Renewed excavations in 2003--2004 at Alalakh (Tell Atchana), a regional capital of ancient Syria during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 2000--1200 BCE), exposed the burials of at least 58 people. Along with published and unpublished data from burials excavated at Alalakh by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1930s--1940s, this mortuary assemblage has been subjected to a bioarchaeological investigation into how embodied personhood was socially produced through daily routines and mortuary rituals. To analyze the skeletal data, I have employed morphological and metric methods focusing on sex determination, age estimation, health and nutritional status, activity-induced alterations, and skeletal and dental non-metric variation. A close examination of each burial's archaeological contexts---emphasizing spatial and stratigraphic relationships, associated material culture, and relative preservation and articulation---has revealed three phases of burial activity, from the Middle Bronze IIC through Late Bronze IIA periods. I discuss the "Plastered Tomb"---a multiple burial distinguished by its excellent preservation, unique architectural features, and elaborate material wealth---in particular detail. As residents of the largest of the nucleated tell-type settlements in the Amuq valley, whose kingdom was frequently embroiled in political conflict, the Alalakh population seems to have struggled frequently with malnutrition and infectious diseases (as evident in moderate-to-high frequencies, yet generally mild presentations, of cribra orbitalia, endocranial lesions, and linear enamel hypoplasias). Such conditions of hardship may have initiated the use of the city's eastern periphery as a cemetery to dispose of larger-than-usual numbers of dead in an efficient manner. The meaningful placement of dead bodies in this designated space eventually transformed the city's edges into a visible mortuary landscape whose use continued for generations. For the interpretation of these skeletal and archaeological data, I have utilized osteobiographical methods, which draw on socio-historic contextual information to investigate the fluid categories of identity that constitute an embodied person over the life course. The fictive narratives that I have written employ multiple voices and perspectives to play along the life--death continuum, thus acknowledging the multivocality that characterizes both the creation of archaeological knowledge and the plurality of past lived experiences.
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