From collective burials to symbols of power. The translation of role and meanings of the stone-lined cist burial tradition from Southern Caucasus to the Euphrates Valley.

T he place and the ritual chosen to bury a dead person, be s/he a family member, a friend or the chief of a community are generally a meaningful and symbolic social act1. This is because dead people (either their bodies or their memories) are important for the living as much as the past is fundamental for the cultural and political construction of the present2. A t the beginning of the third millennium, after the so-called Uruk expansion, a new funerary tradition (the stone-lined cists) appears first in the Upper Euphrates valley and later on, crossing the Taurus mountains, also in northern Syria. The adoption of a tradition originating from very distant regions (Southern Caucasus or Transcaucasia) and from a totally different cultural background (Kura-Araks) highlights that a set of profound social and cultural changes were taking place in the Syro-Anatolian communities. Moreover, the construction of these funerary structures for some elite intramural tombs is also the sign that they were being involved in symbolic dynamics managed and codified by new emerging groups which were challenging the former elites by undertaking a process of social re