Death and burial in the Jewish Diaspora

Fasciculi Archaeologiae Historicae, 2023

Archaeological research in relation to Jewish cemeteries is rarely undertaken, which is why any excavations, often carried out on the occasion of investments, are extremely valuable. The excavations in the area of two Masovian cemeteries, in Bródno in Warsaw and in Węgrów, were also of a verification nature. In Bródno, an attempt was made to mark the southern border of the cemetery, and in Węgrów, an attempt was made to establish the existence of a cemetery, the extent of which is not visible in the field. In both cases, archaeological research was carried out in cooperation with the Rabbinical Commission for Cemeteries and in accordance with the guidelines considering the attitude of Judaism to human remains. Based on source and religious texts, a set of features has also been created that help in identifying burials (and cemeteries).

Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East, 2017

Discussions of corpse contact impurity in biblical, as well as Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic texts, have shaped scholarly assumptions that ancient Jews generally avoided spaces associated with the dead. While rabbinic writings repeatedly consider suitable responses to death, including procedures for corpse treatment, funerals, and mourning, few ancient texts discuss activities Jews once conducted at graveside to commemorate the dead through time. Even if rabbinic texts do not explicitly document the practice, however, analyses of neglected archaeological data from Levantine and European burial caves, including textual and pictorial graffiti, reveal that some ancient Jews did spend time close to the dead by performing multiple activities of mortuary commemoration around tombs. Hundreds of examples of graffiti discovered in Roman Palestine and in the catacombs of Rome, Malta, and North Africa, this paper suggests, offer rare and tangible evidence, in situ, for how some Jews and their neighbors systematically and diachronically visited and elaborated the interiors of cemeteries after the completion of activities surrounding burial and interment. While excavators and historians commonly use rabbinic texts as frameworks to interpret the contemporaneous archaeological record, this paper thus advocates an opposite approach – the independent and contextual evaluation of artifacts – to facilitate a rereading of ancient rabbinic writings concerning ancient Jewish mortuary practices.

CAENL 9, 2019

When all of the relevant literary, legal, and archaeological evidence is taken into account and understood properly, one must conclude that proper (but dishonourable) burial of Jesus was very probable.

Hungarian Archaeology

The goal of the research project described and discussed here is the meticulous assessment of the tombs and cemetery sections investigated in two geographically fairly restricted regions: Western Galilee and the broader area of Caesarea Philippi, both lying in the former Late Roman province of Phoenicia. With the generous support of the Israel Antiquities Authority, we were granted access to several mortuary assemblages that have remained unpublished or were only partially published. The meticulous assessment of these assemblages provides a unique opportunity for studying mortuary practices in the Eastern Mediterranean on a micro-regional level as well as for tracing changes through half a millennium at a finer resolution. We expect to gain a deeper understanding of the region’s mortuary traditions and their change as well as of local attitudes to death among the region’s pagan and pagan-turned-Christian population across half a millennium.

2006

Dealing with the Dead: Studies on Burial Practices in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Levant