Book Description
A ground-breaking investigation of burial practices and social transformations in the era when Cypriot agricultural communities moved from village to urban life and became major players in the eastern Mediterranean copper trade. The author develops an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that enables her to define and elucidate the shifting spatial relationships between tombs and habitation areas, the elaboration of rituals involving secondary treatment and collective burial, and changing patterns of mortuary expenditure and symbolism throughout the Bronze Age. Keswani proposes that during the Early-Middle Bronze periods, the growing elaboration of mortuary festivities and their crucial importance in negotiating status hierarchies contributed to the intensification of Cypriot copper production and the expansion of interregional exchange relations. Subsequent changes in mortuary practice suggest that the importance of collective burial rites and traditional modes of ritual display diminished over the course of the Late Bronze Age, as urban institutions multiplied and the bases of social prestige were transformed.
About the Author
Priscilla Keswani has taught at Washington State University and the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus is a ground-breaking investigation of burial practices and social transformations in the era when Cypriot agricultural communities moved from village to urban life and became major players in the eastern Mediterranean copper trade." Confronting the many interpretive challenges posed by tombs used for multiple interments, the author develops an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that enables her to define and elucidate the shifting spatial relationships between tombs and habitation areas, the elaboration of rituals involving secondary treatment and collective burial, and changing patterns of mortuary expenditure and symbolism throughout the Bronze Age.
SYNOPSIS
American anthropologist Keswani has engaged in field projects in Cyprus for many years, and has written widely about burial practices, political organization, exchange systems, and pottery. Here she integrates parts of her doctoral with research she and others have conducted during the intervening 20 years to describe mortuary practices in Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age Cyprus. She examines the details and the long-term trends of these practices, explores the aspects of social structure and ideology expressed in mortuary rituals, and elucidates how the social structure and social change were actively produced in the ritual context. She finds that funerary celebrations were a main venue in which kin groups created and enacted their ancestral ideologies and asserted their prestige. Distributed in the US by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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