Multiple interment loculi tombs at Tell Dothan -- burial behaviour as cultural process in the Late Bronze/Early Iron I Levant

Abstract

What is considered anomalous among the Late Bronze/Iron I Age Canaanite tomb plans rests on the understanding of the ‘foreign’ and the ‘local’ elements of interments of that period. When Diane Bolger, in her discussion of ancient Cypriot mortuary practices, noted the shift in the scholarly literature from the emphasis on the identity and status of the dead to an examination of the ways in which rituals of death and burial reveal the motives and identities of the living (Bolger 2003), her observation highlighted the importance of burial as a process rather than an event. The phenomenon of burials in loculi chamber tombs during the ‘transitional’ period of the end of the Late Bronze and beginning of the Early Iron Age is explored, building on the foundations established by Rivka Gonen’s work on Late Bronze burial behaviour in Canaan (Gonen 1992). The structural and ritual characteristics of the tombs that present evidence for cultural context and origins are considered, establishing whether the archaeological remains translate into a picture of a regional variation or a foreign influence. Are the Late Bronze/Iron I burials in Canaan examples of an amalgamation of cultural traits of variable geographical origins or did they represent an ‘immigration’ of a mortuary custom? Why are loculi cave burials considered intrusive in the Canaanite territory?The examination of Tell Dothan, Lachish, Tell el-‘Ajjul and Megiddo, and of the Cypriot sites of Ayios Iakovos Melia, Lapithos Vrysi tou Barba, Korovia Paleoskoutella and Dhenia Kafkalla facilitates the discussion of loculi chamber tomb plan interments in the Levant have prompted.