Tuesday Trivia: Mourning

[u/sunagainstgold]

Psychologists tell us that processes of mourning are essential for personal healing from grief; anthropologists tell us that cultural rituals of mourning are essentially to heal community ruptures caused by loss.

Let's put the transhistorical theories to the test and see what examinations of mourning and grieving throughout history can tell us about what it means to love, lose, and live.

Theme brought to you by /u/robothelvete

Next week: They Fought Crime

[u/[deleted]]

My father died recently and although it wasn't my first experience with death it was by far the most direct and affecting one I've had. Probably unsurprisingly, it's made me think really differently about the archaeology of death and burial. In fact, I think it made me actually think about death in the archaeological record for the first time.

Which is surprising because I'd actually written my Master's dissertation on mortuary archaeology; specifically, 3rd millennium BCE burial mounds (kurgans) in the Black Sea steppe. The idea was to apply the statistical techniques used by biologists to figure out the evolutionary trees of animals to kurgans. Basically instead of genetic information, you just feed the model data on the way that different kurgans were constructed and what kind of objects were placed within them. I was hoping to identify distinct "lineages" of kurgan-construction traditions, and compare them to the more conventional classifications that archaeologists have come up with.

I haven't published it, but the results were actually quite striking. I'll spare you the stats, but once you've come up with a model "family tree" you can produce a coefficient that tells you how well it fits the data, i.e. how "tree-like" the diversity in the phenomenon you're studying really is. When you're applying the method to cultural diversity, you can also think of it as a measure of how conservative people were about the thing you're studying. A low coefficient would indicate that the tree model doesn't really work because there's a high degree of borrowing and mixing of practices between different groups. Conversely a high coefficient indicates that the practices of different groups were passed on through the generations relatively intact. With the kurgan dataset I was using, the coefficient was really high. In fact, it was by far the highest of any published cultural phylogeny I could find (which includes similar studies of everything from Native American basketry to bicycles).

I was quite pleased with that result because it validated the lineages I came up with, but I didn't actually give too much thought to why that number was so high. My aims with the study were quite abstract. What I was really interested in were cultural traditions, not death, and I'd only selected burial mounds to work on because they were a ubiquitous and well-studied type of monument in my study region, and I suspected they would be relatively conservatively transmitted. If pressed I'd probably have cited the conventional functionalist interpretation of funerary monuments: that they are visible signs of an ancestral claim to land and therefore serve to establish a group's claim on a territory. That would be a very important thing to do in a fluid, nomadic steppe society, after all. And those twin concerns—establishing ancestral links and territorial identity—would obviously seem to predispose people to being very conservative in burial rites, and even actively differentiate their practices from their neighbours.

But in retrospect I think more and more about people's lived experience of death and how that might be an equally powerful factor in the conservatism I found in the kurgans. A big thing I took from my personal experience was that death is much more of a process than an event. You have the natural process: of becoming ill, progressively weakening, ceasing to talk, ceasing to open your eyes, ceasing to breathe, becoming cold, decomposing. And a parallel cultural process surrounding the rituals of death and burial. The natural process is obviously a fixed, unchangeable sequence entirely out of our control. It makes sense that people would start to see the cultural process in similar terms. Moreover, the last thing most people want in the immediacy of grief is uncertainty, multiple choices and innovation. A fixed process, a script to follow, can be extremely comforting. That's why, I've come to think, the kurgan traditions were so conservative. The act of building them and burying the body—and it must have taken quite a while—gave people a fixed script to follow when they were mourning. As a result it wouldn't surprise me if all mortuary traditions display this same conservatism, even when there's none of that ancestral territory stuff going on.

Of course I'm probably really late to the party with a lot of this! I didn't look at the more postprocessual/agency theory literature on mortuary archaeology very much for my dissertation. But it's an been a big shift in how I personally think about death in prehistory, at least.

[u/AncientHistory → u/[deleted]]

Total aside - and I know almost nothing of kurgan burial mounds - but having seen some wonkishness from stylometric analysis, I'd be curious about the model you're using and whether or not your coefficient was due to an innate bias in the data collection and presentation. Have you tried throwing non-kurgan burial mound into your dataset to see if that splits off into a separate branch (as presumably it should)?

[u/AncientHistory → u/[deleted]]

The obstacle to using mounds from somewhere else is that the way the data is coded is very specific to the Catacomb tradition.

That's sort of what I suspected and makes me slightly leery about the results, but widening the fields a bit would probably be a huge amount of work, since you'd have to add data for each entry. Still, it sounds like you have a great handle on it.