Revealing the shared and individual identity of people buried under stećci: Stećci, with their associated burials, represent an invaluable database of personal biographies and collective identity construction strategies and their preservation. The proposed project will look beyond the traditional categories into identities that were constructed through interaction between persons, things, and places and into processes of choice and agency to acquire and maintain an identity. In a blended society such as Bosnian, we will examine personal identities of which components were initially time, space and material culture, then age, gender and religion, and through evidence of health status, lifestyle habits and treatment of the cadavers also the complexities of intersectionality with different clusters of identities and structural inequalities.
To address this objective, we will question demography, health and diet and work on the interpretation of status, ritual, symbolism, and territory to reveal how medieval transformations and identity interactions were enunciated through stećci. Settlement analyses and multi-period enquiries from the O1& O2, as well as a micro-level analysis of tombstones and burials, will facilitate this objective. A distinctive feature of STONE is the capacity for the approach to operate at increasingly greater precision, spanning from large-scale landscape assessments to high-resolution analyses of individual inhumations and personal biographies. By mapping the locations of cemeteries, settlements, roads and resources across medieval Hum accounting for applicable variables (village & house population, civil status, wealth, agricultural capabilities & production), and using spatial analyses, systematic settlement patterning and SNA to measure the network’s properties, meaningful interpretations can be made about the inhabitants’ inter-relationships and the way they were represented in the post-mortem world.
Macro level: The medieval Hum macro-landscape analyses from the WP1 and WP2’s multi-period inquiries will identify differences between settlements and cemeteries.
Meso level: added information about relationships of sites to resources, historical and epiconographical data.
Micro level: The four stećci cemeteries will be excavated with a multiscale scientific approach to inhumations and archaeothanatological study of cadavers, graves’ organisation, structures and material culture. Bioarchaeology will include established and new osteological analyses of all excavated inhumations, isotope and dental calculus analyses for people’s origins, diet and health issues that will be included in the interpretation of social identities. As radiocarbon dates of the medieval period in the region do not exist, the excavations of six sites will generate 60 human bone and 30 sediment samples for 14C AMS analysis, providing the first robust absolute chronology for the stećci phenomenon through diachronic perspective in order to reconstruct changes/stabilisation over the generations. The aDNA analyses will highlight diachronic demographic changes and provide a new level of detail and insights into identity, especially regarding genetic (non)relationships and correlating the burials from transhumant mountain stećci cemetery with the original, lowland ‘parent settlement’ cemetery.
