Abstract
Human skeletal material from archaeological sites is the most important source of evidence about embodied experience, habitual behaviors, and aspects of health in past people. Within bioarchaeology’s broad area of inquiry, analysis of mortuary behavior (particularly when combined with paleopathology) is potentially the most critical tool for archaeologists to reconstruct ritual and meaning in the past. This work typically combines embodiment and practice theory to examine the importance of ritual, its contours, and its social function. This chapter asks what we mean by “ritual” and how “ritual” emerges from mortuary artifacts and features. This chapter seeks to move away from mortuary ritual as a distinct category of behavior in the Indus context, separate from a secular life in the urban environment. I argue that mortuary behavior for individuals in the Indus civilization varies because of the nature of the heterogeneous populations that occupied these urban settlements but perhaps also that mortuary and other ritual behaviors in the Indus civilization were entangled, enmeshed, and interacted with the everyday heterogeneity of people’s life in the urban environment. While there is no common tradition apparent within or among all Indus cities, what is clear is that the urban lifestyle and environment participated in creating diverse rituals performed in a funerary context and that participation would contribute to memories of the cities long after their decline. Evidence is drawn from mortuary archaeology and objects, bodies and emergent behaviors, pathophysiology and health. These ritual and everyday dimensions of life in South Asia’s first urban period speak to the deepest anthropological questions we can ask about meaning in the past and how it was lived in the urban context.
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Notes
- 1.
Possehl (2002: 50) claims 755 of 1058 (71%) of Indus cities were built on “virgin soil” and 324 (62%) Early Harappan (3300–2600 BCE) sites were abandoned prior to the Mature Period (2600–1900 BCE). He explained this pattern using the concept of a nihilistic ideology.
- 2.
Mohenjo Daro was occupied between c. 2500–1900 BCE and the excavators (Marshall 1931, p. 10) divided the site into rough temporal divisions based on the stratigraphy and apparent shifts in material culture such that the Intermediate Period is strata 4–6 and the Late Period is strata 1–3. The Early Period is comprised by the seventh stratum and below. Marshall’s excavations stopped at the seventh stratum. The Intermediate Period roughly corresponds to c. 2400–2200 BCE.
- 3.
Long Lane (DK Area) between block 10a and 11
- 4.
Room 42 of block 8a
- 5.
Room 74 of House V, in Section B of the HR Area
- 6.
Lane 4 of the VS Area, between Houses XVIII and XXXIII
- 7.
Deadman’s Lane, HR Area, Section A.8
- 8.
Roughly corresponding to the end of the second millennium BCE.
- 9.
Of these interments, only 26 individuals were from the post-urban Late Period (1900–1700 BCE), 78 were from a later Chalcolithic Period (1700–1300 BCE).
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Robbins Schug, G. (2020). Ritual, Urbanism, and the Everyday: Mortuary Behavior in the Indus Civilization. In: Betsinger, T.K., DeWitte, S.N. (eds) The Bioarchaeology of Urbanization. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53417-2_3
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