At the start of the Bronze Age the ancient (semi) nomadic people of the Oman Peninsula interred the dead in burial cairns placed high on the landscape. These small monuments are the only evidence we have of these people until the middle of the third millennium BCE when we see a dramatic shift in mortuary ritual. Low, centrally placed communal tombs are adopted at this time—a custom that effectively destroyed individual identity celebrated in death. In this talk, Kimberly Williams, Professor of Anthropology, will present evidence of changing identity as expressed by building of mortuary monuments as well as complementary and competing viewscapes of the mortuary landscape in order to understand the way that the physical landscape was transformed into a landscape of death. These data will be used to model how ancient people interacted and modified their landscape.

Kimberly Williams is a skeletal biologist who works with both contemporary and archaeological populations. As a CHAT faculty fellow she will be exploring the intersection of scientific and phenomenological perspectives of landscape of the ancient past.