Memento Mori

A cemetery used for centuries is an expression of the enduring relationship between the living and the dead.

- Jarrett A. Lobell

One of archaeology’s paradoxes is that in order to comprehend ancient people’s lives, often the best place to look is not through the broken sherds of the pots they used to cook their family dinners, or at what may be left of their homes after hundreds or even thousands of years, but in their graves. How people are buried, the things they are buried with, and their physical remains can reveal much about those who might otherwise be lost to history. Are their graves filled with valuable items that mark them as wealthy, or with only a few small treasured possessions? Or were they interred with nothing at all and simply consigned to the earth? Did they succumb to a common disease, or were they casualties of war? Do their bones show the passage of many years, or did they die young?

Burials can also illuminate cultural circumstances and values. “People’s bodies can tell us a great deal about them as biological individuals,” says mortuary archaeologist Kate Emery of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, “but bones also have a lot to say about them as social individuals.” The materials available, the types of coffins chosen, the inclusion of provisions for the afterlife, and even the position of the deceased’s body are testimony to economic realities and to belief systems that can be difficult to detect in the writings of ancient authors. “Excavating the dead is actually very humanizing compared to a text,” says Emery. “For the most part we don’t know anything about who they were or many details about them, so studying their bodies and what they chose—or what mourners chose—to put around them in death adds a richness to the story of the past that is missing. Text allows us to remove ourselves from people in some way, but when you are actually looking at their bodies and considering who they were, it’s very intimate.”