One question shapes the core of this work: what makes a burial atypical? A welcome addition to the bioarchaeological literature, this edited volume picks up where Deviant burials in the archaeological record, edited by Eileen Murphy (Reference Murphy2008), left off. While ‘deviant’ burials remain the subject of the present volume, a choice has been made to move away from this value-laden term, which suggests pariahs or nefarious individuals, in favour of ‘atypical’ burials, which are deviant in a statistical sense. The shift in terminology follows calls for the placement of atypical burials along a spectrum of burial variation, rather than in Manichean opposition to ‘typical’ burials. Yet despite this effort, there still remains a sense that atypical burials reflect otherness, for, as Reynolds points out in the afterword, from a statistical standpoint, most elite burials could just as easily be identified as atypical as a decapitated burial.
The odd, the unusual, and the strange is divided into 19 case studies that document atypical burials from contexts in Japan, China, Mongolia, multiple regions in the USA and Europe, the Caribbean, Greece, Turkey, Bolivia and Peru. Each study makes clear that what is atypical in one place or time may not be so in another, and that any attempt at a singular definition of what makes a burial atypical will be stymied by multifold caveats.
Social bioarchaeological approaches to individuality and agency form the guiding principle of this volume, with the actions of the deceased during life and perceptions of the deceased, both in life and in death, playing a mitigating role in their interment. This volume deeply questions how we understand atypical burials, and presents methods for quantifying and qualifying atypical burials through critical data-driven approaches. Cerezo-Román (Chapter 2), examining Hohokam cremations vs inhumations, argues that assumptions about what is atypical introduces biases akin to previous misplaced inferences about deviance.
Most of the chapters in this volume document specific singular events or types of events (e.g. an individual buried with their finger in their anus or vagina; shell and adult ilia bones covering the head of a child to re-create the womb; revenant burials and a multiple interment of four individuals in one coffin), in conjunction with advocacy for broader theoretical and methodological consideration of atypical burials. Mickleburgh and colleagues (Chapter 6) utilise an arbitrary threshold of ≤5% prevalence to define atypical burials in connection with two-mode social network analysis for examining burials in Caribbean contexts. Garvie-Lok and Tsaliki (Chapter 15) propose a checklist of burial signifiers to aid in identifying perceived revenant and vampire burials in Greek contexts—which feature in Chapters 13–15—helping to move the discourse on this topic away from singular unusual events to a broader awareness of this burial category. Moilanen (Chapter 12) argues that the use of archaeothanatology (in-depth attention to post-depositional taphonomic events), scientific methods and social microarchaeology (recognition of regular social practices behind diverse phenomena, and detail over broad generalisations) will help to define and develop the study of atypical burials better.
The archaeothanatology of Henri Duday (Reference Duday, Cipriani and Pearce2009) forms a key methodological component of almost every chapter, with the importance of detailed burial recording fêted as a way to distinguish the typical from the atypical. In re-analysing a Puebloan burial originally interpreted as that of murder victims or witches, due to the position of the bodies and one of the individual's hands around the throat, Stodder (Chapter 3) highlights the value of archeothanatology in arguing that such interpretations were steeped in a level of ethnographic overstatement, while the taphonomic data more readily suggest tendon shrinkage.
While the methods adopted show a promising way forward, a number of challenges remain, not least among them questions of scale. Mickleburgh and colleagues (Chapter 6), considering the site of Kelby's Ridge 2 on Saba, demonstrate how the rarity of cremation within the broader Caribbean would suggest that the cremations at this site were atypical; when considering the site itself, however, where cremation was more common, the perspective changes, calling into question the scale at which the designation of ‘atypical’ should be assigned.
Further complicating the question of identifying atypical burials are disparities that may exist between funerary practices and burial practices. Reusch (Chapter 20), looking at burials of castrated individuals in European and Chinese contexts, notes that, while distinct variations in funerary practices existed for castrated individuals in both geographic regions, their physical burials were often similar to non-castrated (‘typical’) individuals. This challenge is also faced in the inverse situation, where the atypical burials of individuals may not reflect people who were distinctly different in life, but rather whose deaths may have resulted from unfortunate circumstances (e.g. lightning strike, drowning, war captives and the like). In many such circumstances, the connection between ethnographically documented social practices and recorded accounts is informative, but often forms only a portion of the possibilities that may account for atypical burials. As Gardeła (Chapter 13) notes, it is often easier to identify what an atypical burial is not, than what it is: underdetermination remains a primary concern in the identification and interpretation of atypical burials.
While the studies presented in this edited volume are geographically and temporally diverse, a level of regional clustering is evident. With four chapters focusing on the USA and eight on Europe, there is a clear dearth of contributions that deal with examples from Africa, Australia, Central and Southeast Asia, the Indian sub-continent or Oceania. Although this disparity undoubtedly partly reflects the practicalities of where research has been conducted, it would be beneficial in future volumes to see representation from more diverse global contexts.
This volume is commendable for its depth of coverage and progression of the atypical burial and bioarchaeology discourse. It will be of the greatest benefit to bioarchaeological researchers interested in burial variation and archaeological theory, but will also prove useful to undergraduates and graduates studying burial archaeology. This book will make a valuable addition to research libraries.
