The paper deals with the intriguing evidence of a high number of double burials in the late protohistoric graveyards of the Swat valley, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan (ca. 1400-800 cal BC). While previous scholars have attempted to explain the evidence as a result of migrating ideas and people from inner Central Asia, or advocated women’s sacrifice, or even an antecedent of the Hinduist ritual suicide of the widow after the husband’s death, we argue that these interpretations are due to superficial interpretations and bad archaeology in general. Rather, double or collective interments are seen as steps of complex funerary cycles. As still practiced in China and other regions of the Asiatic world, these rituals might be explained with the need of posthumous marriages, meant to legalize agreements, alliances and inheritance rights among different kin segments – not because love and emotions, therefore, but on the wake of precise economical and political interests in a land where land has always been a rare resource.
The neverendIng kIss. Funerary representatIons of personal relatIonshIps in protohIstorIc Swat
Massimo Vidale;
2021
Abstract
The paper deals with the intriguing evidence of a high number of double burials in the late protohistoric graveyards of the Swat valley, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan (ca. 1400-800 cal BC). While previous scholars have attempted to explain the evidence as a result of migrating ideas and people from inner Central Asia, or advocated women’s sacrifice, or even an antecedent of the Hinduist ritual suicide of the widow after the husband’s death, we argue that these interpretations are due to superficial interpretations and bad archaeology in general. Rather, double or collective interments are seen as steps of complex funerary cycles. As still practiced in China and other regions of the Asiatic world, these rituals might be explained with the need of posthumous marriages, meant to legalize agreements, alliances and inheritance rights among different kin segments – not because love and emotions, therefore, but on the wake of precise economical and political interests in a land where land has always been a rare resource.
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