front cover of Alone Before God
Alone Before God
The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico
Pamela Voekel
Duke University Press, 2002
Focusing on cemetery burials in late-eighteenth-century Mexico, Alone Before God provides a window onto the contested origins of modernity in Mexico. By investigating the religious and political debates surrounding the initiative to transfer the burials of prominent citizens from urban to suburban cemeteries, Pamela Voekel challenges the characterization of Catholicism in Mexico as an intractable and monolithic institution that had to be forcibly dragged into the modern world.
Drawing on the archival research of wills, public documents, and other texts from late-colonial and early-republican Mexico, Voekel describes the marked scaling-down of the pomp and display that had characterized baroque Catholic burials and the various devices through which citizens sought to safeguard their souls in the afterlife. In lieu of these baroque practices, the new enlightened Catholics, claims Voekel, expressed a spiritually and hygienically motivated preference for extremely simple burial ceremonies, for burial outside the confines of the church building, and for leaving their earthly goods to charity. Claiming that these changes mirrored a larger shift from an external, corporate Catholicism to a more interior piety, she demonstrates how this new form of Catholicism helped to initiate a cultural and epistemic shift that placed the individual at the center of knowledge.
Breaking with the traditional historiography to argue that Mexican liberalism had deeply religious roots, Alone Before God will be of interest to specialists in Latin American history, modernity, and religion.
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Bonds of the Dead
Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism
Mark Michael Rowe
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. For that reason, Japanese Buddhism’s social and economic base has long been in mortuary services—a base now threatened by public debate over the status, treatment, and location of the dead. Bonds of the Dead explores the crisis brought on by this debate and investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and propagated in contemporary Japan.

Mark Rowe offers a crucial account of how religious, political, social, and economic forces in the twentieth century led to the emergence of new funerary practices in Japan and how, as a result, the care of the dead has become the most fundamental challenge to the continued existence of Japanese temple Buddhism. Far from marking the death of Buddhism in Japan, Rowe argues, funerary Buddhism reveals the tradition at its most vibrant. Combining ethnographic research with doctrinal considerations, this is a fascinating book for anyone interested in Japanese society and religion.
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Death and Dying in Colonial Spanish America
Edited by Martina Will de Chaparro and Miruna Achim
University of Arizona Press, 2011
When the Spanish colonized the Americas, they brought many cultural beliefs and practices with them, not the least of which involved death and dying. The essays in this volume explore the resulting intersections of cultures through recent scholarship related to death and dying in colonial Spanish America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors address such important questions as: What were the relationships between the worlds of the living and the dead? How were these relationships sustained not just through religious dogma and rituals but also through everyday practices? How was unnatural death defined within different population strata? How did demographic and cultural changes affect mourning?

The variety of sources uncovered in the authors’ original archival research suggests the wide diversity of topics and approaches they employ: Nahua annals, Spanish chronicles, Inquisition case records, documents on land disputes, sermons, images, and death registers. Geographically, the range of research focuses on the viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, and New Granada.

The resulting records—both documentary and archaeological—offer us a variety of vantage points from which to view each of these cultural groups as they came into contact with others. Much less tied to modern national boundaries or old imperial ones, the many facets of the new historical research exploring the topic of death demonstrate that no attitudes or practices can be considered either “Western” or universal.
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Digging Up the Dead
A History of Notable American Reburials
Michael Kammen
University of Chicago Press, 2010

With Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known—yet surprisingly persistent—aspect of American history.

 Simultaneously insightful and interesting, masterly and macabre, Digging Up the Dead reminds us that the stories of American history don’t always end when the key players pass on. Rather, the battle—over reputations, interpretations, and, last but far from least, possession of the remains themselves—is often just beginning.

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The Forge and the Funeral
The Smith in Kapsiki/Higi Culture
Walter E. A. van Beek
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Throughout Africa one craft among many stands out: that of the blacksmith. In many African cultures, smiths occupy a significant position, not just as artisans engaging in a difficult craft but also as special people. Often they perform other crafts, as well, and make up a somewhat separate group inside society. The Forge and the Funeral describes the position of the smith in the culture of the Kapsiki/Higi of northern Cameroon and northeastern Nigeria. Situated in the Mandara Mountains and straddling the border of these two countries, Kapsiki culture forms a specific and highly relevant example of the phenomenon of the smith in Africa. As an endogamous group of about 5 percent of the population, Kapsiki smiths perform an impressive array of crafts and specializations, combining magico-religious functions with metalwork, in particular as funeral directors, as well as with music and healing. The Forge and the Funeral gives an intimate description and analysis of this group, based upon the author’s four decades–long involvement with the Kapsiki/Higi. Description and analysis are set within the more general scholarly debates about the dynamics of professional closure—including the notions of caste and guild—and also consider the deep history of iron and brass in Africa.
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Heraldry for the Dead
Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia
By Katina T. Lillios
University of Texas Press, 2008

In the late 1800s, archaeologists began discovering engraved stone plaques in Neolithic (3500-2500 BC) graves in southern Portugal and Spain. About the size of one's palm, usually made of slate, and incised with geometric or, more rarely, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic designs, these plaques have mystified generations of researchers. What do their symbols signify? How were the plaques produced? Were they worn during an individual's lifetime, or only made at the time of their death? Why, indeed, were the plaques made at all?

Employing an eclectic range of theoretical and methodological lenses, Katina Lillios surveys all that is currently known about the Iberian engraved stone plaques and advances her own carefully considered hypotheses about their manufacture and meanings. After analyzing data on the plaques' workmanship and distribution, she builds a convincing case that the majority of the Iberian plaques were genealogical records of the dead that served as durable markers of regional and local group identities. Such records, she argues, would have contributed toward legitimating and perpetuating an ideology of inherited social difference in the Iberian Late Neolithic.

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Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent
Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955
Kristine M. McCusker
University of Illinois Press, 2023
As the twentieth century began, Black and white southerners alike dealt with low life expectancy and poor healthcare in a region synonymous with early death. But the modernization of death care by a diverse group of actors changed not only death rituals but fundamental ideas about health and wellness.

Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

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Living and Dying on the Periphery
The Archaeology and Human Remains from Two 13th-15th Century AD Villages in Southeastern New Mexico
Jamie L. Clark and John D. Speth
University of Utah Press, 2022
The phrase "southwestern US/northwestern Mexico archaeology" tends to evoke images of multistoried villages and cliff dwellings. But on the eastern periphery of the Southwest, where mesas and mountains give way to vast grasslands, other types of villages once thrived. In this volume, archaeologists Jamie Clark and John Speth document the lives and lifeways of the people who inhabited two of these villages: Henderson and Bloom Mound. The villagers hunted bison on the plains and exchanged meat and hides with Puebloan peoples for pottery, turquoise, marine shells, and other goods. The origins of these close social and economic ties between bison hunters and village farmers, often referred to as “Plains-Pueblo interaction,” have intrigued anthropologists for generations. The excavations at Henderson and Bloom Mound provide fascinating new insights into when, how, and why these relationships came about.

Summarizing results from eight seasons of research, Clark and Speth document human burials and associated grave offerings from the two sites. They discuss evidence for pathologies and trauma, raising questions about the nature and causes of violence that led to the demise of Henderson and Bloom Mound, and the abandonment of many other farming-hunting communities in the surrounding region.
 
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The Mound-Builders
Henry Clyde Shetrone; with a new introduction by Bradley T. Lepper
University of Alabama Press, 2004

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

A classic resource on early knowledge of prehistoric mounds and the peoples who constructed them in the eastern United States

With this accessible volume, Henry Clyde Shetrone made available to general readers the archaeological research data and conclusions concerning the ancient mounds and earthworks that dot the landscape of eastern North America. Dismissing popularly held theories of mysterious giants who built these structures, he explained that their purposes were defensive and ceremonial, that they had been used for habitation, burial, and worship. Their builders were antecedents of the native peoples of present-day America and had been skilled artisans and engineers with successful agricultural practices and structured leadership.

Twenty chapters discuss aspects of mound-builder cultures: quarrying of flint and obsidian for knapping into points; mining of copper and iron and its fashioning into tools and ceremonial objects; spinning and weaving materials and methods; smoking customs; carving of calumets and their use in ceremony; freshwater pearls and other items for body ornamentation; and the use of stone burial vaults, cremation basins, and concepts of an afterlife. Data is presented from excavations ranging broadly from Massachusetts to Florida and from Texas to North Dakota.

As Bradley Lepper points out in his new introduction, "The Mound-Builders is a testament to Shetrone's success at working towards 'correlation and systematization' of data, as well as public education. . . . Shetrone was no armchair popularizer. His work was based on years of excavation and first-hand familiarity with much of the data. His popularizations [still] echo with the ring of the shovel and trowel in gravelly soil."

 

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New Jersey Cemeteries and Tombstones
History in the Landscape
Veit, Richard F
Rutgers University Press, 2008

From the earliest memorials used by Native Americans to the elaborate structures of the present day, Richard Veit and Mark Nonestied use grave markers to take an off-beat look at New Jersey’s history that is both fascinating and unique.

New Jersey Cemeteries and Tombstones presents a culturally diverse account of New Jersey’s historic burial places from High Point to Cape May and from the banks of the Delaware to the ocean-washed Shore, to explain what cemeteries tell us about people and the communities in which they lived. The evidence ranges from somber seventeenth-century decorations such as hourglasses and skulls that denoted the brevity of colonial life, to modern times where memorials, such as a life-size granite Mercedes Benz, reflect the materialism of the new millennium. Also considered are contemporary novelties such as pet cemeteries and what they reveal about today’s culture. To tell their story the authors visited more than 1,000 burial grounds and interviewed numerous monument dealers and cemetarians.

This richly illustrated book is essential reading for history buffs and indeed anyone who has ever wandered inquisitively through their local cemeteries.

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Paradise Earned
The Bacchic-Orphic Gold Lamellae of Crete
Yannis Tzifopoulos
Harvard University Press, 2010
This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife: the deceased who were buried or cremated with them believed that they had 'earned Paradise.' The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage. The texts reveal a hieros logos whose poetics and rituals are not much different from Homeric rhapsodizing and prophetic discourses. Cretan contexts, both literary and archaeological, are also brought to bear on these incised objects and on the burial custom involved. Finally, this work adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for 'earning Paradise.'
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Public Memory in Early China
K. E. Brashier
Harvard University Press, 2014
In early imperial China, the dead were remembered by stereotyping them, by relating them to the existing public memory and not by vaunting what made each person individually distinct and extraordinary in his or her lifetime. Their posthumous names were chosen from a limited predetermined pool; their descriptors were derived from set phrases in the classical tradition; and their identities were explicitly categorized as being like this cultural hero or that sage official in antiquity. In other words, postmortem remembrance was a process of pouring new ancestors into prefabricated molds or stamping them with rigid cookie cutters. Public Memory in Early China is an examination of this pouring and stamping process. After surveying ways in which learning in the early imperial period relied upon memorization and recitation, K. E. Brashier treats three definitive parameters of identity—name, age, and kinship—as ways of negotiating a person’s relative position within the collective consciousness. He then examines both the tangible and intangible media responsible for keeping that defined identity welded into the infrastructure of Han public memory.
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Skeletal Biology and Bioarchaeology of the Northwestern Plains
Edited by George W. Gill and Rick L. Weathermon
University of Utah Press, 2008

Northwestern Plains prehistory and early history as told by human bones is vivid and dramatic. The skeletal and burial record spans thousands of years, a wide geographic expanse, and contains important evidence of human existence in this vast region of North America. This book helps clarify the emerging picture.

Most of the contributions assembled here were initially presented as part of a symposium at the Plains Conference in Oklahoma City in 2003. Twenty-one preeminent scholars, working across many fields within bioarchaeology and skeletal biology—including paleopathology, dental pathology, and human osteology—bring their expertise to bear not only on prehistoric Native American burials, but on numerous other case studies. They look at specific Wyoming samples of pioneer-era burials, Indian War–era casualties, historic Chinese burials, and remains from the Benick Ranch and the Korell-Bordeaux sites. Reports on Crow Indian mummies from Montana and military burials from Missouri and Nebraska continue the exploration into recent historic times.

Human burials provide a rich source of information about people’s lives—who they were, what activities they pursued, and how they may have participated in rituals of death and mourning. This volume is an authoritative statement on both the skeletal biology and bioarchaeology of the entire Northwestern Plains.

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Tombs for the Living
Andean Mortuary Practices
Tom D. Dillehay
Harvard University Press, 2011
In the Andes, a long history of research on burial records and burial contexts exists for the purpose of reconstructing cultural affiliation, chronology, socioeconomic status, grave content, and human body treatment. Less attention is paid to the larger question of how mortuary practices functioned in different cultures. Tombs for the Living: Andean Mortuary Practices (originally released in 1995) examines this broader issue by looking at the mortuary practices that created a connection between the living and the dead; the role of wealth and ancestors in cosmological schemes; the location, construction, and sociopolitical implications of tombs and cemeteries; and the art and iconography of death. By examining rich sets of archaeological, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric data, the thirteen essays continue to enrich our understanding of the context and meaning of the mortuary traditions in the Andes.
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Transforming the Dead
Culturally Modified Bone in the Prehistoric Midwest
Eve A. Hargrave
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Transforming the Dead is a collection of essays that examines culturally modified human bones and their roles as “cultural and ritual objects” among prehistoric Eastern Woodland cultures. Previous scholarship has explored the role of human body parts in Native American cultures as trophies of war and revered ancestors. This collection discusses new evidence that human elements were also important components of daily and ritual activities across the Eastern Woodlands. The contributors to this volume discuss each case study within the unique regional and temporal contexts of the material, rather than seeking universal answers to how these objects were used.
 
Most research addressing modified human bone has focused on cut marks and trauma associated with warfare, trophy taking, and burial practices. The editors and contributors of Transforming the Dead document the varied and often overlooked ways that human bone was intentionally modified through drilling, incising, cutting, and polishing for utilitarian, ornamental, spiritual, or ritual use. Examples include bracelets and gorgets to be worn, as well as musical rasps, pipe stems, masks, and protective talismans. The form and function of these objects are not unusual; their construction from the remains of “another” sets them apart.
 
Through a flexible but systematic analysis of the archaeological record, the contributors bring into focus how the careful selection, modification, and retention of particular bones or body parts of an individual after death offer insights into concepts of personhood, the body, life, and death among the prehistoric Native Americans in the Midwest.
 

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