Funerary Practices: Their Study and Their Potential

The recent development of funerary archaeology allows a reversal of perspectives. For thirty years now, the study of funerary behaviours in ancient societies has benefited from major advances in methodology. The taphonomy of the corpse and, more broadly, the various approaches developed by archaeothanatology, have provided specialists with more efficient tools to understand the organisation of mortuary practices. If one now pays close attention to the traces and vestiges left after the funeral act, it is undoubtedly thanks to the progress made in biological anthropology, which has encouraged the field archaeologist to make the necessary observations on the bone remains and their interaction with archaeological contexts, graves, necro-soils and cremation areas. The attention was for a long time focused on the funerary monuments or the objects deposited in the tombs, but the development of biological anthropology, placing the remains of the deceased back at the centre of the research, has finally given a new importance to the stratigraphy of structures, taphonomy and the study of material. Archaeological excavation allows to recognise, sometimes with great detail, how and when the deceased was installed in his grave, how and how long his memory was kept or celebrated. When you burn, bury or commemorate a deceased person, it inevitably leaves traces; many traces that, once studied, will allow for the funeral to be restored, from the preparation of the deceased, the time of the funeral to the burial and subsequent commemoration, which, for a time only, keeps the memory of the deceased alive.

The study of one of Pompeii’s necropolises provides an opportunity to show the full potential of rigorous funerary archaeology in the field and in the questioning of the gestures and practices that can be reconstructed from the traces left in funerary contexts. Such an archaeology of the funerary gesture, as well as informing us about the conceptions of death in Antiquity, reveals the thousand and one ways of dealing with a human tradition.

Keywords:

funerary practices, archeothanatology, methodology, burial culture, Pompeii