ELAMortuary · Villages to Empire: 4000 Years of Death and Society in Elam (4500-525 BCE)

Villages to Empire: 4000 Years of Death and Society in Elam (4500-525 BCE)

As residue of deliberate ritual depositions, burials are laden with social information, offering a window into how societies wanted to present their dead members and, by extension, themselves. The project Villages to Empire: 4000 Years of Death and Society in Elam (4500-525 BCE) (ELAMortuary), aimed to capitalize on this unique property of the mortuary record by adopting it as a lens to examine social change in the ancient Near East. It targeted the mortuary record of Elam, a culture that began to emerge in today’s southwest Iran from around 4500 BCE and endured into the early years of the Persian Empire (ca. 525 BCE). In particular, it sought to harness the potential of the thousands of burials unearthed at the UNESCO world heritage-listed site of Susa on the Susiana plain during large-scale excavations by the Délégation scientifique française en Perse from the 1890s until World War II. Geographically, the agriculturally rich low-lying Susiana plain is an extension of the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia—the so-called “Cradle of Civilization”. It was home to a constellation of settlement mounds whose communities participated alongside their Mesopotamian neighbours in many of the fundamental developments in human societies on the path from village societies to the rise of empires. Susa is unquestionably the most remarkable of these mounds, preserving a long, unbroken 4,000-year sequence of occupation from the late Chalcolithic to the Iron Age. For ELAMortuary, it presented a rare and still unexploited opportunity to achieve its aim of mapping social changes through burials over the long durée, and in doing so, generating new knowledge on social responses to instability and change. The specific research objectives (ROs) to accomplish this aim were: RO1) to create a dataset of burials for analysis; RO2) to identify chronological variation in the data; RO3) to assess the social significance of the variation; RO4) to evaluate the linear “rise of civilization” model against the results of RO3. ELAMortuary’s method succeeded in unlocking social information in burials to begin reconstructing non-linear patterns of social change linked to the complex, ever-changing dynamics between the state, religious institutions, kin groups and individual actors.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union