Pre-Columbian Burial Rites

Volume IV of the PRE-COLUMBIAN BURIAL RITES series consists of a comprehensive examination and discussion of specific mortuary behaviors and characteristics utilized by the prehistoric inhabitants of the Southeast Region of North America. The study of burial practice is useful to the discussion of the complexities of population traits because on a societal scale, similarity or differentiation of patterning in the disposal of the dead has been considered one of the basic identifying "signatures" used to distinguish cultural populations. Because burial of the dead is a ritually-oriented, ideologically-grounded rite of passage, its very nature is conservative, steeped in tradition and resistant to change. It is therefore possible, and vital, to identify repetitive characteristics of burial customs. For this purpose a mortuary sample of 34,132 individuals from 760 mortuary sites was utilized to address the range of variability and consistency within the seven state geographic space of the Southeast region. The states that comprise the database include: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Multiple cultural populations within those prehistoric territories exhibited ritually-oriented and conservative patterns of behavior that differentiated their society's practice of burial methodology from other extant groups. The ritual patterns also indicated that over long spans of prehistoric time, societal disruption occurred when cultures adapted to internally changing viewpoints and/or external pressures, sometimes exacerbated by changing climate and geographic environments that affected basic burial ideology over the long term. That cultural change was visible and evident within the altered burial pattern of the society and was meaningful not only for the identification of that group, but also exhibited evidence of contact and interaction with other cultures both intra- and inter-regionally, thereby providing comprehensive documentation for the cohesion of the four regions presented within the PRE-COLUMBIAN BURIAL RITES series.