Living through the Dead: Burial and Commemoration in the Classical World (Studies in Funerary Archaeology)

This volume investigates the archaeology of death and commemoration through thematically linked case studies drawn from the Classical world. These investigations stress the processes of burial and commemoration as inherently social and designed for an audience, and they explore the meaning and importance attached to preserving memory. While previous investigations of Greek and Roman death and burial have tended to concentrate on period- or regionally-specific sets of data, this volume instead focuses on a series of topical connections that highlight important facets of death and commemoration significant to the larger Classical world. Living through the dead investigates the subject of death and commemoration from a diverse set of archaeologically informed approaches, including visual reception, detailed analysis of excavated remains, landscape, and post-classical reflections and draws on artefactual, documentary and pictorial evidence. The nine papers present recent research by some of the leading voices on the subject, as well as some fresh perspectives. Case studies come from Thermopylae, the Bosporan kingdom, Athens, Republican Rome, Pompeii and Egypt. As a collected volume, they provide thematically linked investigations of key issues in ritual, memory and (self)presentation associated with death and burial in the Classical period. As such, this volume will be of particular interest to postgraduate students and academics with specialist interests in the archaeology of the Classical world and also more broadly, as a source of comparative material, to people working on issues related to the archaeology of death and commemoration.

Table of Contents

Preface (John Drinkwater)
The power of the dead in classical Sparta: The case of Thermopylae (Polly Low)
Burial in the Bosporan kingdom: Local traditions in regional context(s) (Jane Rempel)
Foreigners in the burial ground: The case of the Milesians in Athens (Celina Gray)
Memoria and Damnatio Memoriae. Preserving and erasing identities in Roman funerary commemoration (Maureen Carroll)
From fragments to ancestors: Re-defining the role of os resectum in rituals of purification and commemoration in Republican Rome (Emma-Jayne Graham)
Publius Vesonius Phileros vivos monumentum fecit: Investigations in a sector of the Porta Nocera cemetery in Roman Pompeii (Sébastien Lepetz and William Van Andringa)
Marking the dead: Tombs and topography in the Roman provinces (John Pearce)
The Mechanics of social connections between the living and the dead in ancient Egypt (Martin Bommas)
Innocent X, Pontifex Optimus Maximus, and the church of Sant' Agnese: A mausoleum for the Pamphilj ‘forum’ (Susan Russell)