The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial reviews the current state of mortuary archaeology and its practice, highlighting its often contentious place in the modern socio-politics of archaeology. It contains forty-four chapters which focus on the history of the discipline and its current scientific techniques and methods. Written by leading, international scholars in the field, it derives its examples and case studies from a wide range of time periods, such as the middle palaeolithic to the twentieth century, and geographical areas which include Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Combining up-to-date knowledge of relevant archaeological research with critical assessments of the theme and an evaluation of future research trajectories, it draws attention to the social, symbolic, and theoretical aspects of interpreting mortuary archaeology. The volume is well-illustrated with maps, plans, photographs, and illustrations and is ideally suited for students and researchers. a must-have reference on the current state of archaeological research into death and burial Dr John Manley, Current ArchaeologyLIST OF FIGURES ; LIST OF TEXT BOXES ; LIST OF TABLES ; LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ; 1. Beautiful Things and Bones of Desire: Emerging Issues in the Archaeology of Death and Burial ; PART 1: APPROACHES TO DEATH AND BURIAL ; 2. Cultural History, Race, and Peoples ; 3. Did Prehistoric Man Bury his Deada Early Debates on Palaeolithic Burials in a National Context ; 4. Death, Burial, and Social Representation ; 5. Death and the Cultural Entanglements of the Experienced, the Learned, the Expressed, the Contested, and the Imagined ; PART 2: THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE ; 6. The Bioarchaeology of Health and Well-being: Its Contribution to Understanding the Past ; 7. The Use of DNA Analysis in the Archaeology of Death and Burial ; 8. Stable Isotope Analysis of Humans ; 9. Cremation: Excavation, Analysis and Interpretation of Material from Cremation-related Contexts ; 10. Contextualising Grave Goods: Theoretical Perspectives and Methodological Implications ; PART 3: THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE OF DEATH ACROSS CULTURAL CONTEXTS ; 11. Death, Memory, and Material Culture: Catalytic Commemoration and the Cremated Dead ; 12. African Perspectives on Death, Burial, and Mortuary Archaeology ; 13. The Place of Veneration in Early South Asican Buddhism ; 14. The Archaeology of Death and Burial in the Islamic World ; 15. Burial of the Christian Dead in the Later Middle Ages ; 16. The Unburied Dead ; 17. Upper Palaeolithic Mortuary Practices in Eurasia: A Critical Look at the Burial Record ; 18. Power and Society: Mesolithic Europe ; 19. Archaeological Study of Mortuary Practices in the Eastern United States ; 20. The Living and the Dead in Later Prehistoric Iberia ; 21. The Powerful Dead of the Inca ; 22. Land-ownership and Landscape Belief: Introduction and Contexts ; 23. Megaliths in North-West Europe: the Cosmology of Sacred Landscapes ; 24. Creating Death: an Archaeology of Dying ; 25. Treating Bodies Transformative and Communicative Practices ; 26. Preserving the Body ; 27. Cremations in Culture and Cosmology ; 28. Identities in Transformation: Identities, Funerary Rites, and the Mortuary Process ; 29. Death and Gender ; 30. Ancient Identities: Age, Gender, and Ethnicity in Ancient Greek Burials ; 31. Ethnicity and Gender in Roman Funerary Commemoration: Case Studies from the Empire s Frontiers ; 32. Engendering Ancestors through Death Ritual in Ancient China ; 33. Death, Emotion, and the Household among the Late Moche ; 34. Belief and the Archaeology of Death ; 35. Insights into Early Mortuary Practices of Homo ; 36. Equipping and Stripping the Dead: A Case-study on the Procurement, Compilation, Arrangement, and Fragmentation of Grave Inventories in New Kingdom Thebes ; PART 4: THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF BURIAL ARCHAEOLOGY ; 37. Sapient trouble-tombs'a Archaeologists'Mmoral Obligations to the Dead ; 38. Looting Matters Early Bronze Age Cemeteries of Jordan's southeast Dead Sea Plain in the Past and Present ; 39. How Ancients Become Ammunition: Politics and Ethics of the Human Skeleton ; 40. In Search of Others: the History and Legacy of 'race' collections ; 41. Repatriation, Reburial, and Biological Research in Australia: Rhetoric and Practice ; 42. The Archaeology and Material Culture of Modern Military Death ; 43. The Exhumation of Civilian Victims of Conflict and Human Rights Abuses: Political, Ethical, and Theoretical Considerations ; 44. Contested Burials: The Dead as Witnesses, Victims, and Tools