Abstract
During the Early Bronze Age I, on the eve of establishing fortified towns on the southeastern Dead Sea Plain, people buried their dead in secondary mortuary rituals in cemeteries at Bab adh-Dhra‵, Fifa, and an-Naqa/es-Safi. While we know nothing of the living communities or their primary mortuary practices, we know the EBA people carefully collected even the smallest bones of their dead and transported them down to this area for burial in shaft or cist tombs. Drawing on ethnographic analogies and recently published skeletal analyses from Bab adh-Dhra‵, I explore potential anxieties attached to the living and dying in these communities.
Death is a problem of the living
(Oestigaard & Goldhahn, 2006, p. 45)
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jeff Fleischer and Neil Norman, the organizers of the SAA session “The Archaeology of Anxiety,” for including me in the session and for offering me the opportunity to stretch my own boundaries of epistemological comfort to consider anxiety. I wish to give profound thanks to Tom Schaub who recruited me to help publish the excavations and surveys of the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain (EDSP) and opened the Early Bronze Age archaeological candy store to let me explore my interest in difference, social complexity, mortuary practices, and daily life. For discussions of mortuary practices and investigating daily life in archaeological contexts over the years, I wish to thank Ian Kuijt, Rosemary Joyce, Susan Kus, Rafi Greenberg, John Robb, Kostalena Michelaki, Paula Lazrus, David Yoon, Lin Foxhall, Tico Wolff, Roger Matthews, Wendy Matthews, Morag Kersel, Yorke Rowan, and Hermann Genz. While I have benefitted over the years from the insights and interactions with all of these individuals, I must claim any mistakes or faults of reasoning as my own. I dedicate this paper to Tom Schaub, whom we lost in October 2015 and to Walt Rast, Tom Schaub’s longtime “partner in crime” in the EDSP, as I believe Walt would have loved talking through these ideas and possibilities.
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Chesson, M.S. (2016). Risky Business: A Life Full of Obligations to the Dead and the Living on the Early Bronze Age Southeastern Dead Sea Plain, Jordan. In: Fleisher, J., Norman, N. (eds) The Archaeology of Anxiety. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3231-3_3
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