Funerary Placement in the Past and Present: Uses of Ethnographic Analogy for Archaeological Interpretation

Abstract As attested archaeologically, residential burial is the placement of the deceased within or in close proximity to houses and residential areas, and it occurs worldwide. What explains residential burial remains a puzzle. In this article, the frequency of residential burials in archaeological and ethnographic contexts are compared to assess whether residential permanence impacted the practice in different cultural contexts. We compiled two new datasets focused on residential burial practices. The first dataset includes 60 ethnographically documented cultures that were drawn from the Probability Sample Files in the eHRAF World Cultures database, and the second comprises 49 cases from the Simple Random Sample (SRS) in the eHRAF Archaeology database. Residential burial is significantly more common in the archaeological than in the ethnographic datasets. These findings have important implications for using ethnographic analogy to interpret mortuary practices archaeologically. Whereas the ethnographic descriptions tend to highlight changes in burial practice, often linked with the spread of monotheistic religions and state dispossession, it is suggested that settlements were much more often places where both the living and the dead coexisted—and felt at home—in the deep past.