Into the caves, into the waters

Abstract

People’s ambiguous, ambivalent, non-rational and nonsensical relation towards death is a constant feature throughout the human past. The obvious way of dealing with such a stressful moment in personal and community life is guided by tradition – the well-established system of ways and manners of making spiritual meaning that implicitly answers how to go through this difficult period. From the long-term perspective, burying the deceased in pre-established burial grounds is a rather recent phenomenon. We can trace the intentionally arranged cemeteries as a continuous and prevalent way of treating the deceased in today’s Slovenia for no more than the last three millennia, from the Late Bronze Age onwards. The treatment of the deceased was much more diverse before that. From the earliest discoveries of human remains in the territory of Slovenia in the Mesolithic (8th–7th mill. BC) to the Bronze Age (2nd mill. BC), three different major manifestations of treating the remains of the deceased are documented. The first and most numerous was to expose and/or bury the deceased in the caves. The second was keeping the excarnated predecessors’ remains close to the daily life in the settlements. The third was to bury human remains in cemeteries. However, recent research revealed the fourth way of handling the dead – the immersion of their remains in the waters. Only from the Late Bronze Age onwards does burying all the deceased of a given community in communal cemeteries become the dominant custom.