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The Archaeological Study of Sacrifice
Sacrifice is one of the most common manifestations of human religious thought and behavior, yet archaeology has only recently begun to devote significant attention to the practice. This article reviews the diverse ways in which archaeologists have studied sacrifice and how work might proceed in the future. Both animal and human sacrifice are considered, along with the question of whether these two manifestations of ritual killing are significantly distinct. After examining how sacrifice can be identified in the archaeological record, the review outlines important new developments in bioarchaeology and zooarchaeology that facilitate study of the geographical origin of victims, lifestyle, and health prior to sacrifice, preparations for sacrifice, methods of ritual killing, and postmortem treatment. Proceeding beyond the mechanics of the practice, the article discusses how archaeologists can study sacrifice in its social context as well as its spatial and temporal dimensions.
Journal Article
After Collapse
From the Euphrates Valley to the southern Peruvian Andes, early complex societies have risen and fallen, but in some cases they have also been reborn. Prior archaeological investigation of these societies has focused primarily on emergence and collapse. This is the first book-length work to examine the question of how and why early complex urban societies have reappeared after periods of decentralization and collapse.Ranging widely across the Near East, the Aegean, East Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, these cross-cultural studies expand our understanding of social evolution by examining how societies were transformed during the period of radical change now termed \"collapse.\" They seek to discover how societal complexity reemerged, how second-generation states formed, and how these re-emergent states resembled or differed from the complex societies that preceded them.The contributors draw on material culture as well as textual and ethnohistoric data to consider such factors as preexistent institutions, structures, and ideologies that are influential in regeneration; economic and political resilience; the role of social mobility, marginal groups, and peripheries; and ethnic change. In addition to presenting a number of theoretical viewpoints, the contributors also propose reasons why regeneration sometimes does not occur after collapse. A concluding contribution by Norman Yoffee provides a critical exegesis of \"collapse\" and highlights important patterns found in the case histories related to peripheral regions and secondary elites, and to the ideology of statecraft.After Collapseblazes new research trails in both archaeology and the study of social change, demonstrating that the archaeological record often offers more clues to the \"dark ages\" that precede regeneration than do text-based studies. It opens up a new window on the past by shifting the focus away from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to their often more telling fall and rise.CONTRIBUTORSBennet Bronson, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Christina A. Conlee, Lisa Cooper, Timothy S. Hare, Alan L. Kolata, Marilyn A. Masson, Gordon F. McEwan, Ellen Morris, Ian Morris, Carlos Peraza Lope, Kenny Sims, Miriam T. Stark, Jill A. Weber, Norman Yoffee
eBook
TOWARDS A RADIOCARBON-BASED CHRONOLOGY OF URBAN NORTHERN MESOPOTAMIA IN THE EARLY TO MID-SECOND MILLENNIUM BC: INITIAL RESULTS FROM KURD QABURSTAN
Radiocarbon (14C) data for 2nd millennium BC urban sites in northern Mesopotamia have been lacking until recently. This article presents a preliminary dataset and Bayesian model addressing the Middle and early Late Bronze Age (Old Babylonian and pre/early Mittani) strata of Kurd Qaburstan—one of the largest archaeological sites on the Erbil plain of Iraqi Kurdistan. The results place the large, densely occupied and fortified Middle Bronze Age city in the first part of the 18th century BC, an outcome consistent with the site’s tentative identification as ancient Qabra. A long occupation gap (up to two centuries) probably ensued, before a smaller town confined to the high mound and part of the northeastern lower town resumed in the late 16th and early 15th centuries BC, possibly before this region became part of the Late Bronze Age kingdom of Mittani.
Journal Article
Memory and its Demolition: Ancestors, Animals and Sacrifice at Umm el-Marra, Syria
At Umm el-Marra in western Syria, a sequence of Bronze Age ritual installations facilitates the investigation of how Syrian elites employed memory, ancestor veneration, and animal (and perhaps human) sacrifice to reinforce their position, and how others used countermemory to contest it. Relevant data derive from an Early Bronze Age complex of elite tombs and animal interments and a Middle Bronze Age monumental platform and shaft containing animal and human bodies deposited ritually. Analysis of the spatial landscape, with patterns of access or inaccessibility, facilitates additional insights, as does the consideration of the intentionality or lack of it in ancient references to the past.
Journal Article
From Urban Origins to Imperial Integration in Western Syria: Umm el-Marra 2006, 2008
The Umm el-Marra Project is investigating the genesis and early history of societal complexity at a “second-tier” center of western Syria, focusing on the Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age occupations. In 2006 and 2008, important results were achieved for all three periods. Excavation of the Early Bronze Age elite mortuary complex on the acropolis supplies new data supporting the interpretation that the complex served to inscribe elite ideologies on the landscape in its invocation of social memory and ancestral figures. Evidence of a hiatus of several centuries after the Early Bronze occupation provides new information on the urban “collapse” of the era. Monumental and defensive architecture and the remains of ritual behavior reveal the character of urban regeneration in the period of Amorite dynasties in the Middle Bronze Age. Finally, the Late Bronze Age Mittani occupation furnishes data on the site’s incorporation into a large international empire. Additional figures can be found under this article’s abstract onAJA Online.
Journal Article
KURD QABURSTAN ON THE ERBIL PLAIN: FIELD RESEARCH 2016–2017
A 2016 study season and 2017 excavation season at the 95-hectare walled site of Kurd Qaburstan on the Erbil plain have generated a variety of new results. Geophysical survey on the lower town revealed details of the Middle Bronze occupation in the southeast part of the site, including the city wall, a large open area, streets, houses, and a monumental temple comparable to examples from Tell al Rimah, Aššur, and Larsa. Excavations confirmed the Middle Bronze date of the temple and explored further Middle Bronze contexts elsewhere on the lower town. On the High Mound North Slope, Middle Bronze occupation included a fortification wall and large-scale architecture inside it. On the High Mound East, Late Bronze architecture of apparent elite character was documented. Archaeobotanical analyses complementing the excavations reveal the existence of naan-style bread in both Middle and Late Bronze contexts. Given radiocarbon and ceramic results, the Middle Bronze occupation at Kurd Qaburstan is datable to c. 1800 B.C., while the Late Bronze phases on the High Mound East belong to an early LB horizon in the 16–15th centuries B.C., perhaps predating the imposition of Mittani political authority in the region.
Journal Article
Sacred Killing
What is sacrifice? How can we identify it in the archaeological
record? And what does it tell us about the societies that practice
it? Sacred Killing: The Archaeology of Sacrifice in the Ancient
Near East investigates these and other questions through the
evidence for human and animal sacrifice in the Near East from the
Neolithic to the Hellenistic periods. Drawing on sociocultural
anthropology and history in addition to archaeology, the book also
includes evidence from ancient China and a riveting eyewitness
account and analysis of sacrifice in contemporary India, which
engage some of the key issues at stake. Sacred Killing vividly
presents a variety of methods and theories in the study of one of
the most profound and disturbing ritual activities humans have ever
practiced.
eBook
Legal Threats to Cultural Exchange of Archaeological Materials
Legal action on behalf of victims of terrorism has attempted to force the sale of cultural artifacts on loan to U.S. institutions in order to compensate those victims. Such action jeopardizes the participation of American institutions in international cultural exchanges. The authors maintain that archaeological artifacts should not be sold to satisfy a court judgment, regardless of the actions of a particular regime, and that it should be possible for nations to share their cultural heritage without fear of loss.
Journal Article
A Third-Millennium B.C. Elite Mortuary Complex at Umm El-Marra, Syria: 2002 and 2004 Excavations
Excavations at Tell Umm el-Marra, Syria, in 2002 and 2004 revealed that the elite Tomb 1 discovered on the site acropolis in 2000 was part of a mid to late third-millennium B.C. mortuary complex devoted to individuals of high rank. The complex included a sequence of at least six tombs as well as installations with evidence of the ritual sacrifice of equids and perhaps human infants. Mortuary data allow for the consideration of the role of social status, gender, ideology, and other variables in the development of local complex society. It is hypothesized that elite ancestor veneration served to reinforce and legitimize local authority, and tomb disturbances are interpreted as desecrations intended to sever the connection between the interred ancestors and the living community. Following the period of the mortuary complex, a large, circular stone platform designated Monument 1 was constructed above it, indicating the continued special character of the Umm el-Marra acropolis in the early second millennium B.C. and the uses of social memory by the authorities of that period.
Journal Article