 All right, when I tell people that I study human remains from archaeological sites, they often picture something that looks like this. A relatively complete individual burial in either a flexed or supine position in a delineated grave. However, what I actually study, and many bioarchaeologists in the room are no doubt familiar with this, are depositions that look a lot more like this. Things that represent the fragmentary deposition of multiple individuals, often in multiple places, over periods of time that can span generations. These implicit assumptions about what assemblages of human remains should look like are born out of a particular historical conceptualization of what constitutes proper mortuary treatment. Namely, in term of a single individual in a grave in a spatially and symbolically discreet location reserved for mortuary practices. These kinds of culturally and historically contingent mortuary frameworks are addressed in a recent paper by Chris Newson and John Robb, who detailed the inconsistent terminology that archaeologists employ when describing prehistoric mortuary practices. As an example, they cite Martin Smith, who notes that, quote, the word burial has been used for a grave containing a corpse, for the buried corpse itself, the act of burying a corpse, and the act of burying something else. Moreover, archaeologists often speak colloquially of burials to refer to any human-boned deposition, even when the bodies involved were never actually buried. I would argue that nowhere are these terminologically ambiguities more pronounced than late prehistoric Europe, particularly in Copper Age, Iberia, a period which stretches from about 3200 to 2250 BC. There's a reason it's important to examine variability in this particular time and place, because the third millennium was a time of significant social transformation. An increasing intensification of agriculture and exploitation of domesticates occurred in tandem with the expansion of exchange networks. The emergence of more complex or large-scale villages, and the appearance of new kinds of iconography and material culture. Traditionally, summaries of mortuary practices during the Copper Age describe individuals inter-collectively in man-made locations, such as artificial caves or tholos-type chambered tombs. However, the typical collective burials of the Copper Age actually encompass a wide degree of variability, and over the next several minutes, I'll focus on a series of illustrative cases from sites in Spain and Portugal to outline intracite variability in mortuary treatment. We'll begin with Perigois, a late prehistoric ritual enclosure located in the Evera region of Portugal, dated to roughly 3360 to 21 Calb-B-C, excavated and published by Antonio Carlos Valera of Nia Era Archeology and colleagues. Mortuary practices at Perigois were highly variable, with human remains deposited variously in tombs, pits, and the enclosure ditches themselves. Both tombs one and two show evidence of secondary depositions, and several ossuaries were identified at Tomb II. Small numbers of human bones were found in votive deposits in ditches three and four, intermixed with faunal remains, lithic materials, and bits of copper. Cremated human remains were also placed in pits 16 and 40. Analyses of skeletal remains from these pits have shown that cremations of complete bodies likely took place elsewhere, and all resultant remains were then carefully collected and transported to these pits. To summarize, at Perigois, we have mortuary practices that incorporate secondary depositions, ossuaries, votive deposits, and the movement and redeposition of cremated remains. The second site I'll describe is Belourish, an artificial mortuary rock shelter in Torres Véros, Portugal, excavated by Katina Lilios and her team from the University of Iowa. Here, mortuary practices entailed continual access to the rock shelter in order to intern new human remains. Of the 11 radiocarbon dates from the site, 10 are clustered between 28 and 2600 BC, while one individual dates to 1800 BC, almost a millennium later, suggesting an initial period of intensive deposition and a later mortuary reuse of the site during the early Bronze Age. Here, a mortuary organization is characterized by the arrangement of 11 carved limestone slabs on the shale basin of the tomb. The bodies of the dead were placed around these slabs, and they may have been used to provide a platform on which the living could stand and interact with the dead, and we also use them as platforms for excavation. You can see my foot in that picture there doing just that. Additional evidence of secondary mortuary treatments here includes the selection of long bones for a bone bundle and cranial fragments with cut marks that suggest some kind of defleshing. Over time, as the tomb was filled in with bones and artifacts, it would have grown significantly more difficult to access, and adults would have needed to crouch to enter it. Here, bioarchaeological evidence attests that funerary treatment and mortuary ritual incorporated a diverse range of practices, including continual use of the same burial space, selective curation or placement of specific kinds of bones, and cut marks indicating post-mortem interaction with human remains. Finally, I'll bring us to the site of Marokias, a large-scale ditched enclosure in Spain, which has been the focus of some of my previous research. Marokias is located underneath the contemporary city of Cayenne in the deep south of Andalusia. During salvage excavations that began in the 90s, archaeologists discovered at least seven different mortuary areas around the site, and today I wanna focus on Necropolis II and Necropolis IV. At Necropolis II, radiocarbon dating of human bone has revealed that some structures actually date to the early Bronze Age, a period after which Marokias had witnessed a radical reorganization that led to a steep drop-off in activity. Here, most human remains were partial and disarticulated, and analyses of skeletal completion suggest that these interments were secondary depositions. Necropolis IV, in contrast, is part of a series of artificial caves that were carved out in prehistory, three of which were excavated or re-excavated in 2001. Dental completion analyses suggest that this was an area of predominantly primary burial, though some secondary interments were likely included as well. Ana Castillo and Cozeo Caña, the archaeologists who excavated the site in 2001, made two important observations. First, they noted clustering of skulls and long bones along the walls and entrances of cave chambers, a patterning which can be seen in their hand-drawn site maps. Second, they highlighted one burial that preserved some evidence of anatomical articulation, which was centrally placed in the anti-chamber of the cave of the column. I was able to locate this individual during my collections research and confirmed that the adult male did preserve articulated cervical vertebrae. Due to the central placement of this individual and the preservation of spinal articulations, this deposit likely represented one of the final depositions of human remains in this cave. Keeping in mind that these are only two of the seven mortuary areas in Montokeas, and two in and four incorporate a wide variety of human interactions with skeletal remains, which include reuse of mortuary space, spatial clustering of particular elements, and the movement of bones needed to clear space for new depositions. I'll also add that at Perzegouish, there are documented depositions of human remains in some of the enclosure ditches themselves, which is something that we're working on analyzing right now. These examples are by no means outliers, and other well-known Iberian sites, such as COVID de la pastora and Valenciana de la Concepción, show similar patterning in mortuary practice. At each site, you find a particular unique constellation of motifs which reoccur in different combinations throughout the region. And these include the secondary deposition of human remains, the treatment of human bone is one component of a wider vote of category, formation or burning of a subset of depositions, the movement and rearrangement of human remains over time, the appearance of human bones in contexts that are not exclusively reserved for mortuary purposes, and often a late copper or early Bronze Age reuse of earlier mortuary spaces. I've also recently begun working in early Bronze Age, Transylvania, a period that partially overlaps chronologically with the copper age in Iberia, and there's some similar patterning I've begun to pick up on in mortuary practice. A broad gloss would divide mortuary practices in this region into two environmentally distinct tracks. The highlands of Southwestern Transylvania are covered with hundreds of stone-capped tumuli in which early Bronze Age communities buried their dead. These cemeteries contain between one and 16 tombs, with each tomb housing between two and 10 individuals. The stone-covered cairns of the uplands present a contrast to the earthen mounds of the lowlands. In the settlements along the Morash River, mortuary practices are characterized by frog-style burials in the earthen mounds, with individuals positioned on their backs with both arms and legs lightly flexed. However, even these typical examples of each type of tomb conceal a fair amount of mortuary variability. For example, at the upland tomb of Mentech, depositions in the mound include individual flex and termines positioned on the right side at M2 and M3, the multiple partially articulated deposition of M6, the disarticulated and commingled deposition of M7, and M4, an individual flexed and termined positioned on the left side. At the lowlands side of Albu Yulia, all individuals were placed within the boundaries of the settlement, in bell-shaped pits that resemble storage pits that are typical for the period. Despite the similarity in the pits themselves, individuals here also showed a high degree of variability, but this time in their positioning. M176 was arranged in a typical flex position on the left side, but this individual's hands were flexed and turned outward. M93 was found in a partially articulated flexed position on the right, but there was post-mortem movement of partially articulated remains, and some of the persistent articulations here suggest that these elements were removed while the body was still partially flushed. Accordingly, this movement might represent animal activity that occurrative pits were left open for a period of time after initial deposition. Finally, M36 shows the most unusual placement. It's the only burial that's not flexed and is positioned with arms extended above the head. What I hope this talk has outlined is that broad glasses, such as communal burial or mounted tombs actually conceal a significant amount of the mortuary variability that occurred in late prehistoric Europe, and I'll conclude by turning to three interpretive tools offered by archeologists that can help us unpack some of this variability. First, Katina Lilios has used the term mnemonic density to describe how meaning builds up over time at places like Beloresh or N4 and Marochias. She defines it as, quote, the potency of spaces or things resulting from their repeated use over long periods of time and their accumulated and potentially diverse and conflicting memories, associations, and meanings. I would add that meaning also accrues on perhaps a shorter timescale through the deliberate interleaving of human remains and architecture as in the bone deposits in the ditches of Marochias and Perugosh locations where the communal labor of construction is woven together with human skeletal remains to link the labor of the living to the persistent presence of the dead. Second, Anna Waterman and Jonathan Thomas point out that co-mingled deposits have led to a kind of equifinality where markedly different expressions of mourning and mortuary practice, the burial of a two-year-old child versus a 60-year-old village elder, for example, are conflated, often collapsed in archeological interpretation as some kind of amorphous ancestor worship. Careful bioarchaeological reconstructions of identity and community demography can help us to untangle the differential impact and import of these kinds of depositions for prehistoric communities. Finally, within his archeology of death framework, John Robb has highlighted the importance of treating death as a process rather than an event. In both late prehistoric Iberia and Transylvania, bioarchaeological evidence attests that death as a social and ritual process and the dead as a social and ritual category of being were not neatly compartmentalized in time or space. Instead, the dead were a constant presence in late prehistoric societies with continual interaction with human remains, physically and perhaps even socially, an important component of the lives of individuals and communities. By incorporating these three interpretive tools, appreciating the mnemonic density of place and practice, untangling the sometimes specious equifinality of combing old assemblages and appreciating the death as a process rather than an event, we can better understand the social and symbolic importance of post-mortem interactions with human remains and variability in prehistoric mortuary practice. That concludes my talk and I'm happy to take questions at this time.