Funeral Archaeology

Entre 1988 e 1989, a Mamoa de Aspra (Caminha, Viana do Castelo) foi alvo de duas campanhas de escavação arqueológica por Eduardo Jorge Lopes da Silva no âmbito do projeto de investigação “O Estudo do Megalitismo Minhoto e a sua Correlação com o Douro Litoral e Beiras”. Destes trabalhos, apenas se conhece uma publicação genérica em revista da especialidade que, à luz dos conhecimentos e metodologias científicas atuais, se mostra insuficiente para a compreensão dos contextos e práticas funerárias do neolítico no noroeste português. A consulta dos relatórios entregues à tutela por este investigador, a relocalização do monumento, bem como as várias visitas ao local no ano de 2014 permitiram, entre outras coisas, descobrir novos dados que aqui pretendemos dar a conhecer.

Dexiosis is a modern term referring to the handshaking motif appearing in ancient Greek art, which had specific meaning and symbolism. Though it was a characteristic iconographic element of the Classical antiquity, its roots can be traced back to the Archaic period. Dexiosis was not merely a compositional element connecting two people, but carried a deeper meaning. Most often, the motif was associated with funerary art of the Classical Athens. On funerary monuments the deceased were depicted in the circle of their families, which reflected the ideals of contemporary society. Particularly notable is the contrast between the public character of the funerary monument and the private nature of the depiction. Its meaning should be perceived in terms of both the intimate gesture expressing emotions and the formal presentation of the family. Dexiosis emphasized a permanent bond as the fundamental element of the family in particular, and society in general. At the same time, it was associated with the theme of farewell. The gesture was performed by two people in a dialogical composition, which clearly showed their mutual relationship and the figures were depicted in various compositions regardless of their gender or age. The motif was also used in the Hellenistic and the Roman art.

"Because of its design and scale, Menga is an outstanding megalithic monument. As such, it has also had a remarkable biography, dating back to the early part of the 4th millennium BC and spanning all prehistoric and historic periods since then. This paper presents, for the first time, a comprehensive review of the evidence available to understand Menga’s journey through time. The data presented here help understand issues such as the chronology of the building of the monument, its frequentation and use throughout Late Prehistory or its re-use as burial ground in Roman and Medieval times. To date, no other Iberian megalithic monument has shown such pervasiveness as a place filled with long-term ideological significance for memory and identity."

R.M. Reida, O.V. Heiko, S.V. Sapiehin
«Funera l Feast» Sets of Jugs in ChernIa khiv Culture Burials
Cherniakhiv culture burials from the Forest-steppe Dnipro River left bank region, which included more than one jug, are
analysed within the context of study of drinking vessels sets used during the afterlife feast. There are 12 such assemblages in
Cherniakhiv culture burials known today. Judging from the dating, sets of jugs in the Dnipro River left bank area appeared
in the first half of the 4th c. and their amount raised in the second half of this century. They are found in the burials both with
the Scythian and Sarmatian, and with German ethnic features. Such burials in the region are peculiar with the presence of a
significant number of vessels (from 8 to 16) within the inventory’s structure. Insufficient anthropological research does not
allow the authors to attribute such assemblages by sex.
In order to conduct the comparative analysis, the Cherniakhiv culture materials were also drawn: Sântana de Mureş
culture from the territory of the Dnipro River right bank area, Moldova and Romania. They presented similar low percentage
of burials with the jugs sets within the burial grounds, at the same time, showing certain regional peculiarities concerning
both the jugs types in such sets, and the territorial closeness to the provinces of Roman Empire.
Ethnic features of certain burials can show that the tradition of placing the jugs sets into the grave goods structure
could have no ethnic «commitments», and perhaps was imported or appeared as a result of internal development. It can
be confirmed by the presence of jugs sets, in fact, at the whole area of culture Cherniakhiv-S ântana de Mureş. At the same
time, the dynamics of this tradition’s spread in time (for the Dnipro River left bank area) allow assuming its appearance
and development since the first half of the 4th c. BC. Quantitative and in some cases qualitative peculiarities of the vessels
assemblages in such burials abandon the authors to the idea of their belonging to the high stratum. It can be indirectly
testified also by relatively insignificant percentage of such burials in general bulk of graves at burial grounds.

Within this article, we are publishing excavation materials of a burial with an accompanied horse, in Shanaga, Bukhmurun sum, Uvs aimag. The rescue excavation was made in 2011 by researchers of the Institute of Archaeology in the coal mine of Shanaga. This burial has special interests in the study of Ancient Turkic period.
The burial with an accompanied horse is one of the characteristic types of nomadic funeral ritual between AD 6-9th centuries, or as it called in Mongolian historiography – the Ancient Turkic period. Shanaga burial with accompanied horse belongs to this period by series of features as location, external and interior structures of the tomb, positioning and orientation of the deceased, and his horse, and composition of the offerings and their specific characteristics. Relative dating of some specific funeral objects such as the silver belt pieces, and bronze pieces of the chest strap and crupper was very productive due to extensive analogues from Russian Altai. Meantime C14 data fits well with those relative dating and both lies in time period of second half of 7th century to first half of 9th century AD.
Acknowledgement. We would like to express our thanks to Dr. Prof. Jan Bemmann from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn for the support to realize the C14 dating in Germany. Also, we would like to thank MA R.Erdenetsetseg, Institute of History and Archaeology, MAS for her excellent jobs on the restoration and conservation of bronze and silver objects from our excavation.

Ethnoarchaeology of funeral practices: Aspects of the management of current dolmens and collective tombs in the tribal societies of Sumba Island (Indonesia)

The megalithic societies of the European Neolithic period are characterized by the association of megalithic architecture with the practice of the collective grave. While several ethnoarchaeologists have produced important works on the architecture and social significance of the megaliths, there are very few detailed analyses devoted to their content, i.e. the collective grave itself. This topic was the main objective of a research programme conducted between 2015 and 2018. A first article provided a general overview and a comparison between the practices of traditional societies established in two Indonesian islands, Sumba and Sulawesi (Jeunesse, Denaire 2018). Here, we focus on Sumba, one of the small Sunda islands, located in the south-east of the Indonesian Archipelago (fig. 1). The western part of the island is settled by segmented societies formed by politically independent clans and villages. This area thus constitutes the last place in the world where the "megalithic monument + collective grave" couple can still be observed alive, in the context of still partly animistic societies. Our main field of investigation was the Lolli ethnic group (fig. 2), with, in particular, an exhaustive analysis of the graves in the village of Wesaluri.

Methods: As a reminder, if collective burials documented in ethnohistory can display extremely variable characteristics and functioning modes in detail, what makes their most profund unity is that they are used repeatedly and are intended to gather dead persons deposited on several occasions. At the time they are established, they are planned to receive more dead people later, those being in principle not all dead yet. The other essential common property of collective burials is that in all documented cases they are established to group kin: they gather people being related by consanguinity, affinity or adoption. In archaeology, the recognition of collective burials relies on osteological arguments: a grave is termed ‘collective’ whenever it is possible to demonstrate that all the individuals have not been deposited at one time –which amounts to saying that the grave was used on several occasions (Boulestin / Courtaud Forthcoming).

Grave data was collected in two Lolli villages, Wesaluri and Tambera. Their collection begins with a census of the houses and their clan and lineage affiliation and continues with the study of the connections between the dolmens and the houses (fig. 10). Then comes the systematic investigation lineage by lineage, this social formation being the relevant level for the study of the forms of management of the dolmens and the collective tomb. The interlocutor is generally the head of the lineage, flanked or not by other inhabitants of the village, often traditional priests (rato) whose function implies a good mastery of genealogy. The main lineage of Wesaluri, for example, controls six dolmens, four located in front of the veranda of the ancestors' house (house B), occupied generation after generation by the head of the lineage, the other two located in the rice fields, about 400 m as the crow flies from the house. Before going on to establish the biographies of the dolmens, it is necessary to get as precise an idea as possible of the genealogy of the lineage (fig. 11). House B is the house of the village founder, Pale Poti 1. Our informant in the survey conducted in 2017 was his great-grandson, Toda Mogu Wole. Toda Mogu Wole died in 2018, leaving the chieftaincy to his youngest son, Lukas Lede Toda, accordind to the Lolli's rule of ultimogeniture. It should be noted in passing that the first three lineage chiefs each had two wives.

Genealogy serves as a support for the construction of dolmens' biographies. Dolmen 7, one of the tombs managed by the founding lineage, houses the remains of seven individuals from four distinct generations and continues to be active (fig. 12). It was built on the occasion of the death of the village founder's second wife. Dolmen 6 (fig. 13) was built on the occasion of the death of the second wife of Bura Sele, son of the founder and his successor at the head of the lineage. It also contains the remains of seven individuals from four different generations. The fact that it runs parallel to Dolmen 7 is obviously not without implications. We will come back to this aspect later. This biographical work was carried out in 2017 and 2018 for all the dolmens in the village of Wesaluri, which will be our main source for this article. The exploitation of the data is in progress and we will limit ourselves here to summarizing our first observations. Among the preferred avenues is the exploration of kinship links both within the same dolmen and between the different dolmens managed by the same lineage.

Some results

Dolmen pools: The study of the main lineage of the village of Wesaluri showed that a single lineage used several collective graves in parallel. It is these groupings of collective tombs used simultaneously, and not successively, that we call "pools of dolmens". The system of the pools of dolmens used simultaneously by the same reference group is counter-intuitive with respect to the scheme commonly postulated in research on European Neolithic collective tombs, where it is customary to consider, implicitly, as successive the different dolmens of the same complex that are presumed to belong to the same reference population. Thus, the construction of a new dolmen is considered to be the consequence of the disaffection of the "active" dolmen. Within this paradigm, two dolmens used simultaneously (if we have the means to demonstrate it, which is another matter) will automatically, in a archaeological context, be attributed to two different reference groups. The use of the pool system in Sumba obviously does not allow us to conclude that such a system also existed in the European Neolithic. It simply makes us attentive to a possibility that has so far been little (if ever) taken into account by the specialists of this period.

Hiatus : The study of Neolithic collective tombs shows the existence of hiatuses in the use of the monument that can last several generations, whereas archaeologists generally start from the idea that a collective tomb welcomes all the members of a reference group generation after generation. Such hiatuses also exist in the dolmens of the villages we studied. Highlighting the dolmen pool system allows us to explain where the missing dead are buried, but does not indicate the causes of the hiatuses. The second part of the article is devoted to the study of these causes, in the context of the segmented societies of Sumba.

Kin relationships: The study of kinship ties in the dolmens of Wesaluri remains largely to be done. In this last part, we will limit ourselves to a few general remarks intended to illustrate the complexity of the configurations encountered and the importance of the ethnoarchaeological model we try to elaborate within a more general reflection on the understanding of collective practice in the megalithic cultures of the European Neolithic, with a particular emphasis on the delicate question of the interpretation of the results of palaeogenomic analyses. The preliminary results we present again come from the study of the main lineage of the village of Wesaluri. We have analysed the influence of the pool system on the composition of the various collective graves and the kinship ties between the deceased buried there, and the way in which the kinship ties of the collective graves are conditioned by social organisation in general. But we have also studied the impact on the genetic composition of the collective grave population of rare events such as divorce, individual adoption and the integration of families from other ethnic groups. The ultimate objective will be, in a context where the identity of the deceased and their kinship ties are known, to develop a reference model for a society with patrilineal and patrilocal clans.