Biblical Archaeology Review

James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), p. 81.

Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (London: Equinox, 2006), and many references.

Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death, the Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge, 1991), p. 134.

Maurice Bloch, “Tombs and States,” in S.C. Humphreys and Helen King, eds., Mortality and Immortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death (London, 1981), p. 144.

For a few exceptions, see Irit Yezerski, “Iron Age Burial Customs in the Samaria Highlands,” Tel Aviv 40 (2013), pp. 72–98; note that the few reported tombs (many of which represent precisely the phenomenon discussed here, i.e., simple burials) do not change the overall pattern. If burials were as common in the Kingdom of Israel as in the Late Bronze Age, for example, hundreds of tombs would be expected to be found.

Kletter, “People Without Burials?” p. 39.

I am referring to the Israelite population, not to all the population within the kingdom of Israel.

Kletter, “People Without Burials?” pp. 28–48.

See Ann Ellison and Peter Drewett, “Pits and Post-Holes in the British Early Iron Age: Some Alternative Explanations,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 37 (1971), pp. 190–192; Peter Ucko, “Ethnography and Archaeological Interpretation of Funerary Remains,” World Archaeology 1 (1969), pp. 262–280; Ian Morris, Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge, 1987), p. 105.

See list in Kletter, “People Without Burials?” pp. 28–48; see also Faust, “ ‘Mortuary Practices, Society and Ideology,’ ” pp. 174–190.