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Residential Burial and the Metal Age of Thailand
Author(s) -
White Joyce C.,
Eyre Chureekamol Onsuwan
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
archeological papers of the american anthropological association
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.783
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1551-8248
pISSN - 1551-823X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1551-8248.2011.01028.x
Subject(s) - settlement (finance) , prehistory , geography , archaeology , ethnology , history , business , finance , payment
Mortuary programs have great potential to provide insights into ritually‐integrated social systems of house societies. Metal age house societies of prehistoric Thailand, such as the Ban Chiang Cultural Tradition, are argued to have practiced residential burial, with interment of corpses in close physical proximity to spaces occupied by the living in daily life. It is suggested that this mortuary practice contributed to sustaining long‐lived socio‐settlement systems that were characterized by low levels of inter‐community conflict. The mortuary ceramics interred in metal age burials reveal sub‐regional stylistic and technological groupings that appear to imply territorial subdivisions in these apparently acephalous and decentralized societies.