Using Teeth to Interpret Social Status and Childhood Health in Historic Japan
Our bones are pretty amazing- they keep a record of what has happened to us throughout our lifetime. Bones show the trauma and disease we faced, how well we healed […]
Category Archives: Funeral Practices
Upright Burial: A Mesolithic and Modern Phenomenon?
Recently, the popular news has been fascinated with the discovery of an upright burial from a Mesolithic cemetery site in Germany. Rightly so! Upright burials are an extremely rare phenomenon, […]
Buried with a Sickle: Death’s Scythe or Anti-Demon Protection?
Scythes and sickles have a very clear symbolic association for modern populations. The personification of death is traditionally pictured with a scythe (full size version pictured to the right) or sickle […]
Climate Change and the Chinchorro Mummies
The Chinchorro mummies are quite different from the traditional linen-wrapped mummies of Egypt that we often equate this the term ‘mummy’. Recently, these mummies from Chile and Peru have become […]
The Transition from Living to Dead in Neolithic Italy
I am a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series of novels. They are a perfect blend of intellectual references, irreverent creativity and humor that is perfect for breaking down the […]
Reuse of Cemeteries in Prehistoric Ireland
With the cold weather and ice descending upon the Midwest, I’ve found myself spending more time watching HGTV than I normally do. My favorite shows are the fixer upper ones, […]
Not All Are Buried Here: Selective Burial in Prehistoric Spain
Interpreting cemeteries in order to understand the living population is a dangerous and difficult task. On the one hand, cemeteries are really our only form of information about the actual […]
The Headless Romans: Headhunting, Defeated Gladiators or Natural River Movement?
In the Walbrook Valley near the city of London, large numbers of human remains, dating to the Roman occupation of England, have been recovered over the past 175 years- and […]
One Grave Does Not Equal One Person: Hunter-gatherer Graves in Argentina
There seems to be an assumption that one grave will only hold one individual. Why we assume this is kind of strange given that even today we don’t always bury […]
The Burial That’s Changing British History
There are a few notable archaeological finds and sites that fall under the category of the ‘Pompeii Effect’. They are the type of thing every archaeologist hopes to discover once […]
