An exceptional Late Neolithic burial discovered at Puisserguier, southern France, contains a skeleton buried with its head deposited on its torso; the disposal of the rest of the body follows a standard pattern for individual burials of this period. The authors discuss the nature of this deposit in terms of its funerary status.

Humans have utilised caves for funerary activities for millennia and their unique preservational conditions provide a wealth of evidence for treatments of the dead. This paper examines the evidence for funerary practices in the caves of Scotland and northern England from the Bronze Age to the Roman Iron Age (c. 2200 bc–ad 400) in the context of later prehistoric funerary ritual. Results suggest significant levels of perimortem trauma on human skeletal remains from caves relative to those from non-cave sites. We also observe a recurrent pattern of deposition involving inhumation of neonates in contrast to excarnation of older individuals.

Many thousands of burials have been excavated from across the Roman world, documenting a variety of funerary practices and rites. Individual burials, however, sometimes stand out for their atypical characteristics. The authors report the discovery of a cremation burial from ancient Sagalassos that differs from contemporaneous funerary deposits. In this specific context, the cremated human remains were not retrieved but buried in situ, surrounded by a scattering of intentionally bent nails, and carefully sealed beneath a raft of tiles and a layer of lime. For each of these practices, textual and archaeological parallels can be found elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, collectively suggesting that magical beliefs were at work.

The Final Neolithic and the Bronze Age (3000–800 BC) are periods of great transformations in the communities inhabiting the area of modern-day Belgium, as testified by archaeological evidence showing an increasing complexity in social structure, technological transformations, and large-scale contacts. By combining 599 available radiocarbon dates with 88 new 14C dates from 23 from funerary sites, this paper uses kernel density estimates to model the temporality in the use of inhumation vs. cremation burials, cremation deposits in barrows vs. flat graves, and cremation grave types. Additionally, by including 78 dates from settlements, changes in population dynamics were reconstructed. The results suggest a phase of demographic contraction around ca. 2200–1800 BC highlighted by a lack of dates from both settlements and funerary contexts, followed by an increase in the Middle Bronze Age, with the coexistence of cremation deposits in barrows and, in a lower number, in flat graves. At the end of the 14th–13th century BC, an episode of cultural change with the almost generalized use of flat graves over barrows is observed. Regional differentiations in the funerary practices and the simultaneous use of different grave types characterize the Late Bronze Age.

Ever since large amounts of Bell Beaker complex pottery were first discovered within megalithic graves in north-western France, the Bell Beaker has been tightly tied to the ‘megalithic phenomenon’. However, the fact of construction of these various kinds of megalithic monument during the Middle to Late Neolithic pre-dates the users of Bell Beakers. While this is a case of the re-use of older funerary monuments, it is assumed that Bell Beaker funerary practices witness a shift from Neolithic collective burial to individual inhumation. For a long time finds from the megalithic graves have constituted our main source of information on the Bell Beaker complex in north-western France. However, these ‘artificial caves’ have biased our understanding of the Bell Beaker complex and, in particular, of its funerary practices. The re-assessment of old finds and recent large-scale excavations have brought to light a large number of new sites, revealing a greater diversity in Bell Beaker funerary practices in the region than had been perceived previously. In the first part, we set the broader picture, stating what we know or can say about funerary practices during the Recent and Late Neolithic (3350–2550 bc), before the beginning of the Bell Beaker phenomenon. We then discuss the different Bell Beaker burial practices (2550–1950 bc), their chronological and regional variabilities, and, above all, the research biases that might have affected their understanding.

This article presents results from the excavation and analysis of 11 slab-cist tombs associated with the site of Ayawiri, one of the largest hillforts in the western Lake Titicaca Basin during the Late Intermediate period (LIP; AD 1100–1450). These semi-subterranean tombs typically contain commingled human remains. Variation between and within tombs in the number of individuals, the body parts represented, and the degree of skeletal articulation points to a complex burial practice that likely involved tomb reopening, successive burial, and even the deposition of select body parts. Demographic and mortuary profiles suggest that burial practices were decentralized and flexible, structured by shared attitudes toward “the dead” and the dead body but also subject to the prerogatives and preferences of semi-autonomous corporate groups. This study advances our understanding of a lesser-known mortuary tradition in the Lake Titicaca Basin—one long overshadowed by more prominent burial towers (chullpas)—and sheds new light on the complex interactions that took place between the living and the dead during the LIP.

At times funerary practices do not end with the deposition of the corpses in their final resting place, because occasionally these supposedly definitive burials are disturbed later. When we can confirm that people were mainly responsible for these disturbances, even when other natural taphonomic factors are present, then we have a situation of anthropic postfunerary manipulation of bodies and graves. Some precontact sites in northeastern Brazil have mortuary contexts with “anomalies” in the deposition of bodies into their graves. Applying a taphonomy-based approach, we analyze these cases and compare them to other burials with similar characteristics from central-eastern Brazil in our discussion of the “alternative” phenomenon of postburial manipulation. The evidence suggests that the anthropic disturbance of older burials and corpses should be understood not as a random event, but as an integral and meaningful part of the mortuary practices of ancient inhabitants from across different regions of Brazil throughout the Holocene. With this work we highlight not only unusual mortuary patterns of precontact human groups in Brazil and South America but also the importance of a taphonomic approach to understanding the complexity and variability of funerary and postfunerary actions.

Early Neolithic funerary practices and the meaning of complete ceramic vessels found isolated are poorly researched topics in western Iberia. However, recent archaeological salvage excavations at Armazéns Sommer and Palácio Ludovice in Lisbon have revealed individual burial pits of male individuals laid in a foetal position and directly associated with necked vessels. These discoveries suggest that finds of isolated vessels, known since the beginning of the twentieth century in Portugal and usually found fortuitously apparently without archaeological context, may also have originally belonged to similar burials, unnoticed by their finders. This hypothesis opens new perspectives for the interpretation of such finds, which are inventoried in the present article.

The Late Intermediate period in the south-central Andes is known for the widespread use of open sepulchres called chullpas by descent-based ayllus to claim rights to resources and express idealized notions of how society should be organized. Chullpas, however, were rarer on the coast, with the dead often buried individually in closed tombs. This article documents conditions under which these closed tombs were used at the site of Quilcapampa on the coastal plain of southern Peru, allowing an exploration into the ways that funerary traditions were employed to both reflect and generate community affiliation, ideals about sociopolitical organization, and land rights. After a long hiatus, the site was reoccupied and quickly expanded through local population aggregation and highland migrations. An ayllu organization that made ancestral claims to specific resources was poorly suited to these conditions, and the site's inhabitants instead seem to have organized themselves around the ruins of Quilcapampa's earlier occupation. In describing what happened in Quilcapampa, we highlight the need for a better understanding of the myriad ways that Andean peoples used mortuary customs to structure the lives of the living during a period of population movements and climate change.

This article offers a new perspective on a diverse corpus of high-status Western Slavic objects from the domain of the Piast dynasty in Poland, dated between the tenth and eleventh centuries ad. It is proposed that the lavish zoomorphic decorations, often depicting snakes, found on jewellery, weapons, and equestrian equipment reflected Western Slavic pre-Christian religious ideas and served as material markers of elite identity. The results of this study lead to a more nuanced understanding of Western Slavic worldviews and their material expressions, paving the way for new investigations into cultural interactions both within and beyond the Slavic homelands.

Parramatta was the second British settlement established in mainland Australia, and for a time was the largest. Its burial ground and monuments, the oldest surviving British cemetery in mainland Australia, provides important evidence for the aspirations, attitudes and practices within this fledgling community. It reveals the role of improvement concepts and practices in popular as well as governmental culture, representing an experiment in secular control over burial decades before the urban non-denominational cemetery first appears in England. The primary chronological focus here is from the foundation of settlement in 1788 to c 1840, by which time free settlers as well as emancipists had transformed Parramatta from a convict settlement into a colonial town.

Between the sixth and eighth centuries ad, the practice of furnished burial was widely abandoned in favour of a much more standardized, unfurnished rite. This article examines that transition by considering the personhood and agency of the corpse, the different ways bonds of possession can form between people and objects, and what happens to those bonds at death. By analysing changing grave good use across western Europe, combined with an in-depth analysis of the Alamannic cemetery of Pleidelsheim, and historical evidence for perceptions of the corpse, the author argues that the change in grave good use marks a fundamental change in the perception of corpses.

This article presents the different types of pendant crosses found in the burials of a Middle Byzantine graveyard at the Pisidian settlement of Sagalassos in south-western Turkey. The aim is to study both the chronology and function of these pectoral crosses. A variety of sources are used, ranging from stratigraphy and radiocarbon dates to contextual information and skeletal data. The crosses could be broadly dated to between the eleventh and thirteenth century AD, thus providing an indication of the lifespan of the cemetery. Moreover, the typological evolution, which was corroborated by parallels from other sites in the Byzantine Empire, allowed us to establish a horizontal stratigraphy for the graveyard. The pectoral crosses discussed here shed light on the funerary practices in this part of the Byzantine world. These generally proved to belong to very young children. They constitute a category of material culture that not only provides insights into the lives of the Byzantine population, especially in early childhood, but are also the material manifestation of the intersection between popular religion, magic, and funerary rites.

The protohistoric graveyards of north-western Pakistan were first excavated in the 1960s, but their chronology is still debated, along with their relationship to broader regional issues of ethnic and cultural change. Recent excavation of two graveyards in the Swat Valley has provided new dating evidence and a much better understanding both of grave structure and treatment of the dead. Secondary burial was documented at Udegram, along with the use of perishable containers and other objects as grave goods. The complexity of the funerary practices reveal the prolonged interaction between the living and the dead in protohistoric Swat.

This paper assesses the applicability of modern notions of gender identity and individuality, and examines ‘relationality’ as a key dimension structuring social identity during the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Early Iron Age in western Iberia through a focus on funerary practices and stelae- and statue-menhir-making. It is argued that these practices were involved in the recollection of genealogical and mythical pasts. They entailed the creation of the dead and the ancestors as relational entities through the explicit inscription of graphic and spatial relations. Ultimately, these practices were structured by, and structured, shared understandings of the self and the roles of the deceased and the ancestors in social life—understandings in which ‘relationality’ played a seminal role.