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Cemetery Evidence Essay

Decent Essays

The issue of gender and sex in past cemetery evidence is a very complex one since it involves the rambling ideas analysed above (human identity, social status, cultural influences, biological polymorphism), as well as death and mortuary practices. Many archaeologists assume in a simplified manner that burials can provide the most reliable source of data they need to address the question of gender and sex, since the biological sex can be traced on bones. However, this idea proved highly problematic since it is based on the false assumptions that firstly, sex and gender always overlap, secondly, the methods of sex identification on human bones are infallible, and thirdly, that gender identification is, similarly to sex identification, binary. …show more content…

Dead individuals during their burials undergo an ethical distortion and possibly gender confinement in order to be assigned a definite social role, while their gender may be emphasized, negated or falsified so that their burial would be socially profitable. Based on these ideas, one of the first questions we need to ask when considering gender in mortuary contexts is how the individuals were perceived after their death based on the gender displayed on their bodies and what gravitas their personal identity seems to have had during the formation of the …show more content…

514). According to Van Gennep (1960) this process takes place after the death of an individual during the ‘rites of passage’ that are divided into three phases: first is the pre-liminal phase (separation), wherein individuals discard their social statuses; second is the liminal phase (transition), during which individuals are in the process of acquiring a new one and the third is the post-liminal phase (re-aggregation), after which individuals reintegrate in their social groups with a new status. These processes are characterized as ‘choreographed and staged activities’ (Sofaer and Sørenson, 2013, p. 2) that aim to solidify social norms such as social status, political status, familial status and gender and through them, structures like gender are assiduously being reformed and reproduced (Sofaer and Sørenson, 2013, p.

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