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Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan

Funerary landscapes are eminent results of the relationship between environments and superstructural human behavior, spanning over wide territories and growing over centuries. The comprehension of such cultural palimpsests needs substantial research efforts in the field of human ecology. The funerar...

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Autores principales: Costanzo, Stefano, Brandolini, Filippo, Idriss Ahmed, Habab, Zerboni, Andrea, Manzo, Andrea
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8262793/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34232956
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253511
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author Costanzo, Stefano
Brandolini, Filippo
Idriss Ahmed, Habab
Zerboni, Andrea
Manzo, Andrea
author_facet Costanzo, Stefano
Brandolini, Filippo
Idriss Ahmed, Habab
Zerboni, Andrea
Manzo, Andrea
author_sort Costanzo, Stefano
collection PubMed
description Funerary landscapes are eminent results of the relationship between environments and superstructural human behavior, spanning over wide territories and growing over centuries. The comprehension of such cultural palimpsests needs substantial research efforts in the field of human ecology. The funerary landscape of the semi-arid region of Kassala (Eastern Sudan) represents a solid example. Therein, geoarchaeological surveys and the creation of a desk-based dataset of thousands of diachronic funerary monuments (from early tumuli up to modern Beja people islamic tombs) were achieved by means of fieldwork and remote sensing over an area of ∼4100 km(2). The wealth of generated information was employed to decipher the spatial arrangement of sites and monuments using Point Pattern Analysis. The enormous number of monuments and their spatial distribution are here successfully explained using, for the first time in archaeology, the Neyman-Scott Cluster Process, hitherto designed for cosmology. Our study highlights the existence of a built funerary landscape with galaxy-like aggregations of monuments driven by multiple layers of societal behavior. We suggest that the distribution of monuments was controlled by a synthesis of opportunistic geological constraints and cultural superstructure, conditioned by the social memory of the Beja people who have inhabited the region for two thousand years and still cherish the ancient tombs as their own kin’s.
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spelling pubmed-82627932021-07-19 Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan Costanzo, Stefano Brandolini, Filippo Idriss Ahmed, Habab Zerboni, Andrea Manzo, Andrea PLoS One Research Article Funerary landscapes are eminent results of the relationship between environments and superstructural human behavior, spanning over wide territories and growing over centuries. The comprehension of such cultural palimpsests needs substantial research efforts in the field of human ecology. The funerary landscape of the semi-arid region of Kassala (Eastern Sudan) represents a solid example. Therein, geoarchaeological surveys and the creation of a desk-based dataset of thousands of diachronic funerary monuments (from early tumuli up to modern Beja people islamic tombs) were achieved by means of fieldwork and remote sensing over an area of ∼4100 km(2). The wealth of generated information was employed to decipher the spatial arrangement of sites and monuments using Point Pattern Analysis. The enormous number of monuments and their spatial distribution are here successfully explained using, for the first time in archaeology, the Neyman-Scott Cluster Process, hitherto designed for cosmology. Our study highlights the existence of a built funerary landscape with galaxy-like aggregations of monuments driven by multiple layers of societal behavior. We suggest that the distribution of monuments was controlled by a synthesis of opportunistic geological constraints and cultural superstructure, conditioned by the social memory of the Beja people who have inhabited the region for two thousand years and still cherish the ancient tombs as their own kin’s. Public Library of Science 2021-07-07 /pmc/articles/PMC8262793/ /pubmed/34232956 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253511 Text en © 2021 Costanzo et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Costanzo, Stefano
Brandolini, Filippo
Idriss Ahmed, Habab
Zerboni, Andrea
Manzo, Andrea
Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan
title Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan
title_full Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan
title_fullStr Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan
title_full_unstemmed Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan
title_short Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan
title_sort creating the funerary landscape of eastern sudan
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8262793/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34232956
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253511
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