Citadel and Cemetery in Early Bronze Age Anatolia - (Volume 13) - Christoph Bachhuber

Citadel and Cemetery in Early Bronze Age Anatolia - (Volume 13) - Christoph Bachhuber

Spectacle and Communion on Citadels

Citadel and Cemetery in Early Bronze Age Anatolia - (Volume 13) - Christoph Bachhuber

Christoph Bachhuber [+-]
University of Oxford
Christoph Bachhuber is Associate Faculty Member in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. He received his doctorate from St. John’s College, University of Oxford in 2008, and has since held research and teaching positions at the British Institute at Ankara, the University of Oxford, and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.

Description

Chapter 8 offers an evaluation of the performance of wealth sacrifice and other spectacular rites on citadels, including cremation. Dedications in the form of burnt meat and metal objects are analogous with the gift-giving ethos examined in Chapter 7. The gift and the sacrificial dedication were both prestige-elevating expenditures of wealth that fostered relationships beyond the local and the mundane: one with distant elites and the other with the cosmological realm. Burning human remains was performed in a different ideological setting. But it was also a spectacular event, and like the sacrificial dedication, the spectacle of cremation represents a context where the inhabitants of citadels could commune with cosmological entities. Cremation practices on citadels reveal a social and ideological logic that was antithetic to the mortuary rites of villages, and to the cosmology of villages more generally.

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Citation

Bachhuber, Christoph . Spectacle and Communion on Citadels. Citadel and Cemetery in Early Bronze Age Anatolia - (Volume 13). Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 170-182 Jan 2016. ISBN 9781845536480. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=24595. Date accessed: 11 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.24595. Jan 2016

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