Death, society and archaeology: the social dimensions of mortuary practices

While the material remains of death and the treatment and commemoration of the dead have been studied by archaeologists since the early nineteenth century, the more intensive and coherent analysis of death in its social context has only been a feature of this discipline during the last three decades. The starting point for this change of emphasis was James Brown’s edited volume Approaches to the Social Dimensions of Mortuary Practices (1970), which was published in 1971. It originated in a symposium of the American Anthropological Association in 1966, and contained six papers and an introduction: of the papers, one was a major examination of theoretical approaches to death in anthropology and archaeology, four were analyses of prehistoric cemeteries (three of them in the southeastern USA and one in Sudan) and one studied stylistic change in colonial mortuary art in New England. Although seemingly diverse, the papers shared, in various ways, a concern with five themes: