Spaces of funeral meaning. Modelling socio-spatial relations in burial contexts

Abstract Burials have long been one of the most important sources of archaeology, especially when studying past social practices and structure. Unlike archaeological finds from settlements, objects from graves can be assumed to have been placed there for a certain purpose. The same logic holds true for where these object were placed: We must also understand the (ritual) acts of deposition and construction as intentional practice that moves the spatial configurations created by their placements into focus. Indeed, since the advent of the spatial turn, ideas of space as a social and cultural construct have also affected how archaeologists research and think about graves. However, the spatiality of burials as an expression of social structure has yet to be explored by means of digital methods. The paper wants to take a first step in filling this gap by conceptualizing a data model drawing on the sociology of space by Martina Löw that can then be used to facilitate computational analyses of socio-spatial relations. For this purpose, it introduces a first version of a model created using the CIDOC CRM, the compatible models CRMinf and CRMsoc, as well as additional custom classes to extend the model to adequately represent the social actions making up the construction of these relationships