Deviant Treatment of the Body as a Mortuary Ritual

This chapter examines the social meaning of deviant mortuary practices from an osteoarchaeological perspective using skeletal remains from the Middle Jomon Period (ca. 3500–2500 cal BC) found at the Kusakari shell mound. The analyses focus on attributes associated with mortuary body treatments: 1) arrangements of remains, 2) body posture and direction, and 3) the location of burials within the cemetery. Although the usual body postures were dorsal during the period, one individual was laid in a prone position with an unusual body direction compared with other burials. The skeletal arrangement also revealed that the individual had been disarticulated early in the postmortem decay process; however, the remains were located within the usual cemetery area. Based on these results and the extraordinary amount of varied faunal remains in the vicinity, the deviant mortuary treatments appeared to arise from a specific social persona rather than an unusual context of death, such as drowning, suicide, warfare, or other cause.

The Odd Man Out in a Pioneer Cemetery at Seccombe Lake Park, San Bernardino, California

In 1989, a pioneer cemetery associated with the 19th-century Latter-Day Saints colony in San Bernardino, California, was discovered during the construction of a baseball field. Among the remains of 12 individuals recovered from the cemetery were those of a young man of about 22 years, whose burial treatment differed notably from the other intact interments at the site. Unlike these coffin burials, Burial 5 was found in a sprawling position, apparently tossed unceremoniously into the grave pit. Dental morphological traits identified the genetic affinities of this man as Native American, perhaps a member of the local Cahuilla or Serrano tribes, whereas the other individuals appeared to be of European ancestry, an interpretation consistent with records kept by community members. A possible identity for this individual came from a journal account describing the shooting of an “Indian” by the local sheriff, who was then brought to the fort, died, and was buried before his fellow tribesmen arrived to determine what had transpired and perhaps to claim his remains. This chapter explores the identity and life history of this young man in the context of the history of the valley and the pioneer community in which he met his death.

Out of Range?

Çatalhöyük is most well known for its Neolithic settlement, but the site also served as a cemetery during the Bronze Age, as well as the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods. During the Neolithic, Çatalhöyük is distinctive as a place for both the living and the dead, but thereafter the site becomes more closely associated with the dead. This chapter discusses four examples of non-normative burials from different time periods at the site, including two Neolithic burials: one of a mature male buried with a sheep and another of a young male with a congenital deformity; a Roman period double burial with an atypical grave orientation; and an isolated twentieth-century burial of a woman from the local village, which represents the last known burial on the mound. Osteobiographical information and sociocultural context are used to assess the significance of each burial. We also question how normative and non-normative burials are typically defined in the archaeological record.

The “Vampires” of Lesbos

Greece has a long tradition of vampire beliefs that often involved treating corpses or graves to dispel vampires, practices that should be archaeologically visible and fairly common. However, proposed archaeological cases are surprisingly few. Here we review normative burial traditions in early modern Greece, as well as documentary and ethnographic evidence for vampire-related mortuary ritual. This clarifies the archaeological signs these rituals should leave behind and their deeper significance as attempts to restore the smooth course of a disrupted death journey. Two Ottoman-era burials recovered on the island of Lesbos are discussed as likely instances of vampire ritual, and we consider why vampire burials might be underreported archaeologically and offer some suggestions for their improved detection and study in the future.

Atypical Burials in Early Medieval Poland

Excavations at early medieval cemeteries in Poland often reveal traces of mortuary behavior which deviate considerably from the normative treatment of the dead. Most of these atypical practices involved interring the corpses in prone position, laying or throwing stones on them, or cutting their heads off, but other variants have also been recorded, e.g., covering the bodies with clay or piercing them with stakes and other sharp objects. Graves of this kind have always been difficult to interpret. In the early twentieth century, Polish scholars only mentioned them briefly in their publications, without offering any detailed commentary about their possible meanings, while in the 1970s, the problematic term “anti-vampire burials” was coined, implying that these were burials of vampires. This article provides a critical overview of past and present studies on atypical burials in Poland by drawing on the results of a research project entitled Bad Death in the Early Middle Ages: Atypical Burials from Poland in a Comparative Perspective. The discussion incorporates new and previously unpublished evidence and a reassessment of archival documentation kept in a range of Polish museums and scientific institutions, which challenges the previously accepted “vampire” interpretation and sophisticates our understanding of unusual funerary phenomena.

Variation beyond the Grave

The study of deviant burials is enhanced through a social bioarchaeology perspective that incorporates multiple lines of evidence to better capture the nuances of these unusual mortuary practices and the life histories of individuals receiving such treatment. This chapter presents the range of unusual burials from an early medieval cemetery at the site of Libice nad Cidlinou in the Czech Republic. Additionally, three burials are examined in depth to explore how individual life histories might contribute to atypical mortuary treatment. The diversity revealed in terms of these individuals’ demographics and skeletal data, as well as the wide variation in burial contexts, highlights the interpretive challenges presented by multiple unusual burials at a single site. However, these burials also provide different opportunities to examine how identity, practice, and ideology might intersect at the graveside.

Defining Non-Normative Practices in a Diverse Funerary Record

In the past few decades, researchers have increasingly come to understand that the archaeological record of the Caribbean region shows a high degree of sociocultural variation across the archipelago and through time. Funerary treatment in the precolonial and early colonial Caribbean archipelago in particular was variable, hampering assessment of potentially non-normative funerary practices. Alongside multidisciplinary contextual assessment of funerary practice, we use social network analysis to study relations within the dataset to explore other indicators of non-normative practices. This approach demonstrates that altering the scale of analysis (i.e., local vs. regional) can drastically change our concept of what can be considered non-normative. Network analysis revealed relationships within the diverse funerary patterns, including co-occurrence of uncommon modes of burial at sites, suggesting that even rare modes of burial comprised widely recognized practices.

Interpreting a Multiple Burial in an Early Ancestral Pueblo Village

This chapter describes a multiple burial on a house floor in an early Ancestral Pueblo Village in Southwestern Colorado. A survey of contemporary burials in Pueblo I (AD 700–900) villages reveals that house burials from this period are not common, but neither are they unique or uniform. Tracking thirty years of interpretation of this burial points to the importance of fine-grained contextual taphonomy, and suggests that we expand the scope of what is considered to be normative burial and body position. The changing archaeological interpretation of this Mesa Verde Region burial highlights the place of mortuary treatment in the evolving narrative of the political and social history of large early villages.

Afterword

It is both a pleasure and a privilege to be asked to write an afterword to a collection of essays concerning a topic that for many years has lain at the core of my interests in the behavior of past societies. When, in the early 1990s, I first embarked on the study of deviant burials—and more on that particular turn of phrase in a moment—mortuary archaeology writ large had shifted in its emphasis from the descriptive and typological approaches that had typified its early development, through concerns about hierarchy and ranking, and had turned increasingly to nuanced social considerations. Life cycle and gender, illness and care, among other topics, steadily grew in importance as worthy of study. Twenty-five or so years ago, however, descriptions of people at the fringes of their respective societies were hard to find in the archaeological literature: “otherness” as a concept materialized in the burial record was largely unexplored beyond a few graphically spectacular and deeply intriguing finds, such as the northern European bog-bodies or the Andean mummified children....

Natural Mummification as a Non-Normative Mortuary Custom of Modern Period Sicily (1600–1800)

The island of Sicily is home to a large number of spontaneously mummified remains, dating from the 16th to 19th centuries CE, most of which are located in the renowned Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, where the oldest mummy is buried (Brother Silvestro da Gubbio, who died in 1599). These remains represent unique evidence of deviant practices within the South of Italy, as the large majority of remains was interred in communal graves, cemeteries, or burials within religious buildings. Only a selection of the local population, mainly formed by members of the aristocracy, middle class citizens, and the clergy, underwent a complex treatment that included dehydration of the corpses, cleaning, and filling of the cavities with either animal or vegetal matter, and eventually clothing and exposure in either a wall niche or a coffin. Since 2007, the Sicily Mummy Project has aimed to scientifically investigate this important biocultural heritage and understand local mummification practices. This study sheds new light on mortuary customs and funeral variability in the region and contextualizes and interprets this treatment of the dead through comparisons with the anthropological and sociological literature.