Introduction

The buried human body is at once both corpse and artifact. As corpse, it is stamped with the biomarkers of a previous existential phase, that is, of animate, gendered, and environmentally situated life, when that body was experienced as “the centre of the world towards which all objects turn their face ... the pivot of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1980: 82; see Meskell 2000: 16). As artifact, it is as much “creation” or ideological representation as any petroglyph, figurine, or built structure. The interred body, physically manipulated and culturally elaborated, is a symbolic entity, a ritualized product of thought. It enacts collective values but also funerary idiosyncrasies: specific responses to the dead individual, both in her past mortal uniqueness and in her new, generic condition. Buried bodies can homologically perform the symbolic structures of their originating society, and vice versa. A skeleton placed in a trapezoidal arrangement from the Late Mesolithic site of Lepenski Vir, and perhaps reiterating the trapezoidal houses there, as Srejovic has suggested, is a dramatic example; this formal mirroring seems to be a kind of mortuary theorem, indicating, as Schulting says, “a powerful metaphor of equivalency between the human body and the structures” (Schulting 1998: 209; Srejovic 1972: 117–118). At Neolithic Çatalhöyük, the funerarylike scouring, caching, sealing, and “burial” of houses, as though they were persons, are hard to construe otherwise. The current excavations show these houses were built in an aggregate, almost-cellular manner, reinscribing the infolded geometric and contiguous spiral patterns of murals on their walls. If the postmortem body remains in any sense “the centre of the world,” a static microcosm of the fluid symbolic world it once inhabited, then burials can diagnose key macrocosms – the generative structures of a culture.