Not to be confused with death, this book is concerned with cemeteries — the elucidation and understanding of Chalcolithic (4500—3700 BCE) and contemporary cemeteries in the Southern Levant. Death is a universal phenomenon that elicits a variety of cultural responses, while cemeteries are but one possible outcome, resulting from the accumulated effect of repeated inhumations in a prescribed location. In Western culture, the two concepts are intimately related; this, however, is by no means always the case and the distinction between them is important to maintain. To focus our attention on cemeteries means to put their structure, organization and dynamics in the centre, while death, whether as concept or experience, is of subsidiary relevance.

This order of priorities is not entirely natural for the Western mind. Death figures large in religion, the arts and the sciences. The social sciences, in particular, and archaeology among them take on a strikingly broad range of related phenomena: grief, near-death experiences, funerary practices, euthanasia, stillbirth, religion, ritual, social structure and relations, gender, kinship, memory and many more. It is singularly ironic, however, that cemeteries, perhaps the most conspicuous expression of death in Western society, rarely figure as objects of study in their own right, but are systematically expropriated in favour of other interests. Any survey of literature pertaining to death and its expressions in the archaeological record will undoubtedly cover an extraordinary diversity of themes, but discussions of cemeteries, their structure and logic are hard to come by.