Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus
"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...
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American anthropologist Keswani has engaged in field projects in Cyprus for many years, and has written widely about burial practices, political organization, exchange systems, and pottery. Here she integrates parts of her doctoral with research she and others have conducted during the intervening 20 years to describe mortuary practices in Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age Cyprus. She examines the details and the long-term trends of these practices, explores the aspects of social structure and ideology expressed in mortuary rituals, and elucidates how the social structure and social change were actively produced in the ritual context. She finds that funerary celebrations were a main venue in which kin groups created and enacted their ancestral ideologies and asserted their prestige. Distributed in the US by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
1Introduction12Mortuary ritual and society : some theoretical considerations63The archaeological record of mortuary practice in Cyprus : formation processes, sampling issues, and a methodology for interpretation224The Early and Middle Bronze Age375The Late Bronze Age846Mortuary ritual, social structure, and macro-processual change in the Cypriot Bronze Age145Epilogue : realizing the potential of mortuary analysis - methodological imperatives and directions for future research160
