Selective complexity and adaptive mortuary behavior

摘要

Trends in human history are increased cultural complexity and social differentiation and marked beginnings, endings, reversals, and turns and twists at different scales (1). Within these trends, the creation of social groups and communities is an active process that involves cultural pluralism, ideology, negotiated identity, economy, the built environment, and mortuary expression. In most societies, death implies passage from a visible, living state to an invisible, buried one.