This is a fascinating book, guiding us through 8500 years it deals with the gap between the physical remains that we have uncovered and the beliefs that will have shaped the way the dead were treated.
To go from artefact to belief inevitably requires an imaginative step. Prefacing each chapter with a short story of the burial, based on one of those discussed in the chapter, and bookending the word with poetry allows Cooney to bring that imaginative process to the fore.
Too often archaeologists present their interpretations as “facts”. We can make reasoned and reasonable inferences from the archaeological record, and from comparisons with practices in our own era – but we should hold those lightly.
Cooney shows that richness and complexity of the treatment of the dead across the vast span of prehistory, showing the development over time of some features but equally the way that this was in no way linear – some practices come in and out of favour, most periods are characterised by multiple traditions, and there is always the awareness that those represented in the archaeologic records are only a handful – the majority, mostly the overwhelming majority, are invisible to us. There is this unseen hinterland beyond the practices we can speak about archaeologically.
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