Death and Burial within the Ancient Levant (4500-550 BCE) : Challenging the Normative

This book explores the type and variety of burial practices within the Ancient Levant and challenges the assumptions of previous attempts to find a normative burial practice.

Exploring the dazzling variety of ways in which the living deal with the dead, this book utilises big data projects, new excavations, and shifting theoretical frameworks and methodologies to highlight the sheer variety of burial practices in the Ancient Levant. Theorizing that some types of burial are greatly underrepresented in the data, this volume argues for the necessity of analysing both the existing and non-existing data at multiple scales of analysis. Thus, rather than attempting to identify a “normative” or “typical” burial, the proposed volume explores the multitude of ways in which the living approached and interacted with the dead across the ancient Levant, from the late Chalcolithic through to the Iron Age (5th-1st millennia BCE). In doing so it acknowledges and foregrounds variability, not only in terms of so-called “atypicality”, but also in terms of burials and practices that have been mistakenly lumped together (e.g., collective, or secondary burials) in the drive to streamline and produce narratives of similarity and normative behaviour. This volume also explores the broader patterns and temporal/spatial shifts that shed light on wider changes in the ways in which humans perceive(d) of the dead and themselves (the living) over time.

Whilst predominantly focused on the modern regions of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, this book also engages with these broader themes across Western Asia and the Mediterranean, adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to understanding temporal and spatial variability. This book is for students and researchers of the Ancient Near East and the archaeology of death and burial.