Lecture Summaries: 13 October, 2004

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Death Rituals and Social Change in the Late Bronze-Early Iron Age transition
by
Jack Green

The last few centuries of the second Millennium BC (c.1300-1000 BCE) saw important socio-economic, political and cultural developments in the Southern Levant, ranging from the Egyptian presence in Late Bronze Age Canaan, to the settlement of Sea Peoples and Israelites in the Early Iron Age. This lecture examines the varied strands of evidence available from mortuary contexts for this complex period and region, and attempts to put some ‘flesh back on the bones’. Themes include the impact of Egyptian domination on burial customs, attitudes to death and the body, foreign burials and ethnicity, status and kinship, and ritual expression in death. We shall look at some of the past explanations put forward by archaeologists for regional differences in burial customs, and attempts to identify the ‘cult of the dead’ archaeologically. As we shall see, the poor preservation of burial sites and a lack of contextual information is a limiting factor overall. By contrast, the well-preserved and extensively excavated cemetery of Tell es-Sa’idiyeh (Jordan) exhibits aspects of both continuity and change in burial customs across the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition. Developments at Sa’idiyeh include a change from individual to communal interment, changes in body ornamentation and the provision of food/drink offerings, varied forms of secondary treatment, and shifts in the expression of wealth and status. It is argued here that differential responses to widespread socio-political and economic changes in the LB-Iron transition, had a significant impact on the ways in which the dead were perceived and accordingly treated by the living.