page_title: Funerary art
section_title: Pre-history
hierarchical_section_title: Funerary art / History / Pre-history
caption_attribution_description: English: Poulnabrone Dolmen, County Clare, Ireland, downloaded from pdphoto.org, en:sr:Слика:Paulnabrone.jpg
context_page_description: Funerary art is any work of art forming, or placed in, a repository for the remains of the dead. The term encompasses a wide variety of forms, including cenotaphs, tomb-like monuments which do not contain human remains, and communal memorials to the dead, such as war memorials, which may or may not contain remains, and a range of prehistoric megalithic constructs. Funerary art may serve many cultural functions. It can play a role in burial rites, serve as an article for use by the dead in the afterlife, and celebrate the life and accomplishments of the dead, whether as part of kinship-centred practices of ancestor veneration or as a publicly directed dynastic display. It can also function as a reminder of the mortality of humankind, as an expression of cultural values and roles, and help to propitiate the spirits of the dead, maintaining their benevolence and preventing their unwelcome intrusion into the lives of the living.
  The deposit of objects with an apparent aesthetic intention is found in almost all cultures—Hindu culture, which has little, is a notable exception.
context_section_description: Most of humanity's oldest known archaeological constructions are tombs. Mostly megalithic, the earliest instances date to within a few centuries of each other, yet show a wide diversity of form and purpose. Tombs in the Iberian peninsula have been dated through thermoluminescence to c. 4510 BCE, and some burials at the Carnac stones in Brittany also date back to the fifth millennium BCE. The commemorative value of such burial sites are indicated by the fact that, at some stage, they became elevated, and that the constructs, almost from the earliest, sought to be monumental. This effect was often achieved by encapsulating a single corpse in a basic pit, surrounded by an elaborate ditch and drain. Over-ground commemoration is thought to be tied to the concept of collective memory, and these early tombs were likely intended as a form of ancestor-worship, a development available only to communities that had advanced to the stage of settled livestock and formed social roles and relationships and specialized sectors of activity.
  In Neolithic and Bronze Age societies, a great variety of tombs are found, with tumulus mounds, megaliths, and pottery as recurrent elements. In Eurasia, a dolmen is the exposed stone framework for a chamber tomb originally covered by earth to make a mound which no longer exists.  Stones may be carved with geometric patterns (petroglyphs), for example cup and ring marks.  Group tombs were made, the social context of which is hard to decipher. Urn burials, where bones are buried in a pottery container, either in a more elaborate tomb, or by themselves, are widespread, by no means restricted to the Urnfield culture which is named after them, or even to Eurasia.  Menhirs, or "standing stones", seem often to mark graves or serve as memorials, while the later runestones and image stones often are cenotaphs, or memorials apart from the grave itself; these continue into the Christian period. The Senegambian stone circles are a later African form of tomb markers.
caption: The Poulnabrone dolmen in Ireland covered at least 22 bodies of the Neolithic period
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