Secondary burials and the construction, performance and communication of group identities in the eastern Mediterranean between the III and the beginning of the II millennium BC: a pilot study

Secondary burial is a complex multi-stage practice that involves the deliberate manipulation of the skeleton through the disarticulation and/or amputation of parts and their re-location and definitive deposition in different contexts, and has long been considered to be a necessary step through which the deceased achieved the status of ancestor. In the last twenty years, however, several scholars have argued that its ultimate aim was the creation of intergenerational memory that, in turn, might have been functional to the creation and maintenance of social relationships. Aside from problems of interpretation, this particular treatment of the human body also raises problems of recognition depending not only on the strategies of manipulation adopted, which might facilitate or hinder their identification as deliberate actions, but also on the type of tombs used. Indeed, the manipulation of human bones in tombs that were used for multiple burials over long periods of time has generally been considered to be an unplanned action that was functional to the creation of space for the newly deceased. In this paper we will focus on several funerary contexts from the Greek mainland and Crete dating between the III and the beginning of the II millennium BC and will argue (1) that the disarticulated skeletons recorded in the collective tombs of the III millennium need to be regarded as secondary burials, i.e. as the outcome of deliberate actions aimed at creating and/or maintaining social identities; and (2) that the shift from collective to individual burials recorded in the course of the II millennium BC mirrored a substantial change in the strategies through which the communities were constructing, performing and communicating their social identities.