The story the dead tell about the living: An archaeological study about the medieval funerary practices of the Horn of Africa.

The funerary practices of a society do not only tell us about the dead, but also, and sometimes even more, about the living and the society itself that carries out these funerary practices. Funerary structures and tombs reflect social idiosyncrasies, access to specific means and materials, traditions and cultural baggages, etc. that provide us with a complete and accurate picture of what the human group is like. Therefore, they also reflect the changes these societies are going through. This paper presents the results of an analysis of medieval funerary practices in the Horn of Africa. This study has focused on describing the architecture of the burials by creating a typological proposal of them and the elements added to them, and on the distribution of the different types of tombs in the necropolis of the sites documented by the StateHorn project. The analysis of these factors has allowed us to extract conclusions about medieval funerary practices, relating them to certain changes in the social dynamics of the region and other phenomena that coincide chronologically with this fact, such as the creation and rise of the first Muslim states in the Horn of Africa, the progressive sedentarisation of at least part of the population, changes in material culture, etc. This presentation will describe the typological proposal and will explain and discuss the conclusions and results drawn from the analysis carried out.

Islam. Horn of Africa. Medieval. Burials. Funerary practices.