Residential burial and social memory in the middle bronze age levant

Abstract

Funerary practices in the Middle Bronze Age in the Levant (ca. 2000-1500 b.c.e.) exhibited a high degree of diversity in burial architecture, elaboration of body treatment, and complexity of funerary rituals. Here I discuss the variations in funerary activities that were carried out within residential contexts with a focus on inhumations in masonry- constructed chamber tombs (fig. 1). Such tombs have been found at urban centers across the Levant, where they were used actively for decades or longer in a process of multiple, successive inhumation (fig. 2). The fragmented nature of the skeletal and material remains found inside these tombs indicate that the assemblages had been disturbed periodically in antiquity through a process of compound inhumation, which involved multiple episodes of repositioning.