Death and Changing Rituals

The anthology addresses the function and meaning of ritual changes and changing rituals in past funerary practices. The concept of change is the central topic, together with the question why changes occurred. Did changes emerge from eschatological or cosm ological circumstances, or were they rather governed by shifting trends and personal preferences? The wide approach to the subject crosses some of the traditional chronologic and material limits, and calls the attention to various aspects of past societie s, such as identity, social status, social relations, iconography, symbolism, materiality versus symbolism, among others. Keywords are rituals, change and transformation processes. The anthology aligns the Classical Archaeological research tradition with theoretical problems generally associated with Nordic archaeology and social anthropology. This is a new and broad approach to research on ancient grave materials. Archaeologists following the Classical tradition have often been restrictive in their inte rpretations of grave material, as there is an abundance of artefacts and written sources available, which represent a large specter of information. Archaeologists investigating the prehistoric period have generally applied more significance and meaning to the interpretations. This anthology approaches the theoretical and methodological discussions between prehistoric and Classical archaeologists with the purpose of testing diverging perspectives on different phenomena of change, such as, for example, the shift from inhumation to cremation, and vice versa.