Bradbury Jennie - Engaging with the Dead

Studies in Funerary Archaeology Vol. 13

E XPLORING C HANGING H UMAN B ELIEFS ABOUT D EATH , M ORTALITY AND THE H UMAN B ODY

Edited by

JENNIE BRADBURY AND CHRIS SCARRE

Published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

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Front cover: Sarcophagi at Tyre, Lebanon (photo: J. Bradbury)

This volume presents a variety of cross-disciplinary, archaeologically focused approaches to exploring the interpretation of mortuary traditions, death and ways of disposing of the dead. Topics range from conceptualisation of the body in modern burial reform to detailed discussions on taphonomy, and from studies of memory and curation to reconstructing ancient demography from historic population estimates. Whilst many of the discussions are partial or represent preliminary hypotheses, together they highlight the current vitality of death studies and the potential for future research and discoveries. The aim of this volume, and the project that inspired it (The Invisible Dead Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation) is to explore changing beliefs and practices over time. How do modern archaeology, ethnography and historical records aid our interpretations of the past, and how have past practices influenced understandings of death and dying within the modern world? Death is a part of life and should be respected as such. Many of the practices documented by archaeology appear bizarre to us today, but they are part of that human awareness of self and the afterlife that we share with previous generations. Hence our objectives are forward-looking: to better understand the present by studying the past. In this introduction we simply seek to trace some common themes that emerge from the various contributions to this volume and, by doing so, demonstrate the multitude of ways that we, as archaeologists, can engage with the dead.

The decades spanning the transition to the 21st century have witnessed a dramatic growth in what have, generically, been called death studies. From anthropology and sociology, through classics, literature, art, music, philosophy, theology and ethics, to politics, biology and medicine, issues of dying and death have assumed a heightened profile. Yet, the potential of the archaeological record of human burial, viewed in diachronic perspective, to provide evidence of long-term trends and changes in belief, has not hitherto been systematically addressed. Ian Morris (1992, 69) in a study of burial in the Roman Empire, stressed the massive potential of large-scale empirical analysis when undertaken by investigators who are aware of the historical problems. Two features of the early funerary record the invisibility of the majority of the dead, and variable and symbolic manipulations of human bodies and body parts demand detailed and concurrent attention. It is already widely recognised that in western Eurasia, the documented record of human burial from the beginnings of farming to the Roman period can represent only a fraction of those who must once have lived, despite, in the case of the Levant, a corpus of textual evidence which stresses the importance of a proper burial. Attitudes to bodies, death and personhood lie behind this. Issues of taphonomy and preservation must be addressed in order to evaluate how many burials might have been lost and how representative the surviving sample is of previous funerary practices, but the burial record is so fragmentary and incomplete that it seems justified to turn the whole issue on its head. The surviving remains may not be the primary burial practices of the past but might be unusual or marginal in relation to mainstream practices of body treatment or disposal that have left almost no trace. The surviving burials may be those of elites, or special sections of society, or those who died in particular ways. These are the questions that underlie the Invisible Dead project.

Burial deposits constitute a major component of the archaeological record and have often been used to draw inferences about big questions pertaining to social organisation and belief. More directly, they can answer questions about mortality, longevity, health and disease, and violence. The physical study of human remains is covered by several textbooks ( e.g. Ortner 2003; Roberts 2009; Waldron 2009; White and Folkens 2005). More general reviews of burial evidence in archaeology are provided by Parker Pearson (1999), Taylor (2002) and Tarlow and Nilsson Stutz (2013). Burial evidence figures prominently in studies of ritual and belief (Insoll 2004) and personhood (Fowler 2004; Hamilakis et al. 2002). Death and burial have also, of course, been a major concern of anthropologists studying non-western societies for well over a century ( e.g. Bloch and Parry 1982; Hertz 1960 [1907]; Huntington and Metcalf 1979; Mauss 1938). Despite this multitude of studies and publications, however, there has been a tendency to shy away from comprehensive big scale or big question studies, in favour of smaller, thematic or period-specific contributions.

One of the greatest challenges to those embarking upon big data projects in archaeology is the sheer variability and incompleteness of our datasets. This is nowhere truer than in considering past burial practices. For certain parts of the world the discipline of bioarchaeology is relatively recent and its uptake and adoption into mainstream practice have been limited (Bradbury et al. 2016, 5701; Perry 2012, 457). By contrast, for countries like the UK there is an overwhelming mass of information, held by different local authorities, and documented through sources that have been subject to varying degrees of publication and are often difficult to access (Bradbury et al. 2016). Finding appropriate ways to deal with non-comparable datasets was an issue at the heart of the Invisible Dead project and is touched upon by numerous contributions to this volume ( e.g. ) discusses several large bioarchaeological projects that reveal what is possible when large amounts of data are synthesised and studied. Despite the unevenness of these large datasets and the analytical limitations that follow from that, she amply demonstrates the huge potential of big data research. For bioarchaeological studies such as this, however, one of the most significant challenges is the threat posed by reburial and lack of storage space in museums, a problem to which we shall return in the final chapter.