Istwa Nou

Saladoid villages put their graves in the plaza at the centre of the settlement, and there are two readings of why. The first is ancestor veneration. The dead lie in the ground where the community assembles, present at every ritual held there, and the plaza works as an axis joining the underworld of the ancestors to the world of the living and the sky world of the spirits. The second reading is about movement. Under it the plaza graves record post mortem mobility, in which a person who had spent adult life in another village was carried back to the cemetery of the clan they were born into, so the burial is a homecoming. That version makes the grave a piece of long distance social machinery, binding scattered island communities through kinship claims that outlived the individual. The two explanations sit together comfortably. Either way, where a body went into the ground was decided by rules reaching well beyond the household doing the digging.