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Burial, also known as interment or inhumation, is a method of final disposition whereby a dead body is placed into the ground, sometimes with objects. This is usually accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing the deceased and objects in it, and covering it over. A funeral is a ceremony that accompanies the final disposition. Humans have been burying their dead since shortly after the origin of the species. Burial is often seen as indicating respect for the dead. It has been used to prevent the odor of decay, to give family members closure and prevent them from witnessing the decomposition of their loved ones, and in many cultures it has been seen as a necessary step for the deceased to enter the afterlife or to give back to the cycle of life.
A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a prehistoric structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. There are over 35,000 in Europe alone, located widely from Sweden to the Mediterranean sea.
Shanidar Cave is an archaeological site located on Bradost Mountain, within the Zagros Mountains, in the Erbil Governorate of Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq. It is known for the discovery of Neanderthal remains at the site, most notably Shanidar 1, who survived several injuries during his life, possibly due to care from others in his group, and Shanidar 4, the famed 'flower burial'. Until this discovery, Cro-Magnons, the earliest known H. sapiens in Europe, were the only individuals known for purposeful, ritualistic burials.
In archaeology and anthropology a mortuary house is any purpose-built structure, often resembling a normal dwelling in many ways, in which a dead body is buried.
Long barrows are a style of monument constructed across Western Europe in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, during the Early Neolithic period. Typically constructed from earth and either timber or stone, those using the latter material represent the oldest widespread tradition of stone construction in the world. Around 40,000 long barrows survive today.
In archaeology and anthropology, the term excarnation refers to the practice of removing the flesh and organs of the dead before burial. Excarnation may be achieved through natural means, such as leaving a dead body exposed to the elements or for animals to scavenge; or by butchering the corpse by hand. Following excarnation, some societies retrieved the bones for burial. Excarnation has been practiced throughout the world for hundreds of thousands of years. The earliest archaeological evidence of excarnation is from the Awash River Valley in Ethiopia, 160,000 years ago. Examples of excarnation include 'sky burials' in parts of Asia, the Zoroastrian 'Tower of Silence', and Native American 'tree burials'. Excarnation is practiced for a variety of spiritual and practical reasons, including the Tibetian spiritual belief that excarnation is the most generous form of burial and the Comanche practical concern that in the winter the ground is too hard for an underground burial. Excarnation sites are identifiable in the archaeological record by a concentration of smaller bones, which would be the bones that would be the easiest to fall off the body, and that would not be noticed by practitioners of excarnation.
Grave goods, in archaeology and anthropology, are the items buried along with the body.
In archaeology, an enclosure is one of the most common types of archaeological site – It is any area of land separated from surrounding land by earthworks, walls or fencing. Such a simple feature is found all over the world and during almost all archaeological periods. They may be few metres across or be large enough to encompass whole cities.
The Xagħra Stone Circle, also known as the Xagħra Hypogeum or the Brochtorff Circle, is a Neolithic funerary complex located in Xagħra, Gozo, Malta. It consists of a series of caves which were used to bury the dead, and which were surrounded by a walled enclosure. It mainly dates back to around 3000 to 2400 BC, although the earliest tombs at the site date back to 4100 to 3800 BC. The caves collapsed sometime before 2000 BC, and the site was later used for domestic and agricultural purposes.
Ban Non Wat is a village in Thailand, in the Non Sung district, Nakhon Ratchasima Province, located near the small city of Phimai. It has been the subject of excavation since 2002. The cultural sequence encompasses 11 prehistoric phases, which include 640 burials. The site is associated with consistent occupation, and in modern-day Ban Non Wat the occupied village is located closer to the Mun River.
Jar burial is a human burial custom where the corpse is placed into a large earthenware container and then interred. Jar burials are a repeated pattern at a site or within an archaeological culture. When an anomalous burial is found in which a corpse or cremated remains have been interred, it is not considered a "jar burial".
The archaeological site of Herxheim, located in the municipality of Herxheim in southwest Germany, was a ritual center and a mass grave formed by people of the Linear Pottery culture (LBK) culture in Neolithic Europe. The site is often compared to that of the Talheim Death Pit and Schletz-Asparn, but is quite different in nature. The site dates from between 5300 and 4950 BC.
Fontbrégoua Cave is an archaeological site located in Provence, Southeastern France. It was used by humans in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, in what is now known as the Early and Middle Neolithic. A temporary residential site, it was used by Neolithic agriculturalists as a storage area for their herds of goats and sheep, and also contained a number of bone depositions, containing the remains of domestic species, wild animals, and humans. The inclusion of the latter of these deposits led the archaeological team studying the site to propose that cannibalism had taken place at Fontbrégoua, although other archaeologists have instead suggested that they represent evidence of secondary burial.
The architecture of Scotland in the prehistoric era includes all human building within the modern borders of Scotland, before the arrival of the Romans in Britain in the first century BCE. Stone Age settlers began to build in wood in what is now Scotland from at least 8,000 years ago. The first permanent houses of stone were constructed around 6,000 years ago, as at Knap of Howar, Orkney and settlements like Skara Brae. There are also large numbers of chambered tombs and cairns from this era, particularly in the west and north. In the south and east there are earthen barrows, often linked to timber monuments of which only remnants remain. Related structures include bank barrows, cursus monuments, mortuary enclosures and timber halls. From the Bronze Age there are fewer new buildings, but there is evidence of crannogs, roundhouses built on artificial islands and of Clava cairns and the first hillforts. From the Iron Age there is evidence of substantial stone Atlantic roundhouses, which include broch towers, smaller duns. There is also evidence of about 1,000 hillforts in Scotland, most located below the Clyde-Forth line.
The secondary burial, or “double funeral” is a feature of prehistoric and historic gravesites. The term refers to remains that represent an exhumation and reburial, whether intentional or accidental.
The Zvejnieki burial ground is an archaeological site consisting of a large Stone Age cemetery with over 400 burials and associated grave goods. It is located along a drumlin on the northern shore of Lake Burtnieks in northern Latvia.
Mortuary archaeology is the study of human remains in their archaeological context. This is a known sub-field of bioarchaeology, which is a field that focuses on gathering important information based on the skeleton of an individual. Bioarchaeology stems from the practice of human osteology which is the anatomical study of skeletal remains. Mortuary archaeology, as well as the overarching field it resides in, aims to generate an understanding of disease, migration, health, nutrition, gender, status, and kinship among past populations. Ultimately, these topics help to produce a picture of the daily lives of past individuals. Mortuary archaeologists draw upon the humanities, as well as social and hard sciences to have a full understanding of the individual.
The Lothagam North Pillar Site, registered as GeJi9, is an archaeological site on the west side of Lake Turkana in Kenya dating to the Pastoral Neolithic. It is a communal cemetery, built between 3000 BCE and 2300 BCE by the region's earliest herders. It is thought to be eastern Africa's largest and earliest monumental cemetery.
Prehistoric religion is the religious practice of prehistoric cultures. Prehistory, the period before written records, makes up the bulk of human experience; over 99% of human history occurred during the Paleolithic alone. Prehistoric cultures spanned the globe and existed for over two and a half million years; their religious practices were many and varied, and the study of them is difficult due to the lack of written records describing the details of their faiths.
Azraq 18 is an Epipalaeolithic archaeological site in the Azraq oasis, eastern Jordan. First recorded in a survey by Andrew Garrard and Nicholas Stanley-Price in 1975, and excavated by Garrard in 1985, it is one of many sites of prehistoric occupation around the perennial springs that feed the oasis. Of these, Azraq 18 is the only one associated with the Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture, which is dated to between around 15,000 to 11,500 years ago.
References
- ↑ Thomas, Julian (2000). "Death, Identity and the Body in Neolithic Britain". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 6 (4): 653–668. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.00038. ISSN 1359-0987. JSTOR 2661035.
- ↑ Fowler, Chris (2010). "Pattern and diversity in the Early Neolithic mortuary practices of Britain and Ireland: Contextualising the treatment of the dead". Documenta Praehistorica. 37: 1–22. doi: 10.4312/dp.37.1 .