Is It Ever OK to Publish Photographs of Human Remains?
[no-caption] Jonas Androx/Pexels Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. Death is an experience that …
Digging up the Dead
The Slavia Field School in Mortuary Archaeology in Drawsko, Poland, unearthed a 400-year-old cemetery. Joanna Pearce Excavating a 17th-century cemetery in the …
How to Care for the Dead
Scientists have thought about burial—the act of interring a dead body—as a distinctly human behavior. So what happened when a group of …
The Myth of Racial Purity in Roman Britain
This model at the Museum of London depicts the first bridge over the River Thames, which was built by the Romans in …
The Weird, Wild World of Mortuary Customs
A couple of months ago, I attended the funeral of a friend. Howard was almost 90 years old when he died, and …
Why This Paleolithic Burial Site Is So Strange (and So Important)
Ivory beads and ochre—affixed to the pelvic bones of a child—likely decorated the burial clothing of this 10-year-old interred at Sunghir some …
The Darkest Truths
In 2007, Caroline Sturdy Colls—then a 21-year-old University of Birmingham graduate student—made her first visit to the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, …