Encountering the Unburied Dead: Developments in Mortuary Practice in the Landscape of the Late Bronze Age Megaforts of the Carpathian Basin

The treatment of the dead body is a highly social phenomenon, rooted in cultural conventions. Choices in mortuary rites include inhumation, cremation, and excarnation, along with secondary manipulation before or after burial. In the Carpathian Basin between 1600 and 700 b.c., people employed diverse choices in peri- and post-mortem treatment of human remains. Beginning by defining local cremation conventions, including fragmentation of the body, we next present new data to reconstruct excarnation and inhumation practices. These display similar patterns of peri- and post-mortem manipulation in both cemetery and settlement contexts, demonstrating intersections between rites. Engagement with human bones in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age contexts is shown to have been ubiquitous and encompass varying states of integrity, revealing distinct practices surrounding their use or reuse. This shows that human remains, as material culture, played myriad roles in social discourses, ranging from place-making to ancestor reverence to domination of others.