OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

THE ARCHAEOLOGY
OF RITUAL AND
RELIGION
 OXFORD HANDBOOI< OF

THE
ARCHAEOLOGY
OF RITUAL
AND RELIGION

Edited by
TIMOTHY IN SOLL

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press Introduction: Ritual and Religion in Archaeological Perspective 1
in the UK and in certain other countries TIMOTHY lNSOLL
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7 Death 89
TIMOTHY TAYLOR

8 Taboo 105
NICKY MILNER

9 The Many Dimensions of Ritual 115

MARC VERHOEVEN
88 TERJE OESTIGAARD

TRIGGER, B. 2003 .Understanding Early Civilizations: A comparative study (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press). . . . „ . .
VALERI, v. 1935, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and soC1ety m ancient Hawau (Chicago. The CHAPTER 7
University Press of Chicago). . .
VERNER, M. 2003 . The Pyramids: Their archaeology and history (London: Atlant1c Books).

DEATH

TIMOTHY TAYLOR

1 lNTRODUCTION

THERE can be no clearer a priori demonstration of ritual in past societies than the
archaeological uncovery of a formal human burial. Despite considerable variation in
incidence and manner, it has been found in many places and times, and appears to have
emerged as a standardized routine independently on more than one occasion. Certain
structured coincidences, notably the use of what are termed grave goods, and the wide-
spread adoption of particular recurrent postures and orientations of skeletal remains and/
or tombs, have led scholars to infer the existence of religious beliefs about another place.
This place might be indicated by, for example, the direction of the setting sun; to reach the
place, a journey must be undertaken for which the deceased will require material provi-
sions. But burial is by no means the only intersect between death and archaeology within
the framework of ritual and religion, nor (as we shall discuss later) is it a sine qua non for
the existence of the latter.
Archaeologists' duties to the dead may be conceived of universally, and/or be sub-
defined by real or perceived special relationships (for example, known or projected
ancestral ties). In terms of actions undertaken in the treatment of the dead, we may often
be able to distinguish between coherent systems ofbeliefby which people live and die, and
ritual practice, which may be common to a wide range of communally shared or privately
held beliefs (including no belief at all). The uncovery and return of the dead can thus at
least appear as a material event that in its symbolism cross-cuts the avowed justifications
of specific cases and individual, inner motivations.
Archaeological treatments of death in relation to belief divide sharply between those that
deal with historical periods (as is the case with world religions' contexts: Insoll 2001) and
those that are prehistoric. In the case of the first, it is assumed that the critical information
on specific aspects of belief is known (as in the cases of Roman, Egyptian, imperial
Chinese, and American colonial archaeologies of death); in the second c~se, there is-
typically-a recourse to parallels from the anthropology of 'primitive' s-ocieties (see
Parker Pearson 1999: eh. 2), that is, those non-state-level, and frequently non-agricultural
societies, already reflexively categorized as 'earlier' in historically abstracted schemes of
90 TIMOTHY TAYLOR
universal development (although the extent to which any such division can be maintained
is debatable: Taylor 2008b).
lt is clear then that relationships between the categories potentially covered by the term
'death', and the archaeology of ritual and religion are complex and potentially confusing.
Shanks and Tilley (1992) described archaeology as facing a 'fourfold hermeneutic'
(cf. Embree 1987), wherein archaeologists must first work interpretatively through the
filters of their own sociological position (the double hermeneutic), then the sociocultural
anthropological confrontation of the 'Other', which adds a further level of difficulty, to
finally attempt to bridge the radical disjuncture of time involved in the study of an alien
culture that no longer exists. To this complexity we must add the peculiar difficulties of
the science-religion relationship. Ritual and religion raise complex definitional issues, with
no final agreement in sight, except insofar as there is an emergent view that truly universal
features are lacking (it can hardly be called a consensus, as many of these authors fail
to consider each other's arguments; see James 1902; Kerr 1986; Harrison 1991; Clarke and
Byrne 1993; Boyer 1994; Pals 1995; Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004; Csapo 2005). This
complicates the double hermeneutic and may allow projections that claim (however
spuriously) to short-circuit the other levels, for example by claiming rights for the prehis-
toric dead beyond that of the Enlightenment duty of truth (the sole surviving duty,
according to Voltaire) that is most easily assented to as consonant with the project of
developing an objective discipline.
Death, obviously, is a broader subject within the archaeology of ritual and religion than
recognizable funerary rites. The intersect between death and beliefhas resulted in many of
the most significant surviving ancient finds, sites, and monuments, such as the bog bodies
of North-western Europe, the Shanidar Neanderthal interments, the pyramids of Egypt,
and the tombs of Queen Puabi and of the first emperor of China. W e know iconographies
of death, and of gods, including gods of death. Additionally, many significant ritual sites
have a death-related aspect, as loci of human killing and the deposition of remains
(causewayed camps, central European Kreisgrabenanlagen, the Aztec temples) while others
were designed for ritualized activities that, though not primarily describable as religious,
adumbrated a cosmology oflife and death (the Roman Colosseum); in addition to discrete
monuments which embody aspects of the religion-death nexus, we may also be able to
identify broader landscapes. There are many difficulties in identifying ritual behaviours
through discoverable surviving material and the patterning it may preserve, but it is
perhaps no more problematic than any other area of archaeological inference (pace Whitley
2008: 552).
2 THE ANTHROPOLOGY AND Soc10LOGY oF DEATH
··················································································································
As early as the fifth century Be it was possible to reflect ethnographically on differences in
funerary rites as these related to deeply held beliefs about identity and propriety, as
in Herodotus' description of the horror felt by two different cultures, one practising
cremation and the other endo-funerary cannibalism, in the face of inducements to switch
customs with one another (Hdt 3.38 and see discussion in Taylor 2002 : 83 f.). Herodotus'
conclusion, essentially that human behaviour was contingent on inherited norms that
could vary greatly, was to be underlined by Victorian ethnographers, such as Radcliffe
Brown, W. H. R. Rivers and Sir James Frazer, who revealed an extraordinary global
diversity in indigenous religious beliefs in relation to death practices. Death had a special
place in the first sociological formulation of religion by Durkheim; in recent scholarship, a
specific, specialized sociology of death has emerged (Clark 1993; Seale 1998) and, arguably,
the broad perspective pioneered by Durkheim has been lost. As we shall see, something
similar may be true in relation to 'funerary archaeology' (see below).
Durkheim frequently insisted on a structuring distinction of sacred and profane (Durkheim
2001; Fields 2001). Where these states for Durkheim are typically exclusive, defined by their
set-apartness from one another, the human corpse can bring these states into a dynamic
juxtaposition, being at once an object o~ reverence and horror, purity and corruption: for
aboriginal Australian funerary rites Durkheim believed the corpse switched its sacred polarity
from malevolent to beneficial during the course of the ceremony (eventually becoming
profane and ordinary-a point we shall return to). Although the sacred-profane distinction
'just does not pass the test of crosscultural comparisons' (Boyer 1994: 46), the idea of sequence
was to prove fertile: the idea of death as a punctuated event, with physical death (usually)
preceding social death in a process choreographed in order to give meaning to status transi-
tions more broadly, was investigated in the social anthropology of the early years of the
twentieth century.
Two major attempts to synthesize and schematize the observed variance were those of
Hertz (1907) and van Gennep (1960 .[1908]). Hertz made important distinctions between
three different sorts of human anxieties: horror of death as an event, the shock of any
particular death, and fear of the dead. The first is to do with the body being rendered
extraordinary and so leaving the realm of normal objects; the second relates to the rip that
death makes in the social fabric, large and requiring significant repair in the case of a leader,
small and possibly wholly insignificant in the case of the loss of a slave or an illegitimate
child; the last is a fear of disembodied souls-entities with a potential for powerful
malevolence irrespective of previous life status. Hertz argued that the nature and scale of
funerary rites in all societies will vary depending on these factors, which condition the
relations between the living mourners, the dead body, and the disembodied soul.
Van Gennep also argued for a universal structure in terms of the tripartite structuring of
rites of passage by which individuals leave particular social statuses and are accorded new
ones. His schema was to apply equally to births, deaths, and marriages and consisted of:
preliminary rites of separation, when an original or old status was stripped away; liminal
rites in which a transition occurred and the individual, by virtue of their statuslessness, was
taboo and ritually contagious; and postliminal rites of incorporation. For the dead, van
Gennep argued that primary funerary rites (corpse washing, preliminary burial, or seques-
tering of the corpse) led into a dangerous liminal phase where the disembodied soul would
typically seek to reanimate the mortal remains, and that this <langer would only lift once a
secondary burial, pyre-burning, ritual ingestion, or other act was complete and so signalled
the acceptance of the soul into a social world of ancestors with no possibfo return.
In practical terms, both Hertz and van Gennep manage to malce more sense of the
funerary rites accorded to socially powerful individuals than those of ordinary follc Hertz
seemed aware of this in his famous observation that 'at the death of a chief ... a true panic
sweeps over the group [while] the death of a stranger, a slave or a child will go almost
unnoticed' (1960: 76). Obviously the death of a person in a socially pivotal position
92 TIMOTHY TAYLOR
demands an orderly period of transition, in which the complexities attending a social death
(issues of inheritance, succession, lineage, and so on) may be managed in a period and the
authority of the deceased be maintained through elaborate and costly ritual routines. But to
what extent is the apparently religious manifestation not a functional economic means for
bolstering certain forms of structured inequality? Is not the hierarchization of individuals
in death, under the emotional charge of some level of collective grief, not the ideal way to
establish and maintain the concept ofhierarchy itself? Indeed, Hocart argued that 'the first
kings must have been dead kings', implying that only through the power of funerary ritual
could such an absolute status be instantiated in early states (Hocart 1927; cf. the discussion
in Metcalf and Huntington 1991: eh. 7, and Button 2007 for an archaeological example of
this in action).
An extensive body ofwork exists on the death-religion nexus in sociology, philosophy,
social anthropology, theology, and art history. lt is too great to even fairly review here, but
certain central elements should be noted. While Martin Heidegger observed that 'no one
can take the Other's dying away from him' (Heidegger 1962: 284), it is also clear that the
dying are ultimately deprived of their own death (as noted by Oestigaard 2004: 7), the
paradoxes thereby entailed being the subject of a major philosophical study, The Gift of
Death (Derrida 1995). Derrida nuances Heidegger's idea of authenticity as situated in
acceptance of the inevitability of personal mortality, by arguing that the possibilities of
moral and ethical responsibility are uniquely underpinned by such acceptance. Following '
Patocka, Derrida appears to distinguish fundamentally different types of religion in light of
their engagement with death. For archaeologists, and especially prehistorians, this signals
caution: death in world religions, and particularly in the Abrahamic tradition, at once
deeply conditions modern secular metaphysics (notably, though not only, through linguis-
tic constraint in itself) while presenting a marked, often fundamental contrast, with death
concepts in non-world (a.ka. pagan-, tribal- or primitive-) religions. These, which from a.
central European Christian perspective, Patocka (1990) characterizes as embodying forms
of what he terms 'demonic sacralization' (notably devoid of such refined and historically
derived concepts as personal responsibility, freely conceived and undertalcen: see also;
Paul Ricoeur's introduction to Erica Abram's 1990 translation of Patocka into French),
might weil include the concepta, and preconceptions, of prehistoric social formations. The
distinction between primitive (superstitious) modes of thinldng about religion and civilized
(rational) ones was also developed by Gellner (1988: although he probably underestimate~
the extent to which modern populations en masse had been bypassed by Enlightenmen~
niceties).
If the existence of formally deposited human remains holds a central place in o
reactions to our ancestors, it does so not only for us as members of a community
scholars but also as members of broader present societies. Death for archaeologists is
social category twice over, involving,·first, the reconstruction of the conceptions of dea
and the dead in past communities and, second (and not necessarily), the recognition tha
these past communities constitute a greater category of 'the dead' to whom archaeologis
undertake specific duties. These duties include a duty of truth not only in reconstrucf
the first category in specific cases, but in using the dead, their belongings, and detritus
uncover all possible aspects of past lifeways. They are often also perceived as extend"
beyond what might be dispassionately warranted by objective scientific study, and cro
DEATH 93
over explicitly into politics, ethnicity, and specific ldnds of religiously underpinned rever-
ence, as in the various contemporary 'reburial' debates. In this there are great dangers.
As noted above, W. H. R. Rivers was one of the first to note that the idea of death appears
more variable than might be expected (see Metcalf and Huntington 1991: 6); indeed, as
Needham was later to point out (see e.g. 1985), despite the apparent universality of the
phenomenon from outside, conceptions of it and its attendant (or non-attendant) customs
and symbols are far more varied, cross-culturally, than those of our shared life-processes
(birth, sexual maturity, parenthood, changes in status vis-a-vis one another, and so on),
· which he considered relatively predictable (see also Bloch and Parry 1982). This was hardly
surprising as death's contents are essentially invisible (Needham 1967; see useful discussion
in Metcalf and Huntington 1991: 62 ff.). And, if this has been true of the broad present of
ethnographic documentation, how much more variance must we expect in archaeological
contexts and in a survey of global prehistory?
3 FUNERARY ARCHAEOLOGY
··················································································································
The issue of archaeological visibility in relation to death is particularly problematic. The
ategory is often addressed obliquely, via what seems the most materially data-rich category
thus, in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, death is discussed under the heading of
urial and tombs', and funerary archaeology considered as a subset of 'Religion': Fagan
996: 109f. and 59off.; entries by Diane Chase and Chris Scarre respectively). As with the
ciology of death, funerary archaeology, since a seminal paper by Peter Ucko in 1969, has
come something of a specialized subset of archaeological theory and practice (Ucko 1969;
hapman, Kinnes and Randsborg 1981; O'Shea 1984; Beck 1995; Parker Pearson 1999; Lucy
oo). Such works outline the basic processual and post-processual approaches taken to the
tural elaboration of death in past societies and investigate the visibility or otherwise of
e scale of funerary rites within different contextual frameworks and touch on some
resolved issues in mortuary archaeology. Several of them reveal how an over-focus on
· gs (such as 'tombs' or 'cemeteries') may risk ignoring key aspects of total religious
tems, at (e.g.) artefact- and landscape-level.
As we noted at the outset, the most direct archaeological evidence of ritual and religion is
context of human burial as a mortuary rite (or as part of one). Put another way, the
ssession of a corpse by a community becomes a pretext for ritual action, focused on
h but typically ramified through symbolism to include ideas of social renewal and
eneration, the perpetuation of a cosmic order, and so on (and, as we shall see in the next
tion, this can be inverted, with the necessity of such symbolic ritual providing the pretext
death). The iconography, iconology, and symbolism of death can also be considered
e in making some general points about cognitive development and cultural evolution
~ the long term as witnessed by the archaeology of death-related_.behaviours (in
tcular, issues such as the earliest evidence for ritual and the emergenc.e of culturally
orated, death-related behaviours and potential correspondences between art and
an remains).
wo million years ago, a freshly dead australopithecine (Sterkfontein Stw 53) was
,hered, the jaw cut away with a stone knife; 600,000 years ago at Bodo, Ethiopia, a
 DEATH 95
94 TIMOTHY TAYLOR

. . ns was intentionally defleshed; and the 800,000-year- dead qua art object fades away at this point, to be replaced by a wealth of fancy grave goods
cranium of early archaic Homo sap1e t r individuals have been preserved at and an often kitsch monumentality.
old cannibalized remains of ten Homo an ecesso ·. . rl a ressive Although all Where burial emerged as a ritual option it was inevitably associable with a wide range of
Atapuerca, Spain (Taylor 2002). Each of th~se acts w;;os~:~e ~ha~~e nor~al fate of the interlaced practical and symbplic ideas, from the sequestering of corpses from scavengers
had at least the potentia~ tobe memento ~::' ~e r~;sorption by living systems (formally and enemies (hygiene; purity) through to constructions related to territoriality and land-
dead in these early penods ~~s ~o~~erent from modern Zoroastrian funerary custom, ownership (essentially 'caching' the dead in cemetery resources). But what also seems clear
analogous wit~, though cogm ive.by r ) If the d:ad were beautiful, the aesthetic experi- is that in the vast majority of archaeologically known cultures a range of practices arose
exposure, or ntual funerary canm a ism . rather than one stable template for all the deceased members of a community. In India,
ence would have been transitory and ~sthatory (Taylol'r 2opoh9~.nomenon among dedicated China, and Europe, earlier prehistoric interments may be of animals, while it is unclear that
h 't :fi t appears is t us a puzz mg
Interment, w en ~ rs h .
the Levant were placed in caves 120,000 all humans were buried. In later prehistoric contexts, practices such as inhumation exist
survivalists. ~~atp~g~~cj~:s ~::e~~rn~i:s t~~ls; 60,000 years ago at Shanidar (Iraq), a
alongside cremation in many societies, with hints at less formal disposal methods for lower
years ago, w1 . . 1 d the ' rave of flowers'; and by 25,000 social strata. This has caused archaeologists many interpretive problems on the assumption
Neanderthal was perhaps buned withda~~ an - ~th hundreds of drilled sea-shell tliat the perceived patterning must be due to overarching religious views in relation to
~ea~ agode~:~~::~1:;:~:~s~~~~~;n~~e~toni~:~~~~~' Republic), a triple burial ddatfing to death being expressed in a coherent way, but also subject to drift or change as religious
conceptions changed for whatever internal or external reasons. But it may be that it is
ea s an . d to either side of a female who suffere rom a
26,600 years ago contam~ two ;al~s pos~d not have borne children. The hand of one of often a mistake to attempt to 'read' the patterns for any particular archaeological culture as
congenital pelvic deform1ty an w o c~ here a flint blade was placed; this zone reflective of a unitary religious practice.
the males reaches between the female s le~~ :d ochre Another triple burial from this Of the Roman Empire, where we have detailed descriptions of the forms beliefs took,
was covered, like the heads of all three, ~il d uble b~rials are known from the 'Grotte Jones notes that it is not possible to argue that 'speci:fic religions required specific funerary
time comes ,from Barme Gr~nd(~ (It~ly;, :d ~o:ito (Italy). The latter is the burial of a practices' (Jones 1987: 816). Further, from the standpoint of cognitive anthropology, Boyer
des Enfants (France), Sungir ussia. ,da b . dibly short woman. Perhaps the (1994: 41) warns that:
d d h' d rf accompame y an mcre
chon ro ys~op ~ w; the disabled Dolni V estonice girl belong to an underrepresented the overall consistency of people's representations about religious matters should not be
dwarfs mot er, s e an f d U Palaeolithic remains are male: Pettitt 2011, table taken for granted ... the ancestor cult with its rituals ... may weil be largely independent
group-females (75% o sexe pper from the ideas about witchcraft and magical capacities; although these 'systems' are likely to
6.1-2). · d'b 'al' hetheritwasanhonouror converge, if only because they coexist in people's minds, it would be absurd to take them a
So only a carefully selected subset of people rece1ve un 'w . . al priori as an integrated worldview.
. . h ions the typical absence of obv10us proxim causes
::~~:~h~~~:a:ia~~:ar:~~~!:,
1

.
~ve:;~: ex;ess .of decorative orn;m~~sr~!~:a:~;u~~~:
d d . the corpses at Sungir) are consonan w1
,A good example might be the European 'bog body' phenomenon, which stretches from the
Bronze Age through to the early medieval period with remarkable coherence when set

:~:~~ ;;~i~::!,::: =~:!"~m:~~ ~:~d= t~o;::::~':!~;~:::~:::: ~gainst a variety of changing 'standard' funerary practices (Taylor 2002). This can be seen
i:learly in the case of Meso- and South American religious beliefs, among the Aztec, Maya,
. y ma~:d aSeen as ~form of installation art, these bodies connect with the famous part- d In ca, for example, where both 'the dead' and death were used in a wide range of ways

:a~:~, part~adorned, lar~e-bre~s:ed ~en:::;:;:~~~ ~::ni7!~;0 ~~;:~~ ;:e ~:;e:{;

2 6 ilson et al. 2007; Tiesler and Cucina 2007; Arnold and Rasdorf 2008).
It is also questionable whether practices coherently 'reflect' beliefs at all; Falco Daim has
W e might speculate t at un ymg ima . in shallow raves projected positive and'
awn attention to the way in which ethnicity in early medieval Europe was constructed
pose~;v~e;!~: ~;~:~~;~:~a:~:~:~~::~:i~~;~ysical aspir!ions ~nd the b.asest .calate~o:1': ough funerary practices that were not necessarily taken at 'face value' (i.e. really
nega h tic of mortality was born of existent1 cns1s. oviding for the deceased in another world: Daim 1998 and pers. comm.). This can provide
transgressions. This, the :first concrete aest e . . d b d ' flesh represented by cold
e account for the relatively frequent occurrence of non-functional, proxy, or skeuo-
In the via negativa of these two kinds of aesthe~~c1zethe oa~e:;:i:f moisture and softness;
carved bone and dry human bone represen mg . . e örphic (dissembling) grave-goods, and echoes with Boyer's subsequent suggestion that
. 'ofthe soul was formed Immortality and mortality arose together, mtertwin pticism concerning the basic tenets of religions, far from being insigniqcant 'noise', may
a concep t10n · .
fact provide insights into the acquisition and fixation ofbeliefs (Boyer 1994: 41).
through practice. d h yth' g like
Not until the advent of farming, within the last 10,000 years, o we dave an ~· T o summarize briefly here, it seems necessary that archaeologists at once try to appre-
. . . . what can properly be terme a necropo is. d internal (emic) understandings of death-related behaviours in connection to religion
fair reflection of a hvmg commumty mb f h d d was then done for recognizab.
. f th rth with the ones o t e ea ile at the same time appreciating the external, universal, or overarching effects and
deliberate seed mg o e ea . b ild olitical entities a
territorial reasons, using the creation of set-as1~e sacred s~ac~~ot t~e s!.rtling image of rdances of particular practices in terms of their ability to generate collective representa-
the resource base needed for their survival. lt is no surpnse a s, facilitate social control, and actively create ethnic, status or gender affiliation. Because
 DEATH 97
96 TIMOTHY TAYLOR
Archaeologists, especially prehistorians, have always to take into consideration wh t
of such comple:xities, it is desirable that practitioners establish plausible constraints on
b dl hMasterman termed the sociological paradigm (Master man 1970; Tay1or 2007)a
Margaret
analysis and interpretation in relation to contexts while keeping an open mind concerning roa Y. t e ba~kground sociological assumptions, current among any communi of
what such contexts might be (pace Wylie 2002). academ1cs
1 'bl b by h v1rtue
. of. their belonging to a broader society, b eanng
· on expectat10ns· ty of
p aus1 e e av10ur. lt is'. for .example, becoming increasingly likely, through work such as
that of t.he Stonehenge Rivers1de Project, that the ceremonial landscape around Stonehen e
4 IDENTITY, Exc1us10N, AND V1scERALITY was a ntual landscape of and for the dead (Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998) gd
··················································································································· perhaps even, following the distinction made by Hertz, for rituals f d t h · 'h an
l t 'bil' h b o ea , suc an
exp ana o~ poss1 ity as een available ever since Maud Cunnington excavated an i f; t
This section examines physical death outside the valedictory and funerary contexts (ritual skeleton, . its skull neatly split in two with a stone axe, at th e centre of W oodhenge n an
killing, human sacrifice, endo- and exo-cannibalism, etc.), indicating the importance of
( Cun~mgto.n. as cite.d in Taylor 2002: 276). That past (specifically pre-Christian and re-
advancing knowledge claims antagonistic to the prevailing sociological paradigm. Child Islam1c) rehg10ns m1ght include child satrifice is made clear enough in the Old Testam~nt
sacrifice here provides one example. where the pattern for th.e Cult of Molek was of roasting first-born boys and or irls in ~
lt is probably safe to say that whatever metaphysical categories for 'the dead' e:xist and
I'topeth
al . (or
. roaster)
. outside Jerusalem, Biblical child sacn'fice passages are mamly· g pretty
have e:xisted in human societies, they are only ever subsets connected to the totality of
f;iter 1IlJUilCt10ns
b I' not to. do
. such things and it is very doubtful th at COh erent arguments
human lives and lived experiences. That is to say, the dead belong to one or more social or sym
L ·o · ic or euphem1stic understandings can be made (Oester1ey 1937, Bremmer 2007'
categories, and society is as frequently defined by exclusion as incorporation-processes see eVIt1cus 18.21; 20.2; 1 Kings 3.27; 2 Kings 16.3; 23.10; Jeremiah 3 24· . . '.
often primarily managed through religious practice and understood through the filters of Deuteronomy . ; Ezekiel . ). · ' 7.3l, 19.5, 32.35,
12 31 23 39
belief. An example, contemporary but with more general (pre)historical relevance, is the
'pro-choice'/'pro-life' debate. Here, whether abortion constitutes murder of a person, and
thus the production of an incorporeal soul that must be accomodated somewhere in death 5 MATERIALITY APPROACHES AND
(as, for example, in the limbus infantorum), depends on when a person is deemed first to
have been present. While, for the Catholic Church, the incarnation of an immortal soul is Evo1uTIONARY AsPECTS
considered to occur at conception, in many societies studied by social anthropologists, a
new person enters society weil after parturition, often when the baby's chances of growing
at least into a useful, contributory social role have been judged as good. Thus, we can see In ~he Varieties. of Religio~~ Ex~erience, William James stressed the primacy of immediate
that even the apparently objective and scientific category of biological death is inevitably ~eeling over log1cal expos1t10n m religious belief; Wittgenstein, while influenced b this
framed at some point ethically, morally, and spiritually. A series of initiations marks both idea, tak~s a further step to argue that it is action that is foundational, echoin an :arlier
first entry into society (typically an act of naming) and movement through its statuses, as observat10n
·B by ~
· Marrett · (Kerr 1986: 158, 183; Taylor 2002'· 307) · Ritual' Oll th1's v1ew, is
. JUSt
.
weil as physically manifesting (emically speaking) the, often gradual, establishment of what .one, oyer, m a~pr~VIng of Fortes' judgement that 'it is a short step from the notion of
we translate as soul (though soul concepts themselves may be multiple, as in ancient üual ~s .commumcat10n to the non-e:xistence of ritual per se' (Fortes 1966; Boyer 1994· 190)
s~ns1t~ve to th~ very ~ame point (although in then claiming its absence from 'anth~o o~
Egypt).
lt can be immediately perceived from the foregoing that behaviours around biological · ~ention
g1cal hter.ature '. he falls to the earlier thinkers). In any case, it is not hard to ~ee
death may vary greatly within an ongoing cultural community in line with what category ow ~atenal act10ns-the :11mgs archaeologists may be able to track by their residues and
of being is thought to have died, and in what manner death happened. W e must thus not 1
eposits-may prompt behefs to arise that may then provide postfiactum J'ust'fi t' c
forget the issue of the non-valorized dead, such as neonates, unrecovered war dead, and" hat has been clone. 1 ca 10n !Or
others whose typical absence from the funerary record may be sensibly inferred (sometimes ~rgume~ts for the cogn~tive emergence of Homo sapiens often rests on the interpretation
from other types of material evidence, such as carvings ofbattle scenes). Chattel slaves, fot: . ~e earhest human bunals on the assumption that these, if correctly identified im 1
example, being never socially alive to the enslaving community, may receive no religiously m s complex enough for the idea of a religiously conceived 'beyond" these oft ' flpty
choreographed funerary rite at all ETaylor 2005). Conversely, what we may initiall ot' f '.
.ur thin s · (') h ' en con a e
VIZ. 1 t e emerg~nce. by whatever means of religion; qi) the increasing
understand as the funerals ofkings, queens, pharaohs, and so on, may be better understoo r 10na Impact. of death with mcreased intelligence (as pining becomes concrete
as further stages in social initiation in which a secular ruler became, though a process onl . eavement and is then formalized by mourning); (iii) specific treatinent patterns for
tangentially including what we would understand as biological death, an eternal go ,rpsebs, l~of~e of wulhich may be, more or less accidentally, more archaeologically visible· (iv)
According to the statuses ascribed to different beings, religious rites accorded to membe e e ie m so s. '
of a given society may thus exclude some humans while including some apparent no a:~: marks the point w~ere active human subjects become objects whose volition is
humans, such as pets, divine and totemic animals, and even inanimate objects (thus so absent, but whose w1shes may remain potent projections in the minds of those left
artefact 'biographies' may have terminated in artefact death).
 TIMOTHY TAYLOR
DEATH 99

alive, in whatever relation to the deceased. In a way, death produces in the human body a
previously described body was at least agnostic, historical, and humanistic (Boyer . White-
reduced object, that is thereby analogous to a human being but is not it. This insight was house and Laidlaw 2004). 1994'
made by Levi-Strauss (1985) in relation to all art objects, andin special connec~ion to masks.
The mask-building transformation of prehistoric treatments of the dead, not JUSt the ochre
crusts of the Middle Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, but the clay-covered cowrie-eyed Jericho
skulls, and the Chalcolithic 'cenotaph' graves of Varna, all suggest an impulse to aestheti-
6 CONCLUSIONS
cize death, not in a trivial 'prettying-up' fashion, but in a profound religious sense of ··················································································································
making a physical commentary on mortality, memory, and identity.
Given wha.t else might or 1:1ight not be clone with corpses, the uncovery of the kind of
If we have this knowledge now, when did we not have it? Did it simply occur when a
formal bunal, so archetypal m our own practitioner ideas of uncovering past belief systems
certain modern human cognitive threshold was passed? Perhaps we avoided the reality
(as noted at the outs:t) at least reveals the existence of a grammar of a type Wittgenstein
even as it first revealed itself, adopting it in performance and countering it in figurative art.
(among others) assoc1ated a priori with ritual behaviour, while noting that such behaviours
The common assumption that knowledge of mortality inevitably arose past a certain stage
might not connect in any consistent way'with any particular religious beliefs (Wittgenstein
in encephalization rests on questionable foundations (Parker Pearson 1999: .164; Taylor
1953; 1979; cf. Kerr 1986). That is to say, it is possible that the observed ritual behaviours
2002). Personal mortality is an idea that requires inculcation (for instance, children often
prompt the d:velopment ~f a specific kind of religious belief, as I have argued in relation
believe that death may be a reversible process). The fact that some living things, including
to the extensive use of mhumation, especially in later prehistoric communities, and
some members of an on-going community, are known to have died, does not lead to any
the emergence. of a set ~f broadly uniform ideas concerning the soul. Ironically (perhaps)
straightforward conclusion concerning mortality as a universal condition. In band-level
the archaeolog~cal creat1~n of a material category of 'prehistoric ancestors' can be seen as,
societies, such as those presumed to have uniformly characterized the period from the
arguably, a maJor factor m the restructuring of indigenous belief systems around the dead
emergence of our genus a little before 2 million years ago to some 10,000 years ago, when
where archaeolog~c~y uncovered ancestors become a significant factor in political strug:
farming first began, the observation that people of different ages, from infancy to mature
gles (~uch as abongmal land claims) where the dice are heavily loaded in favour oflarge-
years, died from time to time would obviously have framed death as a p~ssibility but no~, scale mterests, such as property and mining companies.
in the absence of genealogical history, an inevitability. That is why Tambiah (1990: 113 f.) is
The situation is even more problematic because, given strong claims for the domains of
correct to list consciousness of the possibility of death as a finality as a fundamental anxiety,
eligion and science to be partly separate yet partly overlapping (Gould 2002; McGrath and
rather than consciousness of inevitable mortality.
Personal mortality could, of course, have been deduced on the basis of not even the most
~~rath 2007?, and given the inadvisability (essentially, futility) of scientists asserting
lig10n tobe d1sprovable (McGrath 2004; cf. Dawkins 2006; Dennett 2003 and see contribu-
elderly person being able to recall back more than three or four generations, but such an
ns to Bentley 2008), .it must be admitted that entities such as 'the immortal soul' (or,
idea of sequential generations may not have been obvious to communities lacking a system
deed, ghosts) are poss1ble metaphysical realities. lt follows that we cannot dismiss out of
of memorialization through cumulative, shared funerary structures. That those certainly
nd the possibility that death rituals have had or promise actual efficacy in relation to some
began to exist from around the time farming first emerged has often been taken, with a fa~ ;
degree of plausibility, as evidence that genealogy had begun, with its attendant concollll:
scend~nt rea~ty. N either, however, should we presume that, simply by being 'prehistoric'
tants for inheritance, group membership, projected social worlds of ancestors, and so on:
o~erwise anc1ent, past communities might not have been capable of scepticism (or some
c1es of agnosticism) while yet participating in activities around death that might appear to
Prior to this point, it must be said, any systematic funerary archaeological reco~ds artr:, now as profoundly steeped in sincere beliefs.
scanty and infrequent, and may thus not be most safely interpreted as a reyerential andi
religious reflex in the face of inevitable mortality. . .
One of the most energetic areas of current debate centres on the relationsh1ps (howeve
understood) of scientific study and on-going religious belief (e.g. Dawkins 2006; McGra
GGESTED READING
2004; 2007; Bentley 2008). lt is clear that wherever individual scholars stand on thi
the activities of archaeologists in relation to death as a category and 'the dead', howeV1
materially defined but usually in the form of residual human skeletal elements or oth . er rea~ings on death with special relevance to archaeology are as follows: for the
biological material, may themselves be interpreted in ritual terms, and not alwa~s s~pa11: ropolog1cal background the single essential source is Metcalf and Huntington's
1991
cally (vide the claims of modern pagan groups to 'know', through an act of self-1dentificati e, .Cele~rations o[ Death: the anthropology of mortuary ritual (2 nd · edn) while for a
the religious outlooks of some of those represented by the archaeological dead and, thro ~oc10log1cal overview see Davies' Ritual and Remembrance: Responses to death in human
. es ~1994).' Fro1:1 the ~erspect~ve of ~r~haeol~gical method, Carr's 1995 art~cle, 'Mortuary
1
that, to understand the ongoing ritual requirements-often antithetical to scientific stud~­
Ices. Their so~1al, philosoph1cal-rehg1ous, circumstantial and physical determinant' is
the dead demand). The death-religion nexus has also been addressed from evolution
psychological, behavioural and cognitive perspectives, but this in many ways represent
en~ed, while a broad range of studies is represented by Chapman, Kinnes, and
sborg.s The Archaeology of Death (1981). Synthetic accounts that deal with the issues
separate body of transdisciplinary work, often avowedly atheistic and scientific where
eolog1cally but from an anthropologically informed perspective are the standard text,
100 TIMOTHY TAYLOR
Parker-Pearson's The Archaeology of Death and Burial (1999), and the more controversial
reassessment of a range of data in Taylor's The Buried Soul: How humans invented death
(2002).
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ritual sequences in Inca child sacrifice', Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
tabooed, or forbidden, to feed themselves. This prohibition, we understood, was always laid
(PNAS), 104(42): 16456-61.
on them after they had assisted at any funeral, or touched a dead body, and also on other
WITTGENSTEIN, L. 1953. Philosophische Untersuchungen-Philosophical Investigations, trans. ~cc~sions. lt is necessary to observe that, on these occasions, they apply the word taboo
G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). md1fferently both to persons and things. Thus they say the natives were tabooed, or the bay
- - 1979· Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge, 1932-1935: From the notes of Alice Ambrose and:. was tabooed, and so of the rest. This word is also used to express anything sacred, or eminent,
Margaret Macdonald (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield). or d~voted. Thus the king of Owhyhee was called Eree-taboo; a human victim tangata taboo;
WYLIE, A. 2002. Thinking from Things: Essays in the philosophy of archaeology (Berkeley, an~ m ~e same manner, among the Friendly Islanders, Tonga, the island where the king
CA: University of California Press). res1des, 1s named Tonga-taboo. [Cook 1784, cited in Steiner 1967: 27]

ook was read widely, particularly in Britain. The customs described seemed extraordi-
ry .to peopl: i~ Europe and tlie word taboo rapidly came into use, as well as becoming
maJor descnptive category of etlinography (Steiner 1967). Robertson Smitli was one of
e first scholars to study the concept and drew a line between religious behaviour,
ncerned with ethics and gods, and non-religious magical behavio:ur, using the term
oo to describe non-religious rules of conduct, particularly concerned with pollution .
. e~ ~f holiness he held to be intelligible, whereas non-religious tabdos he held to be
1t'.ve and savage (see Douglas 1999). Sir James Frazer (1875) wrote the first essay on
oo m the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where he tried to classify and
derstand the nature of magical tliinking. He took an evolutionary approach which has
n heavily criticized by Steiner (1967). His work suggested that a confusion between