Funerary Veneration of Violated People in the Context of Costly Signaling

Abstract

During the Middle and Late Archaic periods in Indiana, occasional violent interactions led to people being killed and their heads and/or forearms taken, a process often called trophy taking but here called intentional body part removal (IBPR). The IBPR victims were buried by their kin, whose funerary behaviors conveyed information to the community regarding the reinstatement of the deceased into the community despite having died violently. This kind of messaging is costly signaling, whereby an energetically expensive means of information transfer ultimately results in a benefit for the sender and the recipient. The near-normative burial of the IBPR victims is interpreted as kin restoring the deceased’s prestige and mitigating concerns of supernatural repercussions that can emerge when a member of the group dies. The costly signal, therefore, is intended for both the community and the supernatural realm, which are intimately intertwined in animistic populations.