ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the ways in which the analysis of mortuary practice in archaeology moves between metanarratives and small-scale histories of human experience. It argues that while all deaths cause change and instability, mortuary rituals become arenas to handle this crisis. To be effective, rituals must make sense within their context, and as cultures and societies change, so do the rituals, albeit rarely in a straightforward and simple way. Archaeology has often used observations of change in the mortuary record as passive indices of broader social and cultural change – often favouring clean, simple and monocausal explanations. The chapters in this book invite us to take a closer look at the archaeological record and analyse it at a human scale. This perspective allows the authors to approach mortuary rituals as mechanisms in the process, and as a result a more diverse, more complex, and more interesting past is revealed in the archaeological record.
