Fleeting Identity?

The concept of time as felt by the Methanites presents some interesting questions for me, as it seems to have for others who have commented. This may seem like an oversimplification, but how much meaning can the landscape hold for the inhabitants of Methana if there seems to be a general upward limit of 150 years for the living memory of events? To clarify, how do we interpret the apparent recreation of meaning attached to a place when we are approaching it from a field that is generally concerned with a much deeper time scale? Why should it be important to attempt to reconstruct a history that no longer resonates with the current citizens? (this is more of a 'devil's advocate' question, not necessarily representing how I feel, but that was prompted by the reading) The time-scale issue is also interesting when considering that Methana exists within an area often associated with its great antiquity. Although it is mentioned in Ch 4 that the survey project yielded the identification of "a number of archaeological sites (108)", there does not seem to be any indication within the text that the modern inhabitants of Methana are aware of them existing in their peninsula. Is it truly that Methanites are unaware of the ancient sites within their vicinity?

An idea that I started thinking about when first reading Ch2 and I revisited in Ch 8 & 9 is the concept of a landscape of the dead. The case study of the Vanuatu mentions that the funeral rituals "dis-locate dead individuals from places that were integral to their identities as persons and detach the deceased from their places, ensuring that they depart from the world of humans" (23). The notion of a disjunction existing between the realms of the living and the dead is again visited in the section titled 'Kinship and the Landscape of the Dead', noting that the physical structures of the Greek Orthodox churches and the gates entering into the cemeteries indicated the appropriate divide between where the dead and the living could exist. These references immediately made me think of spells from the Pyramid Texts, some of which are also worded to encourage the deceased king to leave his former places and make the transition into the afterlife: "You have not gone away dead: you have gone away alive. /...'Go in the wake of your Sun...that you may exist beside the god, / and leave your house to your son of you begetting" (trans. JPA). Until thinking about it in these contexts, I had always taken for granted the practice of funerals and burials in modern society, thinking more on the aspect of mourning and remembrance. But obviously, funerals serve as a remover from the household of the living of the dead. It would be interesting to investigate how societies have created landscapes of the dead - does the practice necessitate that the dead are removed not just physically but spiritually, always existing on a separate plane? It would be interesting to look at the various modes of access onto such places - how they limit both the movement of the deceased spirit and the living relative.

And I suppose more 'sensationally', what does it say about inherent human fears about death when it seems that the dead have not made the appropriate transition but linger on, in 'haunted houses' and other places to which a supernatural/paranormal presence is attributed?