitches, 4. Isolated in the landscape: single-cave cemeteries, 5. Multiple components: multiple-cave cemeteries, 6. Dark, damp and deep: karstic-cave systems, 7. Funerary structures, 8. Exceptions, outliers and misfits, 9. Structured deposition and depositional structures, Part III: Contemporary cemeteries, 10. An archaeology of us, 11. The raw materials: from matt to lustre, from grey to colour, 12. Tombstone morphology: communal trajectories, 13. Tombstone elaboration: personal expressions, 14. Spatial patterns: between institutional policy and interpersonal spontaneity, 15. Intersecting discourses, Part IV: Conclusion, 16. Prioritizing death and society, 17. Epilogue, Appendix: Gazetteers of cemeteries, Notes, Bibliography, Index
