This thesis examines the character of Middle Neolithic to Middle Bronze Age (3600-1200 BC) funerary and ritual practices in Wales. This was based on the analysis of chronological (radiocarbon determinations and artefactual evidence), contextual (monument types, burial types, deposit types) and osteological (demographic and pyre technology) data from a comprehensive dataset of excavated human bone deposits from funerary and ritual monuments. Funerary rites in the Middle Neolithic (c. 3600-2900 BC) sometimes involved the deposition of single inhumation or cremation burials in inconspicuous pit graves. After a hiatus in the Late Neolithic (c. 2900-2400 BC), formal burials re-appeared in the Chalcolithic (c. 2500-2200 BC) with Beaker burials. However, formal burials remained relatively rare until the Early Bronze Age (c. 2200-1700 BC) when burial mounds, which often contained multiple burials, became the dominant type of funerary monument. Burial rites for this period most commonly involved the cremation of the dead. Whilst adult males were over-represented in inhumations, no age- or gender-based differences were identified in cremation burials. Patterns in grave good associations suggest that perceived age- and-gender-based identities were sometimes expressed through the selection of objects to be placed in the graves. The tradition of cremation burials carried on into the Middle Bonze Age (c. 1700-1200 BC), although formal burials became less common. Circular enclosures (henges, timber circles, stone circles, pit circles), several of which were associated with cremated human bone deposits, represented the most persistent tradition of ritual monuments, with new structures built from the end of the fourth millennium BC to the middle of the second millennium BC in Wales.

This thesis concerns the factors underlying the popularity of the cliff tomb, a local burial form in the Sichuan Basin in China in the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 25-220). The development of the cliff tomb was held in a complex set of connections to the development of the burial forms, and existed through links to many other contemporary burial forms, the brick chamber tomb, the stone chamber tomb, and the princely rock-cut tomb. These connections and links formed to a large extent through the incorporation of the Sichuan area into the empire which began in the fourth century BC. It was in this context, a series of factors contributed to the formation and popularity of the cliff tombs in Sichuan. The hilly topography and the soft sandstone, easy to cut, provided the natural condition for the development of the cliff tombs. The decision to make use of this natural condition was affected by many factors rooted in the social background. The inherent nature of the cliff tomb structure was fully explored, which was then followed by a series of corresponding innovations on the pictorial carvings and the burial objects. The meaning of a continuous family embedded in the cliff tomb structure was explored, as the construction of the tomb was the result of the continuous endeavours from many generations of the family, and the physical form of the cliff tomb was a metaphor for a prosperous family. Following this intention of the tomb occupants underlying the design of the cliff tomb structure, the pictorial carvings and the burial objects in the cliff tomb made adaptations to make the cliff tomb an embodiment of relations between different family members and different generations.

The work is concerned with the archaeological finds from Lovosice, Ustecky kraj, CR obtained in 2002. The major part consists of description and drawing documentation of 15 well-equipped from the Early Iron Age. Movable artifacts are analyzed typologically and chronologically. The funeral rite is evaluated in the frame of spatially-functional relations between human relicts and burnt offerings. Immovable finds are analyzed with respect to the parameters of holes, construction and things. In the same way the graves are categorized into the finding groups. The funeral site is evaluated with regard to the form, structure, total range and chronological trend. The main goal consists in a definition of evolutionary horizons of the funeral site and their comparison between Czech and Central European chronological systems. These horizons, in the future, can make one of the main pillars for evaluating grave and settlement finds of Hallstatt age in NW and C Bohemia. The area of Lovosice necropolis is interpreted as a site of central relevancy and the dead as elite with significant influence over the cultural and economic development of the region. Nowadays, Lovosice represents one of the richest, most widely researched and therefore most important funeral site of Ha C1 - Ha D1 in Bohemia. Keywords Hallstatt...

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Thesis advisor: Irene Mizrahi / This dissertation explores the motif of burial in Carmen Martín Gaite’s 1978 novel El cuarto de atrás and in so doing sheds light on some of the text’s most famous ambiguities. Martín Gaite began writing El cuarto de atrás on November 23, 1975 after watching the burial of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, on television. Within her text she unearths long suppressed memories of her life during the dictatorship. In this way burial and un-burial frame El cuarto de atrás and allow for other instances of burial and un-burial to guide the reader’s interpretation of this complex and ambiguous text. On the novel’s last page the narrator-protagonist C. encounters three objects: a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel, The Thin Man, a small golden box (la cajita dorada), and a pile of pages titled “El cuarto de atrás”. Each chapter of this dissertation begins by questioning the significance of one of these objects, which leads to the discovery of concealed meanings in the novel. The Thin Man calls attention to detective fiction and the ratiocinative process by which detectives reconstruct narratives to solve mysteries. The cajita dorada recalls a caja amarilla that appears at the end of Mariano José de Larra’s essay, “La Nochebuena de 1836,” and reveals parallels between the two texts that characterize Martín Gaite’s reaction to Spain’s period of transition following Franco’s death. The accumulation of the pile of pages and C.’s beginning to read them at the novel’s close are homologous to the psychoanalytic treatment of trauma, the goal of which is to excavate memories buried deep within a survivor’s psyche. When C. discovers The Thin Man on her daughter’s bedside table, she reads he description on its cover: “…indicios contradictorios, pistas falsas, sorpresa final.” This dissertation interprets these words as Martín Gaite’s insistence on the active participation of the reader and her invitation for him to discover messages that she has buried within her complex novel. By recognizing these three objects as clues to the novel’s interpretation, this dissertation enlightens an ambiguous text and acknowledges the reader’s power to create meaning from uncertainty. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

In this dissertation, I study a critical transition in the urban development of Tell es-Sweyhat, a large site in Syria occupied from c. 3000-1900 BCE. In the middle of the third millennium, Sweyhat was an open town centered on a fortress. It was ringed with cemeteries and had a ceremonial public building in its outskirts (Sweyhat Period 3). Around 2150 BCE, the settlement experienced a sudden expansion from 15HA to 35-40HA. Sweyhat became a fortified city with a high central ceremonial platform and no formal cemetery (Sweyhat Period 4). The new fortifications combined with increased population density signifies Sweyhat's transition from a town to a regional urban center. In this dissertation, I identify the changes in land use during this transition and examine the accompanying social changes. I focus on several domestic structures excavated along the edge of the Sweyhat 4 Inner City wall, along with the associated artifact inventories, including spinning and weaving equipment, grinding and cooking equipment, and whole ceramic vessels. One adult burial and several infant burials were also uncovered here. Additional soundings reached down into the Sweyhat 3 layers of this neighborhood. I synthesize the data from these excavations alongside architectural remains and artifact assemblages from other excavated areas of the site, to create a narrative of the changes in the site's occupational history and the possible meanings inherent in those changes. The results reveal that the character and location of certain daily and special activities changed, including mourning the dead, grain storage, grinding and cooking activities, and ceremonial activities. The outer town cemeteries were abandoned, possibly in favor of individual household burials. Grain storage, grinding, and cooking activities that had been located in the central storage area moved to the home. The locus of ceremonial activities shifted from the public building in the outer town to a new structure located in the city center. Access to this new structure was limited: it sat atop a high terrace that was accessible only by particular ramps or stairways, in a district at the center of the city's two fortifications. These shifts suggest increased control of formerly accessible public activities and greater attention to individual privacy. These changes were an integral part of Tell es-Sweyhat's transition from open town to walled city.

This thesis traces the production process of colonial urban space in Seoul. In particular, the research analyses how the space of the dead (the gravesite) was transformed into a space of urban settlers during the colonial period. The Government General Korea introduced the burial rule in 1912, the first modern law of its kind, to control (the space of) the dead within the realm of the state. At the core of the 1912 burial rule was the prohibition of long-standing interment customs - such as feng-shui-based private gravesites - and the installation of public cemeteries as the only place for interment. The rule also introduced cremation into Korean society, a practice that had long been taboo. The gravesite had embodied significant meaning and served important functions within Korean society in the past, but the burial rule changed the whole relationship between the living and the gravesite. Indeed, as this thesis shows, the burial rule was one of the governing strategies deployed in shaping and transforming Koreans' institutions, physical space, and consciousness. To capture the inter-relational mechanisms between the transformation of the gravesite and the wider urban development of the colonial capital Seoul, the thesis uses a unique theoretical and analytical framework, which the author calls 'institutional political economy.' Through this framework and echoing Lefebvre's spatial triad of the production of space, this thesis argues that urban space is produced through the dialectical relations of the institutions, material space, and experience/consciousness. The gravesite, especially in Seoul, underwent a major transformation during the colonial period, which consequently had a substantial impact on Koreans' attitudes towards and notions of death and the gravesite. The thesis demonstrates how these changing attitudes corresponded and interacted with the capitalist urbanisation of Seoul, which would ultimately produce a new urban landscape and urban consciousness and subjectivity within modern Seoul.

Translation of author's diss., Quaestio medico-chirurgica ... An mortis incertae signa; original Latin text p. [11]-40. / Also available online.

Properly folded proteins are necessary for all living organisms. Incorrectly folded proteins can lead to a variety of diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease or Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (Mad Cow Disease). Understanding the forces involved in protein folding is essential to the understanding and treatment of protein misfolding diseases. When proteins fold, a significant amount of surface area is buried in the protein interior. It has long been known that burial of hydrophobic surface area was important to the stability of the folded structure. However, the impact of burying polar surface area is not well understood. Theoretical results suggest that burying polar groups decreases the stability, but experimental evidence supports the belief that polar group burial increases the stability. Studies of tyrosine to phenylalanine mutations have shown the removal of the tyrosine OH group generally decreases stability. Through computational investigations into the effect of buried tyrosine on protein stability, favorable van der Waals interactions are shown to correlate with the change in stability caused by replacing the tyrosine with phenylalanine to remove the polar OH group. Two large-scale studies on nearly 1000 high-resolution x-ray structures are presented. The first investigates the electrostatic and van der Waals interactions, analyzing the energetics of burying various atom groups in the protein interior. The second large-scale study analyzes the packing differences in the interior of the protein and shows that hydrogen bonding increases packing, decreasing the volume of a hydrogen bonded backbone by about 1.5 Å3 per hydrogen bond. Finally, a structural comparison between RNase Sa and a variant in which five lysines replaced five acidic groups to reverse the net charge is presented. It is shown that these mutations have a marginal impact on the structure, with only small changes in some loop regions.

This thesis concerns five Gotland Bronze Age cairns. They have been analyzed in order to compare their inner and outer burial - and building context. The analysis then forms the basis for the discussion of the similarities and differences observed. These five cairns along with the cairn Uggarderojr are presented in detail and compared. Major similarities were found between four of the five cairns. They all have one or more interior wall, a central tomb and other tombs in the form of cremations and skeletal graves scattered in various levels of the cairn and an erected stone in south, south-west position of the cairn. Differences are seen between the mound at Väskinde and the rest. Since Väskinde do not feature a strongly marked central tomb or a stone in the south and have one instead of two interior walls. However, it has been difficult to make detailed analyses of the numerous artifacts and the secondary graves found in the cairns since looting and destruction has been extensive in several cases. The similarities and differences observed between the cairns have been discussed in relationship to the not yet investigated large cairn called Uggarderojr. I. From the cases studied it has been postulated that Uggarderojr like the other cairns could have one or more interior walls, a central tomb in line with the stone in the south and possibly containing multiple secondary burials.