Close to us or far from them? Unusual funerary spaces in early and middle bronze age Cyprus

A number of recent studies have devoted attention to the archaeology of burial and its implications in Bronze Age Cyprus (Keswani 2004, 2005; Knapp 2018; Webb 2018). This article analyzes some aspects of space negotiation between settlement and funerary areas during the Early and Middle Bronze Age. After briefly discussing current views on this subject, it will focus on specific cases of intramural burial from a set of contemporary contexts and then provide a possible interpretation of this unusual funerary practice. Our sources of evidence for unusual burials in Early and Middle Bronze Age Cyprus are three-fold: burial contexts and locations within inhabited spaces, associated assemblages, and human remains. Each of these will be discussed, before asking whether these data, and their anthropological and ethnographic counterparts, might suggest practices associated with necrophobia in prehistoric Cyprus.