Paper Short Abstract:

This paper addresses the evidence of the dead during the Neolithic in south-eastern Europe and western Asia by shifting perspective away from individuals to persons. This methodological shift offers an alternative interpretation of the dead, beyond the Eurocentric notions of kinship and family.

Paper Abstract:

With a few notable exceptions, most of the existing literature on death in Neolithic southeast Europe and western Asia considers the death remains through individualistic Euro-American hegemonic understandings of burying the dead in (nuclear) family graves. The dead are also considered as individuals who can be counted, measured, examined, and compared to each other with the latest natural science techniques. These techniques include the extraction of ancient DNA, which allows scholars to infer the sex of the dead and biological relatedness between “individuals” recovered from archaeological sites, among others. In the central European Neolithic, several recently published studies reconstructed kinship trees of persons related to each other up to seven generations. Those serve as the evidence of (matrilineal or patrilineal) nuclear families burying their dead in family graves.

In contrast, the prehistoric record from southeastern Europe and western Asia can be less neatly piloted on kinship trees. The dead, often buried underneath the house floors, are not necessarily biologically related to each other. This evidence poses new questions about the death rituals, kinship, and social organization of these groups that will be addressed in this paper. By considering the dead not as individuals but as persons, which shifts focus away from western hegemonic understanding of the dead, the funerary record will be reconsidered. Combined with cross-cultural ethnographic evidence, it becomes evident why burying a “new kid on the block” next to a biologically unrelated adult person may not be as exceptional and strange as currently portrayed in archaeogenetic literature.