Abstract
Stimulated by the American Anthropological Association’s Social Dimensions of Mortuary Practices symposium organized by James Brown in 1966 and its follow-up publication (Brown 1971), archaeologists embarked on field programs and other investigations worldwide that addressed a range of issues dealing with the social and biocultural meaning of treatment of deceased. Far from establishing a simple set of rules that govern burial of the dead in human societies, these investigations revealed that by virtually any measure—body treatment, orientation, artifact accompaniments, demographic composition, temporal and cultural association, and social complexity—mortuary behavior is highly variable. The contributors to this book tackle some of this variability and by doing so demonstrate the continued growth in our comprehension of human behavior as it is represented in the archaeological record of mortuary activity. The study of mortuary behavior in past societies has become recognized as an important—if not indispensable—avenue for documenting and understanding social behavior and organization.
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Larsen, C.S. (1995). Regional Perspectives on Mortuary Analysis. In: Beck, L.A. (eds) Regional Approaches to Mortuary Analysis. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1310-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1310-4_11
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