There are countless different cultures and societies around the world, spanning thousands of years. One thing that they all have in common is that no matter what, death is a part of everybody's life. Examining how different societies commemorate their dead can give archaeologists and anthropologists insights into how those societies work and what matters to them. In a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity, a team of researchers explored the practice of burying the dead in or near their family's houses.
"In the deep past, settlements were places where both the living and the dead coexisted and felt at home," says Sabina Cveček, an archaeologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Residential burials, in which people are buried inside of or very close to their houses, are no longer common, especially in the West. But over the past few centuries, cultural anthropologists have documented several societies all around the world that have residential burials. Why some societies began burying their dead at home, and why so many of them later stopped, has remained a mystery. "Until now, nobody had tried to find a way to predict whether or not a society would practice residential burial," says Cveček, the new paper's lead author.
"One theory about why some societies started to practice residential burials has to do with where people lived, and how long they lived there," says Cveček. "Some researchers theorized that once people started settling down, they might have buried their dead by their houses to mark their territory."
To investigate this theory, Cveček examined a database of cultural records, or ethnographies, dating back several centuries. She built a dataset of 60 different societies from around the world and found that 12% of the ones in her sample practiced residential burials. That number seemed low to Cveček and her colleagues.
"I went over the data with Carol Ember, an anthropologist at Human Relations Area Files at Yale, and we agreed, we weren't seeing that many residential burials in these records. We wanted to know, what's going on?" says Cveček. Cveček, Ember, and their colleague Tim Earle, an archaeologist at Northwestern University, reached out to fellow archaeologists at the Field Museum, who were familiar with the seemingly more frequent occurrence of residential burials in ancient sites.
The researchers consulted another database and built another dataset based on archaeological records. Unlike the ethnographies, which were written by anthropologists about societies that they observed in real life in the past few centuries, the archaeological data included information about societies from thousands of years ago. "Ethnographies are about as old as the practice of cultural anthropology, so they only date back a couple hundred years, but archaeology can tell us about societies from way longer ago," says Cveček.
The research team examined burial records from 49 different archaeological sites from around the world. They found a lot more evidence of residential burials than they had in the ethnographies of more recent societies. "It was incredible to see, about 33% of the communities we looked at had at least some family members buried within or around their homes," says Cveček.
The team wanted to know why residential burials were so much more common in the earlier societies than in the more recent ones. While some anthropologists and archaeologists have hypothesized that residential burials were associated with people living in more permanent residences, the data didn't support this idea.
"We found that there wasn't a strong link between how transient or permanent a society was, and how likely they would be to practice residential burial," says Cveček. But the databases did yield a potential reason why the more recent ethnographies contained so few descriptions of residential burials in comparison to the older archaeological findings.
"In the ethnographies I read, in many cases, anthropologists would say that the society being described used to practice residential burials, but that they stopped when major organized religions and colonization arrived in those places. For instance, they'd say that a society used to bury their dead at home, but now they use Christian cemeteries outside the settlement, or that a society used to bury their dead at home, but with the spread of Hinduism, they adopted cremation," says Cveček. "It seems like colonization really impacted burial practices on a global scale for the past four centuries and beyond, and that's part of why residential burials are much less common in the ethnographic record."
Gary Feinman, a co-author of the study and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican and Central American Anthropology at the Field Museum's Negaunee Integrative Research Center, notes that colonization doesn't explain all of the changes in burial practices that the team observed, but that change over time is common in cultural practices overall. "A key finding of this paper is that even a practice as sensitive and important to most people as how and where we inter our dead can shift in specific cultural contexts over time. Human cultural behaviors are dynamic, not static, and for some of the cases studied here, the changes in burial practices even shifted well before the Colonial era," says Feinman.
Overall, the findings offer anthropologists a deeper understanding of humanity. "The choices people make about burying their loved ones provide insights for archaeologists into how their societies were organized," says William A. Parkinson, Curator & Associate Director of Anthropology at the Field Museum and the paper's senior author.
While questions remain about what makes a society more likely to practice residential burials, Cveček says that the underlying story of the practice can help us forge connections to our fellow humans around the world. "I think the most beautiful message from this study is that there are so many different practices of mourning the dead. But residential burial, keeping the dead close to you at home, was a practice present around the globe throughout human history," says Cveček.
This study was contributed to by Sabina Cveček (Field Museum), Timothy Earle (Northwestern University), Carol Ember (Yale University), Gary Feinman (Field Museum), and William A. Parkinson (Field Museum).
