Miniaturization in the Production of Funerary Aesthetics in the Pontic Iron Age, ca. 600 - 300 BC
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-02-11

Funerary performances, including processions, construction of burial mounds, and the deposition of bodies and grave goods, are the primary means by which Iron Age social structure continues to be investigated and inferred. However, the scholarly focus on single massive burial mounds and the amount of interred grave goods, such as found at Alexandropol or Solokha in presentday south-central Ukraine, skew our sense of the importance of the ‘produced’ nature of funerary performance and aesthetics in favor of static (and more easily quantifiable) monumental and ostentatious displays. Few studies of Eurasian Iron Age mortuary practices critically explore how a different approach utilizing the lens of production (in a perfomative/theatrical sense) might highlight often hidden political facets of burial in Iron Age contents, as well as more broadly.
I draw upon Susan Stewarts’ (2007) notion of the ‘remarkable’ (elements of identification chosen to be indexical of certain periods and events assigned to individuals) to demonstrate how burials are acts steeped in political intentionality and manifest power relations. I contend that funerary performances, including audience participation, were miniaturized sensory, and perhaps more importantly sensual, engagements carefully crafted in grander scale cosmologies of meaning that were themselves crucial constituents of social and political life in the Pontic Iron Age, ca. 700 - 300 BCE. During the course of this presentation, I explore the remarkable nature of Pontic Iron Age funerary performances through a careful diassembling and reassembling of grave good assemblages, mound construction, and mortuary landscapes. Utilizing data gleaned from a modest population of mounds and burials from across south-central Ukraine, I focus in particular on how burials and funerary activities were produced and intentionally manipulated as means to legitimize, and reinforce, the cosmological and social ordering of Pontic Iron Age communities through carefully designed and produced aesthetic displays.

Author - Dr. Johnson, James, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States of America (Presenting author)