There are plenty of books on the archaeology of mortuary practices, but few on the archaeology of ancestors. This excellent edited volume brings together ethnographic and archaeological studies of ancestor practices to present a long-overdue and useful synthesis for funerary archaeologists.
The first two chapters, written by the editors, provide overviews of the ethnographic and archaeological evidence. These are followed by seven case studies. Chinese ancestor cults past and present are probably the best known, so Roderick Campbell's chapter on this topic is appropriately the first. It is followed by Carla Antonaccio's study of ancestors in ancient Greece and Charles Mather's ethnoarchaeological study of Kusasi shrines in Ghana. The last four cases are divided between Europe and the Americas. The European studies are by Matthew Murray on the Early Iron Age “princely” burials and society ca. 500 B.C. north of the Alps and by Estella Weiss-Krejci on the construction of ancestors by the Habsburg monarchy of medieval Austria. The book ends with case studies by the book's editors: Erica Hill on ancestors in Moche iconography and architecture and Jon Hageman on Classic Maya shrines.
As Campbell points out in his chapter, an archaeology of ancestors is a multi-stranded archaeology of memory, death, ritual, kinship, identity, and power. While ancestors are only a subset of the dead, they may come in many different forms. Weiss-Krejci shows how the ancestors of the Habsburgs included genetic forebears, appropriated members of other royal lines, and entirely mythical persons from the distant past. The simplistic notion that ancestors are only those to whom one can claim biological descent is further undermined by Campbell's identification of Mao Zedong as a shared ancestor for millions of Chinese. Ancestors are thus fluid and flexible constructs that are mobilized and appropriated by the living. Weiss-Krejci highlights the murky nature of interfaces between concepts of ancestors and other categories of the dead—semidivine beings, heroes, and ancient races—to reveal the futility of trying to draw hard and fast definitions when dealing with those dead given agency by the living. As Hageman reminds us in the book's final chapter, ancestors are created through mortuary ritual.
Domestication and the spread of agriculture were turning points in world prehistory for ushering in the importance of ancestors, for legitimizing rights to land and mobilizing labor through appeals to shared ancestry. Claude Meillassoux is rightly name-checked as one of the cultural anthropologists who explored this nexus, developed around the same time variously by archaeologists Colin Renfrew, Art Saxe, Lynne Goldstein, and Andrew Sherratt. While this book's editors and contributors resist the temptation to see ancestors everywhere, they manage to convey the complex ways in which ancestors are and have been agents for both change and stability in all kinds of societies, providing ideological anchors and metaphors of time, being, and identity for the living.
Campbell's chapter on ancient and modern China tackles a daunting timespan and geographical range but provides one of the best analyses in the book, showing how so many aspects of material culture are related to ancestor beliefs, from oracle bones to inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels to lineage-based burial rites. Antonaccio outlines how multiple concepts of ancestors—heroes, monsters, divinities, and other divine or semidivine beings—served a multiplicity of functions. Mathers's study of locations of ancestor shrines in Kusasi settlement compounds shows how these provide durable patterns of material culture that are archaeologically recognizable.
Murray makes the point that, in some societies, ancestors are everywhere. His observation is well supported by his case study of the enormous tumuli within Late Hallstatt Iron Age landscapes, advertising the power of the elites within “princely” centers such as the Heuneburg and the Glauberg. Weiss-Krejci's exposition of how the Hapsburgs fabricated genealogies, arranged marriages to bolster ancestral claims, and interfered with mortal remains is a tour de force in revealing the realpolitik behind the pomp and symbolism.
Hill's interpretation of certain Moche images as shrines where the living accessed the revered ancestors through sacrifice concludes somewhat equivocally with uncertainty about whether ancestor veneration is really demonstrable from Moche iconography and architecture. Hageman closes the volume with a discussion of how Mayan ancestors linked people with the supernatural world and the powerful forces of the cosmos, manipulated by royalty and commoners alike to secure their various political objectives.
