Our experiences of dying have been shaped by ancient ideas about death and social responsibility at the end of life. From Stone Age ideas about dying as otherworld journey to the contemporary Cosmopolitan Age of dying in nursing homes, Allan Kellehear takes the reader on a 2 million year journey of discovery that covers the major challenges we will all eventually face: anticipating, preparing, taming and timing for our eventual deaths. This book, first published in 2007, is a major review of the human and clinical sciences literature about human dying conduct. The historical approach of this book places our recent images of cancer dying and medical care in broader historical, epidemiological and global context. Professor Kellehear argues that we are witnessing a rise in shameful forms of dying. It is not cancer, heart disease or medical science that presents modern dying conduct with its greatest moral tests, but rather poverty, ageing and social exclusion.

/pdf/a-social-history-of-dying-347jiimgxy.pdf

A Social History of Dying

Radiocarbon Dates from the Oxford Ams System: Archaeometry Datelist 31

The European Neolithic has often been figured in ideational terms. The transformations that gave rise to sedentism, agriculture and the construction of monuments have been explained either in terms of abstract symbolic schemes or as a change in worldview and cosmology. As an alternative, this article suggests that a greater emphasis needs to be placed on the constitution of the person during this period of transformation. Instead of focusing on the playing out of symbolic structures, it is instead important to consider the role that materiality plays in forming social relations. By focusing on the treatment of material culture, human remains and the use of architecture, we begin to understand in concrete terms not only how the European Neolithic was built, but also how people were transformed through this process.

Lives in Fragments? Personhood and the European Neolithic

Our final paper in this series reasserts the importance of sequence. Stressing that long barrows, long cairns and associated structures do not appear to have begun before the thirty-eighth century cal. bc in southern Britain, we give estimates for the relative order of construction and use of the five monuments analysed in this programme. The active histories of monuments appear often to be short, and the numbers in use at any one time may have been relatively low; we discuss time in terms of generations and individual lifespans. The dominant mortuary rite may have been the deposition of articulated remains (though there is much diversity); older or ancestral remains are rarely documented, though reference may have been made to ancestors in other ways, not least through architectural style and notions of the past. We relate these results not only to trajectories of monument development, but also to two models of development in the first centuries of the southern British Neolithic as a whole. In the first, monuments emerge as symptomatic of preeminent groups; in the second model, monuments are put in a more gradualist and episodic timescale and related to changing kinds of self-consciousness (involving senses of self, relations with animals and nature, perceptions of the body, awareness of mortality and attitudes to the past). Both more distant and more recent and familiar possible sources of inspiration for monumentalization are considered, and the diversity of situations in which mounds were constructed is stressed. More detailed Neolithic histories can now begin to be written.

/pdf/building-for-the-dead-events-processes-and-changing-pv076z1aa3.pdf

Building for the Dead: Events, Processes and Changing Worldviews from the Thirty-eighth to the Thirty-fourth Centuries cal. BC in Southern Britain

Summary

Towards the end of the fifth millennium BC, a new funerary tradition developed in Iberia and elsewhere in Atlantic Europe involving the use of megalithic tombs and natural or artificially constructed caves for the collective burial of the dead. Ancestor worship has been the most common theoretical framework used to explain this Neolithic burial tradition, despite demographic information which indicates that these burials house the remains of a significant percentage of children and adolescents. Using data from Late Neolithic (3500–2500 BC) tombs in south-western Iberia as a departure point, in this paper we suggest that by reconsidering the impact that childhood mortality had upon burial and grave visitation practices in Neolithic communities, archaeologists can gain valuable phenomenological information which will allow for a more robust, multivocal interpretative approach.

When the bough breaks: childhood mortality and burial practice in late neolithic atlantic europe

Collective tombs are a characteristic feature of Neolithic societies of Western Europe. Some recent studies have suggested that they originated from an earlier tradition of individual burials at the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. The concept of collective burial involving movement and manipulation of bodies and body parts is, however, entirely different. The former tries to preserve the integrity of the bodies and does not acknowledge the stages of metamorphosis of the corpse. The latter by contrast involves observation and assistance in the dissolution of the body. Recent discoveries of Early Mesolithic collective tombs in southern Belgium have underlined the fact that collective burials are far from restricted to Neolithic contexts in Western Europe. They themselves, however, are not merely a potential point of origin for Middle and Late Neolithic collective tombs but form part of a long-standing tradition reaching back into the Upper Palaeolithic.

Skeletons in Motion, Ancestors in Action: Early Mesolithic Collective Tombs in Southern Belgium

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Skeletons in Motion, Ancestors in Action: Early Mesolithic Collective Tombs in Southern Belgium