The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burialreviews the current state of mortuary archaeology and its practice, highlighting its often contentious place in the modern socio-politics of archaeology. It contains forty-four chapters which focus on the history of the discipline and its current scientific techniques and methods. Written by leading, international scholars in the field, it derives its examples and case studies from a wide range of time periods, such as the middle palaeolithic to the twentieth century, and geographical areas which include Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Combining up-to-date knowledge of relevant archaeological research with critical assessments of the theme and an evaluation of future research trajectories, it draws attention to the social, symbolic, and theoretical aspects of interpreting mortuary archaeology. The volume is well-illustrated with maps, plans, photographs, and illustrations and is ideally suited for students and researchers.

Sarah Tarlow is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester where she has taught and researched the archaeology of death and historical arcaheology since 2000. She has written several books and numerous academic articles and is an editor of Archaeological Dialogues.

Liv Nilsson Stutz is a lecturer in Anthropology at Emory University. She has published widely on the topics of mortuary ritual in the past and on the debate on repatriation and reburial., and is an editor of Archaeological Dialogues.

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List of Contributors
1. Beautiful Things and Bones of Desire: Emerging Issues in the Archaeology of Death and Burial, Liv Nilsson Stutz and Sarah Tarlow
Part 1: Approaches to Death and Burial
2. Cultural History, Race, and Peoples, Adam Stout
3. Did Prehistoric Man Bury his Deada Early Debates on Palaeolithic Burials in a National Context
4. Death, Burial, and Social Representation, Robert Chapman
5. Death and the Cultural Entanglements of the Experienced, the Learned, the Expressed, the Contested, and the Imagined, Susan Kus
Part 2: The Nature of the Evidence
6. The Bioarchaeology of Health and Well-being: Its Contribution to Understanding the Past, Charlotte Roberts
7. The Use of DNA Analysis in the Archaeology of Death and Burial, Barbara Bramanti
8. Stable Isotope Analysis of Humans, Gunilla Eriksson
9. Cremation: Excavation, Analysis and Interpretation of Material from Cremation-related Contexts, Jacqueline McKinley
10. Contextualising Grave Goods: Theoretical Perspectives and Methodological Implications, Fredrik Ekengren
Part 3: The Human Experience of Death across Cultural Contexts
11. Death, Memory, and Material Culture: Catalytic Commemoration and the Cremated Dead, Howard Williams
12. African Perspectives on Death, Burial, and Mortuary Archaeology, David Edwards
13. The Place of Veneration in Early South Asican Buddhism, Lars Fogelin
14. The Archaeology of Death and Burial in the Islamic World, Andrew Petersen
15. Burial of the Christian Dead in the Later Middle Ages, Deirdre O Sullivan
16. The Unburied Dead, Estella Weiss-Krejci
17. Upper Palaeolithic Mortuary Practices in Eurasia: A Critical Look at the Burial Record, Julien Riel-Salvatore and Claudine Gravel-Miguel
18. Power and Society: Mesolithic Europe, Chantal Coneller
19. Archaeological Study of Mortuary Practices in the Eastern United States, James Brown
20. The Living and the Dead in Later Prehistoric Iberia, Robert Chapman
21. The Powerful Dead of the Inca, Peter Kaulicke
22. Land-ownership and Landscape Belief: Introduction and Contexts, Joshua Wright
23. Megaliths in North-West Europe: the Cosmology of Sacred Landscapes, Magdalena Midgley
24. Creating Death: an Archaeology of Dying, John Robb
25. Treating Bodies Transformative and Communicative Practices, Alexander Gramsch
26. Preserving the Body, Melanie Giles
27. Cremations in Culture and Cosmology, Terje Oestigaard
28. Identities in Transformation: Identities, Funerary Rites, and the Mortuary Process, Chris Fowler
29. Death and Gender, Joanna Sofaer and Marie Louise Stig Sorensen
30. Ancient Identities: Age, Gender, and Ethnicity in Ancient Greek Burials, Gillian Shepherd
31. Ethnicity and Gender in Roman Funerary Commemoration: Case Studies from the Empire s Frontiers, Maureen Carroll
32. Engendering Ancestors through Death Ritual in Ancient China, Alice Yao
33. Death, Emotion, and the Household among the Late Moche, Erica Hill
34. Belief and the Archaeology of Death, Sarah Tarlow
35. Insights into Early Mortuary Practices of Homo, Erella Hovers and Anna Belfer-Cohen
36. Equipping and Stripping the Dead: A Case-study on the Procurement, Compilation, Arrangement, and FragSHmentSHation of Grave Inventories in New Kingdom Thebes, Claudia Naeser
Part 4: The Ethics and Politics of Burial Archaeology
37. Sapient trouble-tombs'a Archaeologists'Mmoral Obligations to the Dead
38. Looting Matters Early Bronze Age Cemeteries of Jordan's southeast Dead Sea Plain in the Past and Present, Morag Kersel and Meredith Chesson
39. How Ancients Become Ammunition: Politics and Ethics of the Human Skeleton, Joe Watkins
40. In Search of Others: the History and Legacy of 'race' collections, Cressida Fforde
41. Repatriation, Reburial, and Biological Research in Australia: Rhetoric and Practice, Colin Pardoe
42. The Archaeology and Material Culture of Modern Military Death, Layla Renshaw
43. The Exhumation of Civilian Victims of Conflict and Human Rights Abuses: Political, Ethical, and Theoretical Considerations, Layla Renshaw
44. Contested Burials: The Dead as Witnesses, Victims, and Tools, Liv Nilsson Stutz