ATRIUM Sign of the week No.3: Funerary structure

Funerary structures, the third ATRIUM Sign of the week, consist of a wide range of buildings and monuments to commemorate the dead, serving practical burial needs and reflecting cultural or religious beliefs in the afterlife. They include ancient monumental tombs (like Egyptian pyramids), mausoleums, burial mounds, and columbaria for cremated remains. As such, funerary structures are an important source of information within archaeology as they provide great insight into ancient cultures through the structures themselves, the goods and artefacts found within them and in some cases, through the human remains. An obvious example of this is the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb which yielded a treasure trove that provided great insight into the lifestyle and cultural practices in Ancient Egypt.

There are over 89,000 resources classified as funerary structures with the ARIADNE Catalogue. These range from prehistoric cairns, to barrows and passage graves, burial vaults and pits to monuments found in churchyards, for example. Funerary structures may also include cemeteries and it is useful to map the relationships between these, the graves, the human remains and any grave goods associated with them. In the case of the THANADOS datasets, the Catalogue enables traversal of related resources in this hierarchy.

The map on the right shows the locations of a number of resources associated with the Stará Boleslav (the Basilica of St. Wenceslas and St. Clement’s Church and at the church of unknown dedication) in the Czech Republic.