Space not only for the living: Human remains at Bronze Age settlements in Eurasia

The "settlement burial" is a well-known phenomenon in archaeology. The term can apply to any deposition of human remains (whether isolated bones or partial or complete skeletons) within the boundaries of a settlement. However, it is only in recent decades that settlement burials associated with the Bronze Age have shifted into the focus of scholarly inquiry. A. Stapel (1999) was among the first archaeologists to publish an in-depth study of Bronze Age depositions at two settlements in Bavaria that included human bones. Stapel distinguished between two kinds of 'intramural' complexes: 1) interments proper, characterized by such features as deposition of the deceased, inventory, etc. and 2) one or more human bones associated with a layer or feature of the settlement. Stapel claimed that 'settlement burials' usually "flouted" the regular burial rites commonly observed at grave yards outside of settlements. She therefore regarded them as "deviant burials". Some archaeologists and anthropologists have already criticized the classification of particular graves as "normal" or "regular" vs. "abnormal", "deviant" or "extraordinary". The great variety and the increasing number of depositions of human remains being discovered within Bronze Age settlements more than justified the holding of a conference devoted to these finds. An international scientific conference "Space not only for the living: Human remains at Bronze Age settlements in Eurasia" was held in Berlin, Germany (Freie Universität Berlin) in April 2019. The conference aimed to provide an overview of the different regions in which Bronze Age settlements containing depositions of human remains had been excavated. This allowed a comparative assessment of the structural similarities of the depositions and a description of their characteristic features, which range from those of the interment of a deceased person in the proper sense of the term and of the various stages of a postmortem or even after-burial ritual. For the first time a supra-regional comparison of various interpretations of different deposition patterns had been undertaken.