The MorAnt Project research workshop, "Death and societies of Antiquity", supported by the Institute of Mediterranean Archaeology ARKAIA (Aix-Marseille University), aims to examine the relationship between land use, land law and the installation of funerary areas by ancient societies.
Recent research demonstrates the value of reexamining anthropological, archaeological and historical data for the study of populations and funerary practices of Antiquity.
We want to include this workshop in the line of recent pluridisciplinary studies to question the relationship between land use and the management of the dead and their evolution over time in different cultural areas.
The settlement, delimitation or reoccupation of a funerary area is in fact closely linked, particularly in an urban context, to the evolution of land-use patterns and the land laws that govern them.
More specifically, we will examine the interaction between the evolution of the law and the evolution of funerary practices: does the modification of the law lead to the creation of new funerary spaces or on the contrary, does the investment by the populations of new spaces lead to a modification of the law? Various important changes, both political and territorial, are observable during Antiquity around the Mediterranean. Did the evolution of the political and administrative management of territories, the modification of the urban frame or the reorganisation of land in the countryside lead to transformations within funerary practices? On the contrary, is there a form of continuity in the gestures? Beyond the conceptual framework, very concrete transformations occur from an economic, cultural, political or social point of view and can also influence funerary practices.
Therefore, this workshop is about questioning the ways burials invest the various spaces, according to the social, religious or political context and individual or collective funerary practices. These questions need a cross-referencing of archaeothanatological approaches and the study of texts, for example, the evolution of the status of plots regarding the access of burials to certain areas.
The meeting will focus on case studies designed to initiate a broader discussion on the co-evolution of land use and funerary sites. This meeting does not aim exclusively to present unpublished data, but invites the sharing of knowledge on the practices observed in various chrono-cultural areas and to open the discussion between researchers from different disciplines.
In this perspective, significant time will be allocated for discussion: each presentation, whether synthetic or focused on a peculiar case study, will be followed by a time dedicated to discussion. The day will close with a general discussion.
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