Osborne, J.F., 2011. Secondary mortuary practice and the bench tomb: structure and practice in Iron Age Judah. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 70(1), pp. 35-53.
This article relates to the archaeological study of kinship by "seeking to illuminate the meaning associated specifically with the secondary handling of skeletal remains within the bench tomb and the implications this secondary mortuary practice has on current understandings of ancient Judahite social structure and cultural practice" (p. 36). Unlike the article we looked at in class today, it does not attempt to discern kinship or aspects of a wider social structure based mainly on skeletal remains and distribution data in cemeteries but rather uses material culture in conjunction with ethnographic and textual evidence.
The article reviews anthropological/ethnographic research to determine what ought to be practiced by those who engage in secondary mortuary treatments, then compares this to how secondary rituals were practiced with the Judahite bench tombs and how this relates to how beliefs were outlined in the Hebrew Bible. The article posits that the presence of bone repositories (as well as bone piles separate from benches in cases where actual repositories were absent) in bench tombs indicates them as locations of secondary interments and were, as it has been traditionally interpreted, used to allow continued use of the tomb but that these bench tombs also served a more important symbolic function for the Judahite people and how they related to their dead (p. 37). The author's main purpose in discerning this symbolic function is to attempt to determine exactly how kinship systems were constructed and given meaning in ancient Israel via cultural practices such as burial as researches, for a long time now, have recognized that kinship played a highly important role in Judahite culture but have not really looked to determine how kinship was constituted through culture and the processes that went into constructing kinship. The author argues, then, that the secondary mortuary practices involved in the use of these bench tombs were an integral part in the (re)construction of overall social structure, including kinship (pp.37-8).
The article we read for class seems to be attempting to determine from mortuary evidence simply that some sort of kinship system existed at Hawikku and that this system was used for cemetery consideration. The article that I've discusses here, however, does something different: it recognizes a widely agreed upon and evidenced kinship system and its importance but uses its own study of mortuary evidence to determine how this kinship system was both created and reinforced in mortuary contexts rather than merely reflected (shows mortuary practices as an important and active part in the dynamic process of cultural creation as opposed to inactive cultural reflection).
From this article it seems that a more recent trend in the study of kinship in archaeology is more towards the importance of mortuary practices in creating kinship and larger social systems, as opposed to the old method of using mortuary evidence as a way to simply determine the structure of kinship and looking at mortuary practices as a product of social structure rather than an actor in the creation of social structure. Recent scholarship accepts more the idea that mortuary rituals are a highly important and active part of forging society and are not merely a product of society.
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