The only place with cist graves in the Americas
by Ashley Cowie
Stone cist graves on the Caribbean island of Saba are found to represent a cultural continuity with the burial practices of rural 17th-century British settlers.
It is known that since the Bronze Age, all across Western Europe, stone lined ‘cist graves’ were used right through to the late medieval period and in the Americas they appear in the colonial period. Now, a new paper published in the journal Antiquity says burying people in cist graves is a funerary practice that continues on the island of Saba to the present day which the authors maintain is “unparalleled”, not only in the Caribbean, but across the colonial Americas , and they set out to answer why.
Continue reading on the Repeating Islands website, January 27, 2020
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