Inequality in life and death: bridging divides between domestic and funerary archaeology in Middle Bronze Age Transylvania

Domestic and funerary archaeology provide complementary perspectives on life and death in the past that can sometimes be contradictory. Institutional approaches provide a way of reconstructing a holistic portrait of past societies and resolving these analytical tensions. This study examines the tensions between lived and performed inequalities in the Middle Bronze Age (2000–1500 BCE) in Transylvania (Romania). While evidence from settlements and domestic spaces suggests that social differences and inequality were increasing during the Middle Bronze Age, evidence from cemeteries suggests that Middle Bronze Age communities were using funerary practices to mask inequality in death. Through a theoretical framework of institutional consonance and dissonance, this study bridges seemingly contradictory views of the past derived from domestic and funerary archaeology and can be used to explore the relationship between inequality in life and death in other contexts across the globe.