THE SPACE AND PLACE OF DEATH

Archaeologists typically study death from the perspective of mortuary patterns, devising classifications of disposal facilities and their dead inhabitants along parameters such as technique and materials of tomb construction, position and orientation of the deceased, and paleobiology of the interred populations. From this information a society's organization and level of sociopolitical complexity is reconstructed. Less common among archaeologists is attention to the spatiality of death practice, the unifying focus of this volume. Archaeologists are concerned with issues such as the siting of mortuary facilities; the interplay of agency and expressive style in the funerary context as these relate to the physical space and taking place of mortuary custom; and the recognition, cultural reconstruction, and explanation of death landscapes. These perspectives provide a more holistic framework for achieving an ethnographically sensitive archaeology of death. The studies in this volume range widely in areal location, cultural and temporal focus, and theoretical approach. As a collection they suggest the importance of landscape and physical context in understanding mortuary rituals.

HELAINE SILVERMAN is Professor of Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, LAS Global Studies, and Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. Her scholarship is in Central Andean archaeology, complex societies, urbanism, architectural and landscape history, spatial theory, heritage theory and management, critical museum studies, tourism, cultural memory, identity, globalization, nationalism, appropriations of the past, cultures of death, and Southeast Asian archaeology and history.

DAVID B. SMALL is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Lehigh University. His research areas are State Formation, Texts and Archaeology , Complex Society, Architecture and Society, Theoretical Approaches in Archaeology, Mediterranean Archaeology, Economic Archaeology, Mortuary Archaeology , Historical Ecology, Heterarchy and Mesoamerican Archaeology.