Mortuary Ritual and Society in Bronze Age Cyprus »

American anthropologist Keswani has engaged in field projects in Cyprus for many years, and has written widely about burial practices, political organization, exchange systems, and pottery. Here she integrates parts of her doctoral with research she and others have conducted during the intervening 20 years to describe mortuary practices in Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age Cyprus. She examines the details and the long-term trends of these practices, explores the aspects of social structure and ideology expressed in mortuary rituals, and elucidates how the social structure and social change were actively produced in the ritual context. She finds that funerary celebrations were a main venue in which kin groups created and enacted their ancestral ideologies and asserted their prestige. Distributed in the US by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR