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Grave goods, in archaeology and anthropology, are the items buried along with the body. They are usually personal possessions, supplies to smooth the deceased's journey into the afterlife or offerings to the gods. Grave goods are a type of votive deposit. Most grave goods recovered by archaeologists consist of inorganic objects such as pottery and stone and metal tools but there is evidence that organic objects that have since decayed were also placed in ancient tombs.〔Ian Morris, ''Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity'' (Cambridge, 1992; ISBN 0-521-37611-4)〕 Where grave goods appear, grave robbery is a potential problem. Etruscans would scratch the word ''śuθina'', Etruscan for "from a tomb", on grave goods buried with the dead to discourage their reuse by the living.〔Giuliano Bonfante and Larissa Bonfante ''The Etruscan Language: an Introduction'' (Univ. Manchester Press, 2002. ISBN 0-7190-5540-7); several examples collected〕 The tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamun is famous because it was one of the few Egyptian tombs that was not thoroughly looted in ancient times. Grave goods are in origin a sacrifice intended for the benefit of the deceased in the afterlife. Closely related are customs of ancestor worship and offerings to the dead, in modern western culture related to All Souls' Day (Day of the Dead), in East Asia the "hell bank note" and related customs. Also closely related is the custom of retainer sacrifice, where servants or wives of a deceased chieftain are interred with the body. As the inclusion of expensive grave goods and of slaves or retainers became a sign of high status in the Bronze Age, the prohibitive cost led to the development of "fake" grave goods or funerary art, where artwork meant to ''depict'' grave goods or retainers is produced for the burial and deposited in the grave in place of the actual sacrifice. ==History== Evidence for intentional burial is found in Neanderthal sites from 130,000 years ago or earlier. In ''Homo sapiens'' burials beginning about 100,000 years ago, the body of the deceased was sprinkled with red ochre, and offerings of food, tools, and fresh flowers may have been deposited in the grave.〔Museum of Ancient and Modern Art, muma.org〕 Beads made of basalt deposited in graves in the Fertile Crescent date to the end of the Upper Paleolithic, beginning in about the 12th to 11th millennium BC.〔The Earliest Beads, muma.org〕 The distribution of grave goods are a potential indicator of the social stratification of a society. Thus, early Neolithic graves tend to show equal distribution of goods, suggesting a more or less classless society, while in Chalcolithic and Bronze Age burials, rich grave goods are concentrated in "chieftain" graves (barrows), indicating social stratification.〔see e.g. William A. Haviland, Harald E. L. Prins, Dana Walrath, Bunny McBride, ''Anthropology: The Human Challenge, Cengage Learning, 2010 ISBN 978-0-495-81084-1, p. 268.〕 It is also possible that burial goods indicate a level of concern and consciousness in regards to an afterlife and related sense of spirituality. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「grave goods」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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