Over the past 40 years, advances in the archaeological and anthropological methods and theory used to excavate, analyze, and interpret mortuary deposits have revitalized the study of ancient death and burial. Most influential has been Henri Duday’s (The Archaeology of the Dead: Lectures in Archaeothanatology, Oxbow 2009, 3) defining of the subdiscipline of “archaeothanatology,” or the archaeology of death and burial, a truly interdisciplinary branch of mortuary archaeology that foregrounds both the biological and social aspects of death.

This volume responds to the proliferation of interest in mortuary studies over the past few decades and results from a series of multidisciplinary workshops held at the École française de Rome between 2015 and 2017. The book, edited by Bérard, centers around the question of who had the right to burial in the ancient world, and it comprises 15 papers: 12 in Italian and three in French, by researchers who use a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to understand past societies through their treatment of the dead.

The book begins with Bérard’s introductory chapter, which articulates how the question of who had the right to burial in the ancient world can be approached in different ways—namely, through the selection of the deceased for inclusion in funerary spaces on the basis of anthropological and archaeological data; the legal status of tombs and burials; and the study of “abnormal” burials. This volume is organized into three sections that correspond to these themes. Before the first section, Maria Giovanna Belcastro and Valentina Mariotti (ch. 2) establish some helpful terminology, including what constitutes a burial, before proceeding to non-normal or atypical mortuary deposits, such as informal, formal, and accidental nonburials. This paper would have benefited from more substantial case studies rather than passing references to burial contexts, in order to better illustrate the terms under discussion.

Following these two introductory chapters, papers in the first section use archaeological and anthropological methods to address questions of recruitment or selection in funerary complexes. Although “recruitment” can imply active selection methods, the archaeological evidence is somewhat more ambiguous since it is often difficult to determine whether particular groups were actively excluded from the mortuary context or whether their absence reflects demographic trends or issues in preservation. Valentino Nizzo (ch. 3) combines methods from cultural and biological anthropology in order to explore the integration of children into the Archaic necropolis of San Montano at Pithekoussai and finds that formal burial was not based on the age, gender, social status, or perhaps even the ethnic origin of the deceased. Paola Catalano, Stefania Di Giannantonio, and Walter Pantano (ch. 4) use anthropological data to explain the distribution of the deceased in three funerary areas at Casal Bertone in the suburbs of Rome. This chapter is well illustrated with 23 photos, plans, or graphs; however, the graphs (figs. 6–8, 10–23) only show the percentage of individuals in any given analysis and not the total number of individuals in any category, which would have been helpful to include.

In perhaps the most interdisciplinary chapter in the volume, Caroline Laforest and Dominique Castex (ch. 5) present a detailed anthropological and epigraphic case study of tomb 163d in the northern necropolis at Hierapolis in Phrygia, which contained the remains of more than 290 individuals in a tomb that was used over the course of seven centuries. The fact that this tomb was never looted made it possible to undertake an archaeo-anthropological analysis of both grave goods and human remains. By reconstructing the phases of tomb use, the religious beliefs of their owners, and changing attitudes to the treatment of the body over time, this chapter demonstrates the potential of studying epigraphic, archaeological, and anthropological evidence together.

The second section features five chapters that focus on the law regarding tombs, and they use mostly epigraphic and legal evidence. Michele Faraguna (ch. 6) explores the legal status and administrative management of funerary enclosures in Athens, Rhodes, Kos, and other cities in Asia Minor during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Maria Letizia Caldelli (ch. 7) argues that inscriptions on tombs at Isola Sacra at Ostia primarily served the legal function of advertising who had the right to burial within an enclosure, above their role as a vehicle to advertise ownership, power, or social status. Cecilia Ricci (ch. 8) uses epitaphs, mostly found on the Via Appia and Via Latina, that mention members of the familia of Agrippa, in order to discuss the possible existence and location of a funerary monument that Agrippa might have planned for his slaves and freedmen.

The final two chapters in the second section address the epigraphic and juridical evidence for tomb violation and property law in the Imperial period. Arnaud Paturet (ch. 9) argues that tomb violation was a unique crime in Roman law, one that affected not only the deceased but also the gods and the whole city, and it was both a semi-private and a popular action with a financial penalty. Sergio Lazzarini (ch. 10) demonstrates that landowners in the Imperial period could subvert burial law by founding visible and marked tombs on their own land and thus convert their entire property into a locus religiosus that was therefore inalienable and could evade tax authorities or creditors.

Moving from the realm of the hypothetical to more specific case studies, five papers in the third section address non-normative contexts: abnormal burials, the deprivation of burial, and nonfunerary deposits with human remains. Anita Crispino and Massimo Cultraro (ch. 11) investigate secondary deposits at two Bronze Age sites in Sicily and determine that similar patterns of bone groupings were the result of different practices: one possibly involved a large part of the community in a nonviolent, mass-mortality event such as an epidemic, and the other case study highlights exceptional burial as a form of honor within a community. Eva Christof (ch. 12) introduces 14 cenotaph inscriptions from Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor, and, following C. Ricci (Qui non riposa: Cenotafi antichi e moderni fra memoria e rappresentazione, Edizioni Quasar 2006), differentiates between cenotaphs of necessity, when the body was missing, and those of memory that augment the burial site. Some cenotaph inscriptions mention the dedicators, the reasons for erecting the cenotaph, the cause of death, and, in at least three instances, references to a real tomb elsewhere. As a way to emphasize the importance of lasting forms of memory at various levels of society, this paper concludes with two brief case studies from the Imperial family: Gaius Caesar’s cenotaph in Limyra (Licia) after his death in 4 CE and the one for Trajan at Selinunte (Cilicia) built after his death in 117 CE.

The two papers by Valentina Mariotti et al. (ch. 13) and Donato Labate et al. (ch. 14) both address disarticulated remains from the area around Modena. The former examines a secondary deposit from a nonsepulchral context (a dump) and highlights the atypical location, lack of “care,” and traces of defleshing on the bones, while the latter explores three unique cases, all found in proximity to necropoleis but in unusual locations: a pit in a burial area, a canal, and a dump. The authors of both papers suggest that the disarticulated remains of individuals whose corpses were left to decompose and deprived of “proper” burial were executed criminals, gladiators, battle victims, or the recipients of personal revenge. The link between the manner of death and the nature (or denial) of burial has been explored in Deviant Burial in the Archaeological Record (E.M. Murphy, ed. Oxbow 2008), but the reason for death cannot often be gleaned from mortuary evidence alone. To that end, José-Domingo Rodríguez Martín (ch. 15) looks to the writing of the jurist Gaius in order to examine whether the deprivation of burial in the form of exposure to birds and dogs served as a punitive measure to deny the humanity of the deceased.

Breadth and open-access publication are strengths of the volume. Case studies span the Graeco-Roman world from the first millennium BCE until the end of antiquity, with a heavy concentration in the Roman Imperial period. Some papers address the stated themes of the volume fairly explicitly, while others, especially in the second section, fit less well in this volume because of their highly technical nature. Nevertheless, this volume presents a variety of approaches to the question of who had the right to burial in the ancient world, and several papers combine multiple strands of evidence to begin to answer this question in an interdisciplinary manner.