The Archaeology of Death?

I’d never really thought about what humans did with the dead before concepts like spirits, ghosts, and an afterlife of some kind developed in humans. When did that appear, and how could anyone tell? It turns out, paleoanthropologists and archaeologists found some patterns and survivals of remains that suggest a specific point in time when people stopped treating dead band or tribe members the same way they treated other dead or broken things.

One caveat: what we know depends on what survived. Very little not stone lasts for thousands of years, unless the conditions are exactly right. Absence of evidence might not be evidence of absence, just the law of statistics and survival. Even so, sometimes the dog that doesn’t bark, and the remains and grave goods not found, might tell a story …

Once people began to view the dead as remaining within the culture for some period after death, either as a form of benevolent ancestor, or malevolent dead, true graves begin to appear. Interestingly, that’s also when the signs of fear of the undead, those who have not gone on for some reason, or whose bodies have been inhabited by a malevolent force, also appear. Stones wedged into jaws, stakes in the heart, deliberately broken bones in a skeleton buried under an unusual and large rock … The dead did not remain in their proper place. The idea of the dead remaining as part of the extended clan appears in several ways, including the layered burials of skulls and in some cases full skeletons within dwelling areas, or as boundary markers, showing a claim to the land. Think of Genesis and Exodus, and the “land of his fathers,” idea, and you see how it continued on.

Belief in an afterlife has been claimed for the Neandertal, based on the famous Shanidar Cave finds in the 1960s-70s in Iraq. Later research and excavation has pointed to some problems with this, and highlights an on-going tension within archaeology – do archaeologists see what they want to find? The Solecki’s, the primary excavators of the cave and “graves,” argued that flower pollen and some other things were proof that the Neandertals were peaceful, lived in harmony, and cared for the disabled in their society (perhaps better than modern society at that time did.) Many of their findings have been questioned, including how deliberate the burials were, since rock-falls were a major hazard in the cave even in modern times. What we can be pretty certain of is that with the rise of agriculture and the later Neolithic period, people started treating their dead in ways that were more likely to lead to preservation of the remains (to an extent).

Burials, ritual burials to prevent a return of the body or spirit or both, the incorporation of parts of the dead in buildings, apparent veneration of skulls, grave goods even with cremations, all are hints about beliefs in something after death, and elements in the desire or fear of the proximity of the deceased to the living. Francis Pryor has some fascinating speculations about the relationship of the excarnation* site called Seahenge to Stonehenge and other elements on Salisbury Plain. He suggests that both were used, the first to remove the flesh from bones, which were then ritually removed to Salisbury. From there, they were deposited in a grave following a communal feast. Wood was for the living, stone for the dead, the inverted oak tree at Seahenge being where the separation of the dead from the living truly began, a rite finished at Stonehenge or one of the other stone-marked places on the plain. Pryor also makes clear that he is speculating based on archaeology and what we know of comparative anthropology. Timothy Taylor has a different take, but both point out that the “spaces between,” the liminal spaces that are neither water nor land, not earth or air, neither truly living nor perhaps not yet fully dead, were and are considered unsettling and especially dangerous. Thus the near-universal worry about the should-be-dead-but-don’t-act-like-it, aka vampires.

Archaeology provides teasing glimpses into the distant past. We cannot easily reconstruct beliefs without writing, and even then what we see is often official, formalized belief and ritual, not everyday magics and traditions. The modern western separation of the dead – often sterile, no longer part of the community, clinical and distant – is very new. Very few members of western culture worry about the dead returning in some form, or turn the mirrors backward or cover them so that the spirit can leave peacefully, or stop clocks, or stake the suspect dead. Death is final, clinical, the end.

Or is it? The fascination with the occult, the market for Ouiji boards, mediums, and other things, paranormal romances and urban fantasy, Goth music of certain kinds, suggests that perhaps we’re not so far from our ancestors as we’d like to think.

*Excarnation is the practice of exposing the remains of the dead until only bones remain. These might be left to be broken apart by animals and weathering, as the Parsee do with their Towers of Silence, or they might be gathered up and deposited in a certain ritual location as part of the “final death,” as Timothy Taylor phrases it.