The Rituals and Ideology of Death: Archaeological Perspectives
From King Tutankhamen’s tomb to Qin’s Terracotta Army, many of archaeology’s most famous discoveries have been human graves, though they are but a small part of what archaeologists study. We have long recognized that corpses reveal myriad ideas about death and the afterlife, social and political structures, and even what it means to be human. The remains of a person are often the culmination of rites of passage in which the dead are separated from the living and transformed into ancestors, memories, and symbols. In archaeology, burials thus teach us about the beliefs and rituals employed by the living to send the dead to their afterlives. However, a deceased human being’s body is also a biological entity, one which can reveal patterns in ancient diet, nutrition, and disease. This course will use archaeological and anthropological studies of “deathways” from societies worldwide and throughout prehistory. We will look at death and the body from the perspective of ancient and modern conceptions of mortality, afterlives, and identities. We will study the archaeological dimensions of burial and other death-related rituals, and other clues to belief systems about death and the role of the dead in society. Topics include, for instance, skeletal analysis (specifically, paleodiet and paleopathology), tomb construction and elaboration, religious death rituals, and human sacrifice.
Through our readings, writing projects, and class discussions, we will practice increasingly sophisticated methods of critically evaluating others’ scientific arguments and constructing our own. Writing assignments aim to critically test models of death rituals and ideology with multiple lines of evidence. They include a series of short essays testing various models against archaeological remains and contemporary death practices and belief systems, and a conference-style presentation. Students will also collect original data from modern cemeteries and religious ceremonial practices for comparative purposes. Through these writing projects, we will reflect on how data availability and selection, theoretical perspectives, and analytical techniques shape the interpretations of mortuary evidence. Reflective writing practices developed throughout the course will give students a wide range of tools for critical reading and writing in the sciences.
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