Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus - Book Review

Priscilla Keswani's comprehensive work, "Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus" [1], offers a thorough and interesting examination of the relationship between funerary practices and social structure in ancient Cyprus from the Early Bronze Age through the Late Bronze Age. It also serves as an excellent overview of the development and changing nature of mortuary practices on the island throughout the Bronze Age.

Drawing on archeological data from hundreds of excavated tombs, Keswani reconstructs the details and symbolism of Cypriot burial practices. Through comparisons with other cultures and anthropological theories, she explores the potential social and ideological meaning of these practices. She also examines how these practices changed during a crucial period of Cypriot history marked by economic growth, political centralization, and increasing social complexity.

Summary & Structure

The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces Keswani's research objectives, arguments, and the chronological framework of the study. Chapters 2 and 3 lay the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the study.

Chapter 2 provides a critical review of anthropological approaches to mortuary analysis, covering key debates between processualist and post-processualist perspectives and emphasizing the need to situate mortuary practices within their historical and cultural contexts.

Chapter 3 examines the processes of archaeological formation and recovery that have shaped the Cypriot mortuary record and the sampling issues that constrain its interpretation, and it outlines Keswani's analytical methodology for reconstructing mortuary programs and social structure from the often problematic remains of collective tomb deposits.

These first chapters are a great resource for anyone interested in the methodological challenges of mortuary archaeology and Cypriot archeology overall.

The heart of the book is comprised of Chapters 4 and 5, which present regional analyses of tomb architecture, burial treatments, and grave assemblages dating to the Early–Middle and Late Cypriot Bronze Age respectively.

Chapter 4 traces the island-wide appearance of extramural cemeteries and chamber tombs in the Early Cypriot Bronze Age, and the increasing formalization of mortuary practices involving secondary treatment and collective burial over time. Keswani argues that these ritual elaborations were related to the emergence of a "delayed-return" economic orientation emphasizing the importance of social affiliation, wealth inheritance, property rights and competitive status displays as broader economic practices evolved on the island. Analyses of burial group composition and mortuary expenditure at key sites such as Bellapais Vounous and Lapithos Vrysi tou Barba are used to support the argument that funerals became the central arena for social competition and display in a society that was still far from modern institutionalized stratification.

Chapter 5 documents the continuity of elaborate collective mortuary practices at many rural sites in the Late Cypriot period, concurrent with the development of more isolated coastal settlements where new traditions of intramural and increasingly "privatized" burial developed in the context of economic specialization, social heterogeneity, and political centralization.

Keswani's discussions of the highest order prestige goods found in Late Cypriot tombs, including gold jewelry, bronze vessels and Mycenaean pottery, reveal an interesting hierarchical pattern in which elite groups made use of a shared, yet exclusive, set of status symbols that were consistently displayed in the funerals of successive generations and deposited in the wealthiest tombs of major coastal centers like Enkomi, differentiating them from smaller towns and inland copper producing areas. However, even as Late Cypriot elites invested huge material resources in mortuary display, Keswani argues that the overall decline in the scale and centrality of funerary celebrations reflects the decentering of mortuary ritual as the context for status legitimation, as other forms of social power and economic control emerged within an increasingly complex landscape.

In Chapter 6, Keswani provides a discussion of long-term changes in social structure and mortuary ritual over the course of the Bronze Age, and she constructs a model of how mortuary practices and ancestral ideologies were affected by and acted upon at the local level. Keswani argues that the funerary arena was not just a reflection of social structure, but rather the principal context in which Bronze Age Cypriot communities experienced and altered the trajectory of social change.

Keswani proposes that the centrality of elaborate mortuary practices and competitive status displays in the Early and Middle Cypriot periods created an influential funerary economy that stimulated metal production and interregional exchange, setting the stage for further sociopolitical developments at the dawn of the Late Bronze Age. As the demand for copper and imported valuables generated by funerary consumption gradually enabled some lineages to consolidate economic and political power, however, new elite institutions and forms of control developed wherein the pivotal importance of the funerary arena was eventually eclipsed.

Critical Evaluation

"Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus" is an ambitious work that succeeds remarkably well in shedding light on the social dimensions of a fragmented mortuary record that had previously been studied mainly for chronology building by earlier researchers.

Keswani achieves a compelling synthesis by combining archaeological analysis with the use of ethnographic analogies, anthropological theories, and an emphasis on regional contextualization that enables her to avoid the static models of mortuary-social processes that characterized some earlier processual approaches.

The methodological framework that she develops for interpreting the formation processes, demographics, and symbolic dimensions of collective burial deposits is particularly valuable given the prevalence of such deposits in many Near Eastern contexts.

As with much of Cypriot archeology, Keswani is forced to make some assumptions and rely on limited data. Keswani acknowledges this throughout the book however mentions of topics such as colonization during the Bronze Age are speculative and should be taken with caution. These types of assumptions are not critical to the overall argument of the book but are worth noting.

The discussion of Early-Middle Bronze Age mortuary practices relies very heavily on the extensively published tomb groups from Vounous and Lapithos, while these sites have been well studied and others are marred by poor excavation practices, it is a potentially problematic limitation. Although Late Cypriot mortuary practices are documented across a wider geographical area, the analysis of prestige goods distributions and declining mortuary expenditures in this period is based predominantly on the Enkomi sample, and it would have been interesting to see a more systematic diachronic study of these variables in some of the other major coastal centers.

Finally, as Keswani acknowledges, the scarcity of osteological analyses (study of bones) and the frequent lack of explicit correlations between skeletal data and associated material places serious constraints on the identification of age and gender as variables influencing mortuary treatment. Future studies will undoubtedly build upon the foundation provided by this work to further refine our understanding of social identities and Cypriot cultural constructs of age, gender, and the body as they intersected with status, wealth, and ritual practice in the mortuary domain.

Keswani is thorough in her treatment of the data throughout the work, emphasizing the diversity in Cypriot Bronze Age mortuary practices and the problems as well as the potential of mortuary studies.

The final chapter of the book provides a discussion of how the Cypriot case may fit into broader models of the relationships between mortuary ritual, social structure, and socioeconomic change.

While it is quite academic, it should have broad appeal to Eastern Mediterranean historians and researchers interested in bridging the theories and methodologies of funerary archaeology, as well as anyone interested in Cypriot archaeology and the Bronze Age more generally.

Final Thoughts

Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus is an important work that advances our understanding of the social transformations that reshaped the Cypriot cultural landscape over two critical millennia of the islands history.

Through archaeological analysis, anthropologically-informed interpretation, and comparative theorizing, Keswani demonstrates that Cypriot Bronze Age mortuary practices were not only structured by the prevailing social order, but were in fact dynamic arenas for the negotiation of social identities and power relations that both reflected the conditions of socioeconomic and political change throughout the Bronze Age.

With its well-constructed arguments, and thoughtful considerations of the potentials and challenges of mortuary studies, this book should serve an essential reference to future research on the mortuary archaeology of Bronze Age Cyprus.

The book is published by Equinox and is available here.