Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan.

• Author: Liebowitz, Harold

In this volume, Rivkah Gonen focuses upon burial patterns to argue for cultural regionalism: the coastal plain and inland valleys, on the one hand; the hill county, on the other. In this, she is successful.

In her brief introductory chapter (pp. 1-8), she defines the problem, lays out her research strategy and design, provides a useful chronological guide, and provides a description of the organization of the book.

In chapter two, "Types and Burials" (pp. 9-31), she describes the main burial types characteristic of Late Bronze Age Canaan along with distribution maps and useful tables. Each of the burial types is subjected to analysis in terms of five characteristics: physical features, cemetery organization, spatial relation to the settlement, mode of burial, and the funeral assemblages, though the primary emphasis in the book is on the physical features of the tombs.

In chapter three, "Spatiotemporal Processes" (pp. 32-40), Gonen focuses on the process of change and the emerging Late Bronze Age patterns of burial and attempts to account for the emerging pattern. The discussion is facilitated by division into three discrete subtopics: regional differentiation, change over time, and geographically differentiated cultural change.

In chapter four, "Cave Burials for Multiple Interment" (pp. 41-69), she presents a survey of the sites that yielded cave burials for multiple interment. However, representation is uneven since some sites yielded only one or two burials and may be statistically irrelevant.

Chapter five, "Pit Burials for Individual Interment" (pp. 70-97), deals with burials from twenty sites with emphasis on burials from Tell el-Ajjul, which is enhanced by the inclusion of plans and tables. Since at some other sites only few burials were found, these may also be statistically irrelevant.

Chapter six, "Intramural Burials" (pp. 98-123), focuses primarily on burials from Megiddo and Tell el-Ajjul. Regrettably, the implications of the data from these sites for the overall issues studied are not discussed.

In chapter seven (pp. 124-47), Gonen discusses eight types of burials: five are distinguished on the basis of architecture, and three on the basis of the types of burial containers. The final section is reserved for three miscellaneous burial caves. While these data are interesting, they are not germane to her thesis. Furthermore, while Gonen's discussion of the data in chapters four and five was thorough, and the implications of the data...