Learning About Death and Burial: Mortuary Ritual, Emotion and Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes

Abstract

Mortuary rituals are conservative and transformative. As practices of hands-on and conceptual learning, memory making, and inter-generational knowledge transfer they take place within Communities of Practice, where emotionality and temporalities shape learning about death, interment, and commemoration. Drawing on mortuary, ethnographic, and archaeothanatological evidence, this paper explores how inhabitants of the provincial Tiwanaku site Omo M10 (eighth–twelfth centuries ce) in southern Peru experienced and learned death and burial. The reconstruction of three stages of funerary ritual—body preparation, interment, and remembering—represents distinct episodes of bundling. During each stage, increasingly more diverse participants, materials, spaces, and activities differentially shape episodic memory formation and knowledge transfer. I propose that coming to understand the constituent participants, practices, and knowledge of mortuary ritual as emergent and heterogeneous Communities of Practice has important implications for the interpretation of synchronic and diachronic mortuary variability.