4
Remembering One and All: Early Postclassic Residential Burial in Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

Residential burial at Río Viejo marked deceased adults as members of particular houses and as witnesses and actors within the world of the living after their physical deaths. The standardization in burial locations, positions, and offerings emphasized the group identity of Río Viejo adults and their shared house histories. The simultaneous commitment to keeping individual bodies separate and intact, however, indicates that this group identity was not achieved through the subjugation of individual identities. Instead, at Río Viejo, the deceased were celebrated as a cohort of ancestors made up of unique individuals, rather than as a single-minded collective group. [residential burial, Mesoamerica, ancestors, social identities, age]

Bioarchaeology and Kinship: Integrating Theory, Social Relatedness, and Biology in Ancient Family Research

“…King's (2006) study of age-centered mortuary behavior at Early Postclassic Río Viejo, Oaxaca, provides an example of bioarchaeology's potential to access the intersection of childhood and kinship. King's research centers on mortuary contexts and asks why subadults were excluded from burials beneath house floors, a common mortuary context for adults at Early Postclassic Río Viejo (King 2006(King , 2010. Instead of interpreting the absence of child burials as evidence for the exclusion of children from household or kin collectives, King references childhood imagery in ceramic figurines to construct an alternative interpretation.…”

“…Affiliation with specific households (and/or biological kin collectives) remained fluid until an individual passed through a socially significant stage of the life course. In this way, the experiential time of the individual child was ''interwoven via agestatus identity'' into the non-linear history of the corporate residence (family) (King 2006(King , 2010Robb 2002, p. 159). Studies of this kind, especially if both biological and social models of relatedness are integrated, would make a strong addition to bioarchaeological approaches to kinship.…”

“…Bioarchaeologists often cite interment with symbolic ''inalienable possessions'' or within residence areas as behaviors tied to the direct or indirect generation of social memory; such acts are often viewed as ancestor veneration or as reflecting traditional or ''alternative'' forms of relatedness (Christensen 1998a, b;González-Ruibal 2006;Hutchinson and Aragon 2002;King 2006King , 2010Laneri 2010). The house model and ancestor veneration have been discussed in detail by Mesoamericanists, particularly for the Maya (e.g., Duncan and Hageman 2015;Gillespie 2000bGillespie , 2001Gillespie , 2002Joyce 2001b;Miller 2015;Novotny 2013;Watanabe 2004), and by archaeologists working in Southeast Asia (e.g., White and Eyre 2010).…”

Making markets with the dead: Residential burial among theYoruba

“…According to Huberman (, p. 479): “In many parts of the pre‐modern world, people were usually buried on or near their family's land or in a family cemetery.” This practice is connected to ancestor worship/veneration and associated with the belief in a fluid boundary between life and death in certain ethnic (e.g., Mesoamerican) cosmology (McAnany, ; Miller, ). It offers emotional and physical proximity to the ancestors, acting as a perpetual reminder of appropriate conduct (King, ) and gives the living access and rights to the material/nonmaterial property of their ancestors (Gillespie, ). Residential burial practice then seems to have symbolic properties and meanings that are shared within a cultural context.…”

“…Furthermore, some forms of relationships and beliefs are navigated, materialised, and transformed through consumption and related practices in death negotiations, for instance, transactions and renegotiations (Oestigaard & Goldhahn, ), sentiments of affinity (Schiller, ), emotional and physical proximity (King, ), the veneration of ancestors (McAnany, ), rites and rituals (Bonsu & Belk, ), and meaning making (Neimeyer, ). The study is thus conducted against the background of the consumption culture theory—referred to as a “family of theoretical perspectives that address the dynamic relationships between consumer actions, the marketplace, and cultural meanings” (Arnould & Thompson, , p. 868).…”