In this dissertation, I study a critical transition in the urban development of Tell es-Sweyhat, a large site in Syria occupied from c. 3000-1900 BCE. In the middle of the third millennium, Sweyhat was an open town centered on a fortress. It was ringed with cemeteries and had a …
"10" Result
Sort By:
Assuming that ancient traditions were at the very heart of medieval Jewish practices, I question to what extent the care for the dead in medieval Ashkenaz continued and to what extent it differed from the treatment of the body in earlier periods. Were the halakhic norms regardin…
It has been debated whether a human dispersal originating from southern mainland Asia replaced the original, late Pleistocene modern human populations inhabiting the islands of Southeast Asia or whether observed morphological changes (and cultural changes) are attributable to in…
The non-burial motif in the Hebrew Bible borrows language, imagery, and rhetorical strategies from its ancient West Asian milieu. Despite its many attestations in TANAKH, this motif often is overlooked in biblical research. Past scholarship relied on Delbert Hillers's form-criti…
This dissertation examines the buildings and intramural graves from the Early Dynastic (ca. 2900-2300 B.C.) site of Abu Salabikh, Iraq. The study focuses on the spatial context of burials and their relation to living spaces. The dissertation presents an argument that the treatme…
This dissertation examines the mortuary practices of the Iron I-III Levantine Phoenicians to document and analyze material expressions of social identity. Previous scholarship on Iron I-II Phoenicians has emphasized their city-based political allegiances on the one hand, and rel…
Throughout the history of the Catholic Church, a belief in life after death has been one of the fundamental tenets of the faith. The goal of the laws of the Church has always been the salvation of souls and a crucial facet of that salvation includes the belief in the resurrectio…
This dissertation examines the “memory economy” of church reform from the late ninth through thirteenth centuries. It argues that monastic communities and aristocratic households of the period used the human body as a touchstone for the discussion of memory as a key stake in the…
Changes in social organization can be studied through several different avenues one of which is through mortuary patterns. Here we will be looking at changes in social organization during the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age in Northern Europe using mortuary and osteological data. I…