Human Experience of Death: Chapter 7

• Chapter seven discusses the human experience of death.

The Human Experience of Death

• Humans often sacrifice the beauty of life to deny death.
• Awareness of death has been part of humanity for millennia.
• Death concentrates the mind, serving as the 'muse of philosophy'.
• 'Being towards death' provides context for human action.
• Life is lived in relation to the finitude of death.
• Ernest Becker suggests people immerse themselves in the public world to deny their deaths.
• Death is a universal fear that drives human activity.
• Knowledge of death gives perspective for living and valuing moments.

Death and Time

• Time is understood through the human experience of our own and others' deaths.
• Funerary rituals highlight the process of time in three ways: decay as duration, metaphorical associations for regeneration, and claims for immortality.

Duration

• Funerary rites mark time duration in various ways
• Victor Turner states liminality uses decomposition and catabolism symbols.
• Smells of decomposition are significant.
• Mourners' rituals symbolize the passing of time.
• Middleton identifies two kinds of duration in Lugbara notions of time: ordinary time and the time existing outside of the ordinary world.
• Death confuses ordinary time, leading to pollution.
• The dead are associated with the time outside of the real world, moving to the underworld.

Regeneration

• Liminal conditions in rites of passage involve deathly representations.
• In secondary burial, Hertz notes that changes in the state of the corpse were linked homologically with changes to its soul and to the mourners.
• Suzanne Küchler describes how decay works on corpses and malanggan sculptures
• Carving is described as 'making the skin' to replace the decaying corpse and contain liberated life-force.
• Sculpture and life-force merge, and are exhibited for a few hours then left to decay.
• Metaphors of regeneration go towards transcendence of death.
• Transcendence in human time derives from reflections on mortality and attempts to find meaning in death.
• Rebirth helps people negate the finality of death.
• Every cremation at Varanisi is a self-sacrifice which rekindles creation
• Death leads to the regeneration of life and birth of an ancestor providing continued fertility.
• Individuality is a problem to overcome for the eternal social order.
• Mortuary rituals deny individuality since death is part of a renewal cycle.
• Authority is founded on orderly reproduction of ancestor's world
• Festivals of the dead mark the agricultural cycle and divide the year for Laymi society in Bolivia.
• The dead are socialized as a source of recurrent fertility.

Immortality

• A linked notion of transcendence over time is that of personal or community immortality after death.
• The immortality achieved by individuals has been a central theme of human transcendence.
• Many dynastic systems immortalize the institution of rule.
• Societies create representations of community immortality, giving an ahistorical existence beyond duration and time.
• A stone burial platform embodies the lineage.
• Stone tombs are more permanent than wooden houses.
• Mike Rowlands points out how western society memorials convert timelessness notions into fetishized forms.
• Ancient monuments must be conserved to prevent denials of death, decay and transience.

The Archaeology of Belief

• Conceptualizations of the dead are crucial in forming individuals' history.
• Funerary rites and practices provide material insights into changing existential awareness.
• A series of experiential transformations have occurred.
• The history of religious belief is rare in narratives of evolution but the urge for comprehension of the human condition is big.
• Social change needs understandings beyond materialist and sociobiological models, which explain ideology and religion as legitimizing mechanisms.
• Rather, human consciousness is social being and practice, then transformation in human experience of death as has changed life.
• The archaeology of death awareness can provide a phenomenological perspective of the changes the earliest hominids faced.
• It looks at working various ideas about mortality and the transcendence of death, rather than ecological adaptation.
• This side of the story relies on archaeological understandings of funerary material culture linking to treatment of other aspects of social life.
• The last five thousand years uses texts as the most influential artifacts in effecting these transformations in human understandings.
• Archaeologists seek out material traces of certain religious traditions that may claim impressive ancestries.

Funerary Rites and the Origins of Humanity

• Awareness of death and marking its occurrence is specific to the human species and a defining aspect of self-consciousness.
• Voltaire: The human race knows it must die through experience which separates it from animals
• It is not known how to measure this awareness being in in the face of death, and cannot identify when humans evolved with it.

Do Animals Know of Death?

• Like tool usage and language, death awareness is shared among species to varying degrees.
• Animals attempt to avoid death, but few are affected by the death of others.
• Dogs and Chimpanzees show signs of bereavement.
• Primate bonds can lead to behavioral disturbances after death.
• Chimps grieve dead.
• Death can lead to intense anxiety and aggressive behavior.
• Primates do not indulge in elaborated behavior towards corpses.
• Elephant care shows approximating human concern.
• Elephants react to carcasses and bones of their own kind, and are unconcerned with other species..
• Reaching for bodies with trunks and moving head/tusks shows recognition.
• Elephants may pick up and carry bones.
• An elephant family may gather around a young female's carcass.
• Elephants became tense, quiet, and nervously approached corpse.
• They smelled and felt the carcass started digging and patting ground.
• Some elephants broke off branches and placed them on the carcass.
• Elephants may have buried the dead if undisturbed.
• Group disintegration and lethargy in females may show grief.
• Apparent care for dead driven by other aspects than emotion. May bury dead to discourage scavengers/predators.

The Significance of Mortuary Rites

• Communication inadequacies with other species makes understanding self-consciousness hard. How much better with humans?
• Physical traces of the bodies are all that is left.
• The hermeneutic problem of understanding homonids is greater than with animals.
• hindered by lack of remains + own ethnocentric conceptions.
• Ritualized cannibalism as respect shows understanding.
• Deliberate interment is recognised by choosing to recognise the corpse below ground
• Some considers grave goods as the afterlife and the concept of the soul.
• The backgrounds of the researchers bound some of these problematic questions
• Exploring treatment articulate new concepts of self and through a awareness of nature of death sheds light on human existence
• Death and religion imply each other because of death’s 'ontological and teleological questions, questions about the origin and the purpose of living'.
• Funerary actions import meanings and reveal life.

Burials of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic

• Recent debates among archaeologists about the development of death awareness place it mainly within the last 100,000 years.
• Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition the age of human culture/consciousness.
• symbolic change happened later since most dated Upper Palaeolithic burials are from the 25,000-12,000 BP period.
• humans devised treatments and created understandings of the self.

The Middle Palaeolithic Burial Controversy

• Most archaeologist considered Homo sapiens neanderthalensis not capable originally
• The two Neanderthal skeletons in Belgium and France showed traits.
• The Le Moustier remains buried in a sleeping position.
• Chapel skeleton lay east-west.
• Neanderthals have a large grave structure and place items in the give.
• Neanderthals may bury their dead was very controversial
• Robert Gargett states tapped to create a reappraisal of the Neanderthal burials and claimed accounts were unnatural with humans merely dying in caves thereby denying physical evidence to disposal.
• Archaeologists were impacted since no bodily ornaments have been found
• Gargett's study omitted burials and dismissed grave cuts as natural.
• Garget dismissed cave collapses and goods were naturally derived.
• Archaeological opinion has swung away from Gargett's minimalist view.
• Neanderthal are wholly partially articulated, and conflicts with evidence.
• Shanidar pollen's origin proved ancient from plants flowering in the summer.
• Neanderthal burials show East-West orientation.
• Infants in cave sites at Amud showed upper jaw lying on pelvis
• Infant lay on back with legs flexed, rock slab rare in cave deposits.
• Cave burials at Mugharet es-Skhul showed redating and dating which placed the skeletons even further back.
• Bodies were purposefully arranged with folded and flexed limbs.
• Wild boar placed within arms
• Bovid skull and antlers show they accidentally placed at different sites, but the inclusion likelihood is not high since the head is present and the bones are in good condition
• There are many Open questions, such as the fact Neanderthal and human burials are only in caves, why only found in specific locations, why the goods have never been found, and why bones removed.

Upper Palaeolithic Burials

• Burials after 28,000-25,000 BP show humans recognized state as of death as succeeding life.
• Clear definition of grave pits, and ornaments.
• The Sunghir and Dolní V stonice are good examples.
• Ten thousand ivory beads. mammoth lances
• One was of an old king with beads on his cap.
• triple burial with red achre stone
• Wood was found in the grave.
• Each burial shows a problem of understanding the middle and upper palaeolithic.
• Low numbers, below ground inhumation during both, meant very special reserved right
• Neanderthal remains may regard burials deliberately but placed not usually covered.
• Many bodies are dispose of out of view.
• Bones from the Kebera hinted at a series which show the skeleton remains and dispersed.
• Removal shown in the stone
• post-Morten manipulation reflected religious complex. Middle Palaeolithic caves meant restricted with only caves is uncertain. Shallow burial from the Sea, meant just not deep and was damaged.

The Lower Palaeolithic: Formal Disposal and Cannibalism?

• Fast changes have changed people's conception of anatomically humans
• skilful planners, rather than expedient scavengers.
• Hints of complex that humans: wooden spears
• A horse scapula: small whole through with javelin damage.

The Atapuerca Caves

• Consist of humans and cave sites.
• the pit of bones is not simply the quality of the bones, but shows what is interesting in a deep system
• Bones are found base in a shaft.
• It is assumed neither animals nor people were living inside the shaft.
• Some bear ones are found. The ones shows they are not animals and not buried. It proves they are not brought over.
• Small amount is explained.
• Bones were not thrown there, since the skeletons were not articulated, nor not move for the place of deposition.
• Not casual.
• Catastrophes could be created.
• Leaders could fall.
• The explanation is that the are purposefully disposed either at once in a period and are the earliest in the world
• cannibalism may have been involved

Cannibalism as Mortuary Rights

• The ata site is unique and hard to be taken as dominant practice.
• The bones show cut marks and been split.
• The excavators interoperate it as cannibalism.
• The Bodo and billiz are good sites
• The Homo erectus skull shows they desleshed, and the finding shows are small

The Origins of Monumentality

• Burials were often double, the were large and deep cuts into the earth.
• Provision of array artifacts with children suggest ranked hierachily
• No everyday wear worn by a dead means special ceremonial significants.
• To house the is and construct container meant in nutshell.
• The architecture was built around tower stone.
• The beginning on indicate the sea change is change modification and directed
• stonehenge was driven which meant not agricilutr which meant not social
• The tower a long tradition a structure, the stairs led pack twelve.
• Is consider either to defend and association of storm

The Construction of Ancestorhood

• Remains are scarce from a period.
• Burials are found In areas, the diversity shows high.
• Long running show soceity was very ranked and egalitarian.
• There ceremonies were focused.
• burials are settlemenn shows sedentary, which is contrast to previous
• Hodder state the place is show symbolic the house
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The Epic of Gilgamesh

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The Rise of Secular Beliefs

• religions the archaeology
• thought
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• monumentality
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