Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus; Volume 9; Priscilla Keswani

Priscilla Keswani [+–]

Independent Scholar

Priscilla Keswani received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1989 and has taught at Washington State University and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She has participated in archaeological field projects in Cyprus for many years and published a number of scholarly papers on Bronze Age burial practices, political organization, exchange systems, and pottery.

Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus is a ground-breaking investigation of burial practices and social transformations in the era when Cypriot agricultural communities moved from village to urban life and became major players in the eastern Mediterranean copper trade.

Confronting the many interpretive challenges posed by tombs used for multiple interments, the author develops an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that enables her to define and elucidate the shifting spatial relationships between tombs and habitation areas, the elaboration of rituals involving secondary treatment and collective burial, and changing patterns of mortuary expenditure and symbolism throughout the Bronze Age.

Keswani proposes that during the Early-Middle Bronze periods, the growing elaboration of mortuary festivities and their crucial importance in negotiating status hierarchies contributed to the intensification of Cypriot copper production and the expansion of interregional exchange relations. This helped set the stage for the rise of urban polities early in the Late Bronze Age, when the presence of hereditary elites first becomes apparent in the Cypriot archaeological record. Subsequent changes in mortuary practice suggest that the importance of collective burial rites and traditional modes of ritual display diminished over the course of the Late Bronze Age, as urban institutions multiplied and the bases of social prestige were transformed.

Series: Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology

Prelims

Contents v-viii

List of Figures

List of Tables xi-xii

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction [+–] 1-5

This chapter introduces the objectives and arguments of the book. Beyond merely ‘giving the dead their due’, mortuary rituals are often focal contexts for the negotiation of social hierarchies, the affirmation of social alliances, and the articulation of sanctified propositions about relationships between individuals, groups, their ancestors, and the cosmos. Thus, the general objectives of this work are to examine the details and long-term trends of mortuary practices in Bronze Age Cyprus.

Mortuary Ritual and Society: Some Theoretical Considerations [+–] 6-21

This chapter discusses the ethnological foundations of mortuary analysis, the processual approach to mortuary variability as well as the objection raised by post-processualists against processualist mortuary theory. Moreover, it highlights the importance of examining multiple lines of evidence in interpreting the mortuary record, as well as the importance of understanding mortuary ritual as a dynamic cultural system. It also presents an important development in mortuary ritual that may be associated with increasing socioeconomic complexity, the systems of ‘dual obsequies’. It further discusses secondary treatment and collective burial as well as long-term variations in mortuary elaboration.

The Archaeological Record of Mortuary Practice in Cyprus: Formation Processes, Sampling Issues, and a Methodology for Interpretation [+–] 22-36

This chapter begins with an examination of some of the intermediating screens or filters that have affected the representation of mortuary practices in Bronze Age Cyprus. Problems of preservation associated with collective burial units in general and with the chamber and pit tombs typically found on the island are considered first. Then the limitations of past and present approaches to tomb excavation and mortuary analysis are reviewed, followed by a discussion of sampling problems in regional, chronological, and local perspective. Lastly, the chapter provides an outline of the basic principles of an analytical methodology that may be helpful in eliciting aspects of ritual systems and social structure from the complex and sometimes problematic mortuary record of the Cypriot Bronze Age.

The Early and Middle Bronze Age [+–] 37-83

The Early and Middle Bronze periods in Cyprus pose a major contrast to the preceding Chalcolithic era in almost every aspect of material culture and socioeconomic life. The chapter argues that Early Cypriot and Middle Cypriot mortuary practices evolved into a unique and locally rooted system that may initially have distinguished but ultimately united communities of recent immigrants and older inhabitants in a broadly shared complex of social representations and ancestral ideologies. Moreover, it introduces programs of mortuary ritual, patterns in burial group composition, as well as the origins and elaboration of the EC-MC chamber tomb tradition.

The Late Bronze Age [+–] 84-144

This chapter addresses a number of questions regarding the significance of changes in the spatial disposition, ritual treatment and grouping of the dead, long-term changes and synchronic variation in tomb architecture, the evidence for social hierarchy and prestige symbolism in Late Cypriot burial assemblages, and the implications of declining mortuary consumption over the course of the Late Cypriot period.The chapter argues that these developments overall reflect the changing significance of mortuary ritual in stratified, socially heterogeneous urban communities, where status differentials were no longer primarily created through periodic, ritualized exhibitions among competitive kin groups, but were instead increasingly based upon differential access to copper, trade goods, and positions attained within a variety of court and temple institutions. In this altered sociopolitical context, mortuary ritual would have remained a crucial arena for the expression and reproduction of status differentials, but it most probably ceased to be the principal venue for their production.

Mortuary Ritual, Social Structure, and Macro-Processual Change in the Cypriot Bronze Age [+–] 145-162

This chapter considers the broader regional processes that impinged upon local systems of meaning and ritual, and the ways in which those processes, were experienced and influenced in the course of mortuary celebrations. The chapter further reviews the principal developments in areas of demography, settlement patterns, economic production, and household and community organization that may be inferred from non-mortuary archaeological data, along with their implications for social structure and ideology. The changing role of mortuary ritual in the social life of Cypriot communities is further examined, as well as the issue of how local ideologies and ritual practices were affected by supralocal or macro-processes of economic and sociopolitical change.

End Matter

Bibliography 163-185

Tables 186-248

Index 249-257

Reviews

The book is an indispensable tool for anyone attempting to come to terms with the extremely complex and highly variable resolution of the Cypriot mortuary record. …Keswani presents a compelling case for moving beyond interpretation of ‘prestige good’ towards a more holistic approach incorporating the actions of the living in reconstructing society from mortuary practices.
Antiquity, Volume:79 (Sept 2005)

This is a well-structured book on a complicated yet intruiging matter: The reconstruction of social structure and meanings from funerary rituals handed down via archaeological investigations.
American Journal of Archaeology-Online Book Reviews, 110.4 (October 2006)

This is a significant contribution to mortuary studies in general and the Mediterranean Bronze Age in particular.
Bibliotheca Orientalis LXIII

Setting the burials within a social context or, vice versa, reconstructing social changes against the background of observable mortuary changes has resulted in a fascinating account of pre-historic Cyprus, the like of which one rarely encounters.
John G. Younger, University of Kansas, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol 67, No. 3

Priscilla Keswani’s comprehensive survey of Cypriot Bronze Age mortuary practices is a welcome addition to the literature on the archaeology of the island. Supported by detailed analysis of of ethnographic data and superb manipulation of the raw data from the major Bronze Age tomb groups that have been excavated throughout the island, Keswani puts forward convincing arguments for the social, political, and economic changes underpinning funerary ritual on Cyprus during the Bronze Age. The book will be of great value to other scholars working in the field and to students of Cypriot and Near Eastern archaeology.
Louise Steel, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, February 2006, issue #341

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Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus

Priscilla Keswani [+–]

Independent Scholar

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