Keswani/Mortuary Ritual, 5. The Late Bronze Age

This chapter addresses a number of questions regarding the significance of changes in the spatial disposition, ritual treatment and grouping of the dead, long-term changes and synchronic variation in tomb architecture, the evidence for social hierarchy and prestige symbolism in Late Cypriot burial assemblages, and the implications of declining mortuary consumption over the course of the Late Cypriot period.The chapter argues that these developments overall reflect the changing significance of mortuary ritual in stratified, socially heterogeneous urban communities, where status differentials were no longer primarily created through periodic, ritualized exhibitions among competitive kin groups, but were instead increasingly based upon differential access to copper, trade goods, and positions attained within a variety of court and temple institutions. In this altered sociopolitical context, mortuary ritual would have remained a crucial arena for the expression and reproduction of status differentials, but it most probably ceased to be the principal venue for their production.