Theme:
Theories and methods in archaeological sciences
Session format:
Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each
Title:
Complex biographies: high-resolution chronological methods applied to the study of Late prehistoric funerary palimpsests
Content:
Funerary practices normally appear to archaeologists as intricate palimpsests. The frequent use of funerary spaces during long periods, produces a mass of human bones together with other kind of ritual depositions that were found piled on top of each other, overlapping in many occasions. Primary depositions were typically disturbed by later activities, mainly subsequent burials, but also by horizontal and vertical displacements as a result of factors such as gravity and voids created by the decomposition of soft tissue. Approaching the study of these archaeological contexts is as much as trying to understand the different practices that involve the accumulation and transformation of successive and partially preserved ritual activities. As Gavin Lucas (2005) has pointed out, palimpsests “refer to the traces of multiple, overlapping activities over variable periods of time and the variable erasing of earlier traces”.
Temporality appears in such archaeological contexts as a key feature to untangle their complex biographies. The stratigraphic sequence is an obvious criterion but its degree of resolution is low when we confront with layers of multiple events formed during an uncertain chronological period. High-resolution chronological methods and the statistical modelling of large series of dates emerge as the best way to understand not only the general temporality of palimpsests, but also to identify different episodes of deposition, their time span, intensity and chronological hiatuses. The aim of this session is to discuss the particular nature of this kind of contexts and how we can explore their temporality with different high-resolution chronological methods.
Keywords:
Funerary practices, Palimpsests, Chronology, Prehistory
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Main organiser:
Marta Díaz-Zorita Bonilla (Germany) 1
Co-organisers:
Dr. Gonzalo Aranda Jiménez (Spain) 2
Dr. Pedro Díaz del Río (Spain) 3
Dr. Águeda Lozano Medina (Spain) 2
Affiliations:
1. Tübingen Universität
2. University of Granada
3. CSIC, Instituto de Historia, Madrid
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