Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Inferring Social Organization Through Mortuary Practice

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The broad and fundamental significance of this research rests on the insight it will provide into how small scale traditional societies are organized. Placed in broader context with other such studies it has the potential to elucidate how social complexity develops and is maintained. Small scale social groupings continue to exist within nation states today and there can be practical benefit to understand how they function.Does equal treatment in death reflect equal treatment in life? The Iberian Copper Age is a period dominated by the emergence of early complex societies, which are characterized by agricultural intensification, political centralization and population aggregation. Previous research has focused on the phenomenon of collective burial to suggest that these broad-scale social processes are underwritten by a "communally-organized society." However the internal organization of such communities is still poorly understood, particularly because the preservation issues and social function of such collective burials are underexplored.This research contributes to a growing body of work on the significance of collective burials in prehistory. While this topic has merited increasing anthropological attention in recent years, few Iberian-specific analyses have been conducted that permit researchers to understand what such large-scale sites represent in terms of social organization. Importantly, a better understanding of the communal interments so characteristic of the Iberian Chalcolithic will allow for a more detailed understanding of how these amorphously "collective" early complex societies were actually organized. This project's intellectual merit lies in the fact that its multi-component bioarchaeological and archaeological analysis offers a novel approach to mortuary work in Spain, and should offer a framework for future projects. At 113 ha in size, Marroquíes Bajos is one of the largest settlements known for the time period, and contains evidence of four different burial programs. This project's bioarchaeological analysis of the mortuary variability at the site will allow for the investigation of the degree to which Iberian Copper Age societies were collectively organized. In particular, it is unclear whether collective burials mask significant differences in individuals' access to food, disease burdens and activity levels as a result of social characteristics like gender, age, or social group affiliation. Through analysis of human remains, isotopic analysis of diet, AMS radiocarbon dating, and an examination of tomb form and grave goods, this research will allow for a more nuanced reconstruction of the ways in which Copper Age societies were organized, while deepening our understanding of how and why collective burials were used by prehistoric populations.