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Research | Forskning - peer review

Mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology increasingly recognize that the mortuary record indexes not only past societies’ understandings of death but also a wider set of experiences and practices bearing on an extended life course and ontology more broadly. The process of “being-toward-death,” the ex… Mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology increasingly recognize that the mortuary record indexes not only past societies’ understandings of death but also a wider set of experiences and practices bearing on an extended life course and ontology more broadly. The process of “being-toward-death,” the experience of dying, a community’s participation in this process and subsequent handling of the corpse, the ongoing relations of the living with the material remains, the memory traces of the deceased in a burial cairn, and the local biologies illuminated by bioarchaeology, all constitute elements of a “necrontology” that was a core component of the culturally figured life course. Here the mortuary records from two parts of the Inuit world—northern Labrador and Southwest Greenland—are characterized in terms of their implications for such a necrontology of Inuit groups. While there appear to have been pan-regional patterns, idiosyncratic mortuary treatments also occur, warranting that archaeologists revisit, in appropriately community-sensitive ways, a record increasingly threatened by climate change. Læs mere