From the death reading program. Quirky, idiosyncratic, sometimes creepy, sometimes thought provoking. Author Timothy Taylor is an archaeologist, but although the book incorporates a lot of archaeological information it isn’t an archaeological history of human attitudes toward death.


When he’s in the idiosyncratic mode, Taylor isn’t very satisfying. He starts several chapters with personal stories – some are pretty personal indeed. The first recounts the death of his grandfather; the young Taylor threw a temper tantrum at a family gathering and his grandfather physically dragged him away from the dinner table and locked him in his room. One month later the grandfather had a heart attack, and died in the hospital soon thereafter. Even though it was over a month between the tantrum incident and the death, Taylor’s mother always blamed him (even years later), with the (Taylor’s words) “… mantra ‘If you had not had that tantrum, none of this would ever had happened and he would still be alive today’”. Another recounts a college-age Taylor taking out his Swiss army knife and cutting himself in a fit of depression over not getting a grant he was angling for. Taylor relates both of these peripherally to his main theme – the first to mourning and the second to scarification rituals, but these don’t fit very well with the rest of his narrative. I eventually forgave him for that; I’ll explain why later.


In creepy but thought-provoking mode, Taylor recounts an incident when he was called in for forensic assistance in a London murder case. The victim was a young (estimated 6 years old) boy of African origin. Or part of one, at least; the arms, legs and head had been sawed off. The torso was dressed in bright orange shorts – and it was evident (Taylor doesn’t say how) that he had been so dressed after he died – and was found on the banks of the Thames. Taylor initially concluded – as I assume just about anyone would – that the killing was the work of a lone psychopath, but it was eventually resolved as something different – muti murder. (Warning: if you google “muti killing” don’t ask to see images; reading the text entries is bad enough). Muti is a Zulu word meaning (roughly) “magic”; Taylor notes that there’s muti – in fact, most of it - that doesn’t involve anything as nasty as ritual murder. However, a particular kind of muti involves killing children for their body parts; each part (fat to smear on car wheels to avoid accidents; penis for sexual prowess; fingers for marriage success; head buried in a building foundation for stability; brains eaten to provide wisdom) is wrapped in a particular color cloth and stored before being used in the appropriate ritual; and when it’s all done the residue is deposited near water. The remains need to be found, since the muti practitioner needs to demonstrate that the magical components have been extracted according to traditional methods and not just picked up out of a hospital dumpster. For some magical purposes the victim is supposed to be screaming through the entire process; in other cases noise dissipates the muti and the victim has to be tightly gagged. Taylor notes that discussing muti is not considered “politically correct” in South Africa, and that a South African cultural anthropologists has argued that muti killings are not murder, that criticism is a white, imperialist attitude, that it is sometimes necessary for a member of the community to be sacrificed for the greater good, and that muti killing should be as acceptable as abortion or euthanasia. Taylor relates all this in a dispassionate manner to the point that it almost seems like he’s condoning it – later in the book he makes it clear that he is not a proponent of cultural relativism, murder is murder, and murdering children is particularly heinous – I think for the shock value and to get the reader involved. Certainly worked for me.


Another thought provoking section starts by mentioning a BBC science program that answered various questions posed by viewers. One episode discussed “questions we no longer ask”, and an example of such a question is “How do you keep the dead from ‘coming back’ and bothering the living”? Taylor suggests that this was once a very important question indeed and that various customs associated with death and funerals are not intended to honor or preserve the dead but rather to keep them happy where they are so they don’t want to return. Among several examples cited is removing a corpse through a window in a home, or even through a specially cut opening in a wall that is then repaired. To borrow Taylor’s use a personal anecdotes, this resonates with me, since I have dim memories from a very young age of the coffin of a deceased relative being removed from a house through a window (the precursor to that is also no longer done – the body was kept in the house for viewing, not taken to a funeral home). Taylor further posits that some funerary structures were intended not to keep tomb robbers out but to keep the occupant in, and that some “multi-stage” funerary practices – mechanically defleshing a body or exposing it so this could be done by carrion eaters, then eventually gathering the bones and entombing them. This sort of thing was practiced by many cultures (including still by Zoroastrians in the “towers of silence”); Taylor suggests that perhaps the original intention – maybe all the way back in the Paleolithic – was to quickly make the body incapable of re-animating.


There are repeated – and slightly unsatisfying, because it’s never quite clear where Taylor is going with them – references to an account by the Arab traveler Ibn Faḍlān of the funerary ritual for a Norse chief who died on the banks of the Volga in about 921 CE. The chief was temporarily buried, then disinterred, laid out on a couch on a boat, and had a “volunteer” slave girl sacrificed by strangulation to accompany him to the next life (this incident is recounted and related to Beowulf in the Michael Crichton novel Eaters of the Dead and the movie The 13th Warrior). Taylor’s contention is that the Norse lied to Ibn Faḍlān, and to the slave girl, and that she really wasn’t going to go to the next life with her lord but instead was a sacrifice to get the attention of his wandering spirit so that it would return to his body before it was cremated; this fits in with his idea about stabilizing or fixing the spirts of the dead but there’s no real evidence.


Another section (I keep saying “section” as if these were distinct bounded parts of the book; perhaps “theme” would be more appropriate, because the ideas get discussed several times) is the preservation of Vladimir Lenin. Taylor relates particularly to ancient Scythian funeral customs, and to similar customs spread across a number of cultures, where the dead body of a ruler was a symbol of the continuance of the dynasty and sacrifices to it were not only intended as servants in the next world but as a way of avoiding succession disputes by killing off the dead rulers kin and major servants. In the Scythian and other cases cited, there was again the theme of multiple stage funerals; a Scythian chief was buried with some retainers but another burial with more sacrifices took place a year later; for Lenin, there were three successive tombs (a quick temporary one, a more permanent one, and finally the granite mausoleum familiar as a reviewing stand for May Day parades) and two successive embalmings (again, a quick temporary one and a permanent one; indeed the “permanent” one is ongoing as there’s a special laboratory for embalming techniques and the body is periodically touched up). As far as sacrificing retainers to avoid succession disputes goes, all of Lenin’s pallbearers except Stalin ended up shot within a few years.


Cannibalism, especially funerary, is another recurring theme; here Taylor again takes the dispassionate, seemingly cultural relativist tone. A particular case – especially on opposition to the muti murders discussed previously – is a South American tribal group that eats its dead children (only if they died naturally; they aren’t killed for food). The chief was horrified when he learned that Europeans buried dead children, saying “You mean you leave them all alone in the cold? We keep them safe and warm inside us”. This is a case where cultural relativism actually makes sense; although the initial response is disgust and horror on reflection you can see the South American chief’s point. Taylor then continues to develop the cannibalism theme, and finally makes it clear where he’s going with the various cultural relativism references. There was a prominent anthropological book published in the 1970s that suggested that human cannibalism is a myth and that cases where it was reported are all examples of the West trying to demonize other cultures. It being the 1970s, this was quickly seized on and accepted by the politically correct community. Then in a seeming non sequiter he brings up David Irving and Holocaust denial, and then finally lets you know where he’s been going with a lot of these examples; he’s not apologizing for muti murders or Nazis killers or cannibals; he’s apologizing for people who deny these things. It’s not necessarily a bad thing – it may be naïve, but it’s not evil – to deny that humans are capable of these horrors. That was again thought provoking; I don’t think that Holocaust deniers are actual sensitive souls that can’t imagine their fellow humans capable of atrocity but I can sort of imagine – in perhaps a “future history” – people who think that way. Hypothesize the popular science fiction catastrophe that destroys most written records and drives civilization back into dark ages. Then suppose civilization gradually climbs out again, and distant future archaeologists stumble on whatever remains of Auschwitz. What would they think it was? Traces of a transportation system and barracks; sealed underground rooms with peculiar plumbing; large retorts of some kind – what does all this mean? If one of the future archaeologists suggested the truth – a factory for industrial-scale murder – would his colleagues denounce him as perverted and insane? These are our honored ancestors, after all. The idea would seem unbelievable – but then again, as Taylor pointed out at the very beginning, it’s equally unbelievable that a child in London was dismembered alive for magic body parts, and perhaps even more unbelievable that other “people” would contend this is acceptable.


So then, uneven and sometimes hard to follow and a little pretentious but definitely worth reading. Thankfully, only a few pictures. Everything – unfortunately in some cases – is well referenced. I forgive Taylor for the personal anecdotes; he’s welcome to recount anything he wants if that keeps the nightmares away. ( )

This is only the second book I've read by an archaeologist (the first was Steven Mithen's Singing Neanderthals) - are they all this good, I wonder? Taylor takes us on a tour from cannibalism, via human sacrifice to people who have been put to death multiple times (to keep their souls from escaping) and interred in bogs where their bodies will not decompose. From these changes, he infers how ideas of the soul, of what it means to be "socially dead" - and indeed what death and mortality are - have evolved. Basically, until we stopped eating our dead relatives and started seeing their intact dead bodies on a regular basis, we weren't confronted so much with the inevitability of our own death. Now, though, we're more likely to experience "visceral insulation", being cut off from the brute physicality of dead bodies and inert tissue. "Human material culture... gains inertia and begins to kick back against its creators, creating unintended new realities," says Taylor (p 212): the practice of preserving the corpses of the dead creates an awareness of death as an ubiquitous inevitability, and ultimately leads to the idea of an afterlife, which in turn affects burial practices from then on. It took me a long time to work through this book, and perhaps that's partly to blame for me feeling that it's not as coherent as, say, The Singing Neanderthals. There's a recurring thread of argument that we underestimate the harshness - what we'd call 'savagery' from our point of view - of previous human behaviour and beliefs. But overall, The Buried Soul feels like a tour, rather than a story or a theory. ( )

Fascinating book. Subjects range from bog bodies to cannibalism to neolithic accidental burials to ship burials. Taylor is an archaeologist and a lot of his theories are backed up by good archaeological evidence (or lack thereof). But he also incorporates some anecdotal stories from his life, which really shows how our perception of death and burial has changed over the millennia. (I also liked that I have a few books in his bibliography. It makes me feel smart!) Muchly recommended. ( )

Not to be read while eating.... Taylor again has written an entertaining book that does its best to blow comforting, comfortable beliefs about humanity's past right out of the water. This is, in essence, a chronicle of cannibalism. I remember being told as a student that cannibalism is an insult one group gives to another - that examples of real cannibalism had not been found.
Taylor refutes that, and the basis for that, in the first few pages, and discusses clearly and cogently issues such as cannibalism and muti.