The archaeological record of southeastern Mauritania has considerable potential to contribute to longstanding anthropological debates in world prehistory, such as early cereal domestication or the emergence and organization of complex societies, although research remains limited. The archaeological study of funerary rites offers invaluable insights into cultural attitudes towards the dead and the socio-economic dynamics of the living. The materiality of remembrance is a political statement, rooted on the ability of different social agents to mobilize labor pools and networks of obligations within a given cultural framework. As such, understanding the spatial distribution and size variability in burial monuments within funerary landscapes provides insights into the social energetics of ancestor memorialization. To that end, this paper first presents a size-based classification system for pre-Islamic conical tumulus cairns in the highlands of southeastern Mauritania, West Africa, that has much wider applicability within prehistoric Saharan archaeology. Through the first application of Gini coefficients to the study of funerary landscapes, the paper then analyses the spatial distribution and degree of monument size variability within large, spatially bounded clusters (“tumulus fields”) in Dhar Tichitt in order to contextualize the socio-economic dynamics of labor mobilization at three previously undocumented tumulus fields in the western Tagant Plateau.

毛里塔尼亚东南部的考古记录具有相当大的潜力，可以为世界史前史中长期存在的人类学辩论做出贡献，例如早期谷物驯化或复杂社会的出现和组织，尽管研究仍然有限。丧葬仪式的考古学研究为了解对死者的文化态度和生者的社会经济动态提供了宝贵的见解。纪念的重要性是一种政治声明，植根于不同社会主体在特定文化框架内动员劳动力和义务网络的能力。因此，了解墓葬景观中墓葬纪念碑的空间分布和大小变化，可以深入了解祖先纪念的社会能量。为此，本文首先介绍了西非毛里塔尼亚东南部高地的前伊斯兰圆锥形古坟石标基于大小的分类系统，该系统在史前撒哈拉考古学中具有更广泛的适用性。通过首次将基尼系数应用于丧葬景观研究，本文随后分析了 Dhar Tichitt 大型空间边界集群（“古坟场”）内的空间分布和纪念碑大小变异程度，以便将社会经济背景化塔甘特高原西部三个先前未记录的古坟场的劳动力动员动态。