As part of its 2024 annual meeting, the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (SAP) organised a thematic session: "Mortuary practices and social inferences."

KLI fellow Anne Le Maître, along with other members of the scientific committee of the SAP, coordinated a special issue on this topic now published online in the Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (BMSAP). This special issue comprises several articles stemming from presentations at the annual meeting, including an invited talk by Chris Fowler.

In this special issue, the authors consider the new possibilities offered by combining funerary, osteological, isotopic, and biomolecular methods and data to understand both biological and social relationships in past human populations. In particular, they insist on the concept of kinship in its social sense and not just as a biological link, and they show how the different dimensions of social relationships and hierarchies can be investigated using a holistic approach, with applications on archeological sites ranging from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. They also discuss the limits of biological and funerary information that only partially reflect social relationships among living individuals.

This thematic session of the SAP meeting and subsequent BMSAP special issue highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity in the analysis of mortuary contexts to grasp the complexity of social practices in ancient communities.