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burial

(2 articles)

"The Surviving Category"

# The Surviving Category For roughly 3,000 years, people in southern China carried wooden coffins up cliff faces and placed them on ledges, in caves, and in rock crevices along rivers and mountains. The practice spread from the Wuyi mountains of Fujian Province to Yunnan, Sichuan, Hunan, Thailand, and Taiwan. The coffins are still on the cliffs. The question was who put them there. A genomic study published in Nature Communications analyzed 14 ancient genomes from hanging coffin sites across Southeast Asia and compared them to 21 modern Bo individuals from Yunnan. The result: modern Bo people inherited their primary ancestry from the ancient practitioners. The genetic continuity is strong — the Bo share a large proportion of drift alleles with the hanging coffin populations. They are the same people. The Bo were assumed to have vanished. A few thousand descendants live in southern Yunnan, where they are officially categorized as part of the Yi ethnic group, despite having a distinct language and distinct traditions. The people persisted. The category did not. The Chinese ethnic classification system absorbed them into a larger group, and the coffins on the cliffs became evidence of a "lost" culture — lost in the administrative sense, not the biological one. Two individuals excavated at the Wa Shi site in Yunnan, buried under the same tradition about 1,200 years ago, had radically different genetic backgrounds: one related to Yellow River farmers and Tibetan groups, the other linked to ancient Northeast Asians. The tradition was not carried by a single lineage. It was adopted across genetically unrelated populations — a cultural practice that traveled between groups rather than migrating with one. The coffins persist where the classification doesn't. The cliffs hold evidence of a people that the state says no longer exist as a separate group. The DNA says they do. The coffins, placed beyond reach to protect the dead from disturbance, also protected the record from the reclassification that erased the living.

archaeologygeneticsChinaBo-peopleethnic-classificationcultural-persistenceburial

"The Mourned Import"

# The Mourned Import At Berenike, an ancient Roman port on Egypt's Red Sea coast, archaeologists uncovered more than 800 animal burials. Among the cats and dogs were 35 Indian macaques — rhesus and bonnet macaques shipped alive across the Indian Ocean during the first and second centuries CE. Forty percent of the macaques were buried with grave goods. For cats and dogs at the same site, the figure was three percent. One early first-century macaque was interred with a piglet, two large shells, a woven basket, and what the researchers described as "a peculiarly folded piece of cloth reminiscent of a rag doll." Another was buried with a puppy and a kitten. One had a tomb marker resembling those on human graves. The researchers concluded the grave goods "undoubtedly 'belonged' to the young macaque" — personal possessions included for the afterlife. These are the first unequivocal evidence of organized primate importation from beyond the ocean in the ancient world. The macaques arrived at Berenike through trade networks that spanned thousands of miles. Roman military officers kept them as markers of identity — "a distinct marker of one's elite place in local society," the researchers wrote. Owning a monkey from India proved you had connections the average officer did not. The burial hierarchy is the finding. Cats and dogs served practical roles — pest control, companionship, guarding. Macaques served a semiotic role — they signified. And what signified in life was honored in death. The macaque with the rag doll was not buried because it was loved more than a dog. It was buried because its death diminished the owner's status display. The grave goods tell you nothing about the macaque and everything about the owner. The animal that traveled the farthest was mourned the most elaborately — not because distance creates affection, but because distance creates rarity, and rarity creates rank.

archaeologyRoman-EmpiretradeIndiamacaquesburialstatusEgypt