Distant cousins and weak interdisciplinarity: funerary landscapes, identities, material culture, and social practices

Abstract

The aim of this work is twofold. Firstly, it seeks to reflect on the recent evolution of projects dedicated to the materiality of death in the Early Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula from the dual perspective of funerary archaeology and bioarchaeology’s, arguing that both lines of work maintain a form of partial interaction, which could be defined in terms of weak interdisciplinarity. This, in turn, limits the scope of research on the funerary record. As a result, the second part of this presentation advocates for a form of deep interdisciplinarity and the creation of new theoretical and methodological frameworks. To this end, several proposals and suggestions are made aimed at building a shared work agenda based on the analysis of four key topics.

Keywords

• Disciplinary interaction
• methodological innovation
• shared agendas
• sociocultural analysis
• historical bioarchaeology