Linking anthropological and archaeological evidence: Notes on the demographic structure and social organisation of the Bronze Age necropolis Velika Gruda in Montenegro

Abstract

The burial mound Velika Gruda on the eastern Adriatic coast was excavated in the years 1988-1990. The upper layers recovered a necropolis of the beginning of the late Bronze Age with collective inhumations and cremations, ossuaria and infant's jar burials. The anthropological analysis of the human remains showed an average population with a small amount of young children. The archaeological situation, however, evidences that an important number of pottery finds comes from jar burials that suffered poor preservating conditions in the mound and should thus produce the missing perinatal segment of the population (newborns and infants). In a model where the collective burials represent "family graves", a small village community can be postulated at the origin of the burial site.