Considerazioni conclusive sulle ultime linee di tendenza nel dialogo tra Antropologia e Archeologia

Since its inception, archaeology has frequently been perceived as capturing macroscopic demonstrations of
funerary practices considered deviant, such as, for example, the localization of the deceased in urban
environments (with or without formal deposition), interment of the dead in the prone position or abnormally
contracted, the absence/removal/intentional relocation of skeletal parts with peculiar symbolic importance (such
as the skull), the use of special devices for the immobilization of the deceased, the creation of mass graves related
to war or pandemics, as well as human sacrifice, capital punishments, etc. What’s new on the epistemological
level, therefore, is not an interest in locating the deceased and/or abnormal or deviant burials, but the
methodology and theoretical approach applied to the recognition and interpretation of burial practices. From a
purely sociological level, the comparison between “deviance” and, more generally, the “perception of deviance”
presumes the existence of a collective recognition of what is “normal.” This is possible only within relatively
complex communities, which are able, for example, to process a net conceptual opposition between urban space
and funerary space and, at the same time, to define rules and social roles governing marginalization (in life and/
or death), to inflict or cause death itself (in accordance with shared beliefs), and to restore the “order” violated by
behavior or a physical/mental condition considered unusual.
In recent years, in terms of archaeological hermeneutics, the refinement of excavation methods and analyses -
particularly through bio-archeology and archaeo-thanatology - combined with the relativistic, semiotic, and
contextualizing approaches to the post-processual critics have allowed us to appreciate not only the extreme
symbolic permeability of the funerary gesture, but also its numerous anomalies and exceptions, ranging from the
psychological and behavioral “denial” of grief to the extreme annihilation of the material corpse through “non
burial” or its assimilation to “refuse/waste”.
Thus one of the objectives of this article is to attempt a synthesis of the most complex aspects of funerary
archaeology, those which intentionally open up the codes of the ritual to discussion, instances in which the logic
usually governing the dynamics of death appears reversed or, more or less deliberately, ignored. As mentioned,
these conditions may give rise to various possible forms of “deviance,” often interrelated, which especially in the
last decade have been the subject of insightful studies in various fields aimed at exploring the ways in which such
atypicality was perceived and, more or less as a result, reflected in the burial, depending on the circumstances of
death (the “atypical death”), on the characteristics of the deceased (“atypical deceased”) or on those of the ritual
(“atypical ritual”).