Mummification in Australia and Melanesia

Mummification of the human body as a vector of social link: The case of Faténaoué (New Caledonia)

“…Comparisons with other mummies from Oceania highlight the uniqueness of the Faténaoué mummies. If the removal of epidermis observed at Faténaoué is a frequent practice in mummification processes of Oceanian populations (Beckett and Nelson 2015;Pretty and Calder 1998), other features appear specific to New Caledonia: no body part was removed from the bodies, the thoraces were not opened, the necks were not disarticulated on purpose and there is no apparent effort to re-establish a living human appearance, as documented, for example, for Torres Straits mummies (Bonney and Clegg 2011;Flower 1879;Pretty and Calder 1998) or funerary mannequins of Malekula, Vanuatu (Speiser 1923(Speiser [1996). The use of basket containers at Faténaoué also differs from the stretchers used to present mummies in the Torres Strait during the 19th century (Pretty 1969) and the armchairs used today in the Anga societies of Papua New Guinea (Beckett and Nelson 2015).…”

Mummies

“…Many cultures have practised what might be termed a sort of mix of natural and artificial mummification. This may include treatment of the dead body in a manner in which natural mummification is facilitated, e.g., by specifically placing the corpse in an arid environment (intentional, natural mummification), or by performing certain rites such as partial evisceration or defleshing (Pretty and Calder, 1998;Zimmerman, 1998). The famous Scythian mummies from Pacyryk in the Altay mountains of Central Asia had been subjected to evisceration, removal of the brain, and also partly defleshing of muscle through incisions, which were then stitched.…”

The Excavation and Analysis of Prehistoric Caribbean Remains

“…It is important to note here that the practice of wrapping the deceased in cotton and desiccating the body near a fire would serve to at least partially mummify the dead (Pretty and Calder 1998). However, it was likely not enough to combat the detrimental effects of the weather on soft tissue; also, the practice of leaving the dead in an open pit until the majority of biological material decomposed before removing certain bones for secondary purposes would have contributed to a lack of preservation in the Caribbean skeletal record (Walker 1983).…”

“…Another important area of bioarchaeology is the study of how the remains of an individual were treated after death; for instance, were the remains desiccated and preserved, as is the case with some indigenous Australians and Melanesians, or were they simply interred into soil wrapped in a cotton fabric, as the Island Caribs of the Lesser Antilles (Pretty and Calder 1998;Walker 1983)? Burial patterns and treatment of the dead is important not only to understand what happened to the remains before interment, as this may cause confounding factors in later analysis, but also because it helps archaeologists understand how the culture in question views life, spirituality and death (Ubelaker 1989;Walker 1983).…”