Misperceiving Life Expectancy in the Deep Past
An archaeologist explains that most people do not calculate life expectancy correctly. This leads to misunderstandings. This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republis…
Tag: Death
Archaeology at the Borders of the Refugee Crisis
Archaeological methods, which are typically used to study the past, can also illuminate the experiences of today’s displaced people. This article was originally published at Knowable Magazine and…
Excavating My Dad’s Life
An archaeologist navigates her dad’s passing by using the methods of her discipline to preserve his office and gain insight into the mysteries of his personality. ✽ In…
Living With the Prospect of Assisted Dying
[no-caption] The Real Tokyo Life/Getty Images Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig.…
Living With the Prospect of Assisted Dying
Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig. Used with permission of the publisher,…
Haunted by a Secret War
In Old Sepon in Savannakhet province, Laos, a temple wall riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel scars hints at war’s remains. Leah Zani Excerpted from Strike Patterns: Notes…
Reinterpreting Life and Death in Ancient Nubia
Research team members excavate a tumulus burial structure. Michele R. Buzon This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished with Creative Commons. Circu…
Memorializing Death in an Age of Mass Mortality: Keywords of Covid-19 by Richard C. Keller
How do we remember death when it constitutes our landscape? In an age of ubiquitous mortality—not only pandemic deaths, but also deaths from meteorological disasters, deaths of migrants…
Raiding Graves—Not to Rob but to Remember
Reconstruction of a chamber grave from eastern France. B. Clarys/PCR espaces et pratiques funéraires en Alsace aux époques mérovingienne et carolingienne This article was originally publ…
I Carry My Grief With Me, but I Also Carry My Joy
When you lose someone the future dies. Or, at least, the one with them, that you thought about with them, in it. I imagine any relationship that ends…
Mourning Kin After the End of Cannibalism
Clockwise from top left: (1) Indigenous Wari’ dwellings in Amazonia, Brazil. (2) The author (middle) with her adopted father, Paletó (right), in 2012. (3) The author interviewing Wari’…
Archaeology’s Role in Finding Missing Indigenous Children in Canada
A memorial of 104 orange hearts, created by the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation’s Tiwahe (family) Services, stands in honor of missing children from the Brandon Indian Residential School…
Why Couldn’t Iron Age People Throw Some Stuff Away?
It is often hard to part with the objects left behind by loved ones—even everyday things. Ashton/Flickr I have been told many stories by people who found it…
Anthony Stavrianakis’s Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide by Ari Gandsman
Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide Anthony Stavrianakis University of California Press, 2000. 248 pages. Everyone discovers an academic doppelgänger at some point. We invest ti…
Stepping into the hospital side room: a place for death in England by Erica Borgstrom
I hovered in the doorway as the palliative care nurse who I was shadowing that day indicated I should. She entered the darkened side room to check on…
#Bookreview: Dying to Eat
Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife (2018), edited by Candi K. Cann, is an interdisciplinary study that cuts across various approaches, including the…
Reading Lists: Residential Schools and Canadian Colonialism
Content warning: this article covers topics of colonialism and genocide in Canada. In early June of 2021 news reports emerged about the remains of Indigenous children buried in…
Discovering Africa’s Oldest Burial
This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Africa is often referred to as the cradle of humankind—the birthplace of our…
An Excavation of the COVID-19 Pandemic
[no-caption] Kim Herbst With over 131 million people fully vaccinated in the U.S. and numbers of new infections dropping nationwide, some have started to declare the “end” of…
Reading Lists: Waste Colonialism and Palestine
When there’s conflict, academics and teachers will often put together a reading list or syllabus to show the breadth and depth of knowledge on a topic that is…
Abou Farman’s On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience by Purbasha Mazumdar
On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience Abou Farman University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 360 pages. Max More, a trained philosopher and the present Ambassador and…
Death as Something We Make
[no-caption] Rouzes/Getty Images Renee (a pseudonym) closed her eyes, lay her head in her brother’s arms, and gently drew her last breath. Minutes before, she had chugged a…
#Review: The Kiss of Death
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage many places in the world, it is hard to imagine a book that is more timely or prescient than Andrea Kitta’s…
Living in a Time When “Death Feels Closer”
“I know I’m young, and dying isn’t something I’m ‘supposed’ to think about yet, but how can I not? Death feels like it is everywhere,” earnestly intoned Autumn,…