Jun 4, 2025 06:02 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/how-ancient-are-o...the-undead
EXCERPT: . . . This, at least, is how I once understood the origins of our modern ideas about the undead. I believed they were created and enlarged by the medieval and early modern European imaginations. But after reading about Neolithic burials in which bodies had been pinned down with stones, seemingly to stop them from rising, I began to doubt my explanation. How deep do these fears go, I wondered?
In the 21st century, researchers are continuing to find traces of such fears buried across the archaeological record. Though it’s highly unlikely that people from 10,000 years ago conceived of ‘vampires’ and other undead creatures in the same way we do, the ‘Archaeology of Fear’, as the funerary archaeologist Anastasia Tsaliki calls it, seems to link us with the past in unexpected ways.
Such fears are scribed deep into European history and soil. They are written into my ancestors’ bones. And they lead us to an understanding of death that greatly exceeds the one described by Bacon in 1612. Not only is it ‘as natural to die as to be born’. For much of our species’ history, it may also have been just as ‘natural’ to fear the dead.
According to growing archaeological evidence, this fear appears to stretch far beyond written history into deep time. And that leads to a much more complex and uncertain question: where did such fears come from?
To understand why early humans seemed to fear the dead, we first need to consider the long history of intentional burial. Only through excavated graves, makeshift tombs and other forms of interment can we begin making sense of prehistoric anxieties surrounding the dead. However, this history is not always straightforward: though we now have a rough idea of when burial became widespread, researchers are still vigorously debating exactly when humans began deliberately interring their dead.
One of the most controversial claims is that intentional burials may have been practised as early as 240,000 years ago... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . This, at least, is how I once understood the origins of our modern ideas about the undead. I believed they were created and enlarged by the medieval and early modern European imaginations. But after reading about Neolithic burials in which bodies had been pinned down with stones, seemingly to stop them from rising, I began to doubt my explanation. How deep do these fears go, I wondered?
In the 21st century, researchers are continuing to find traces of such fears buried across the archaeological record. Though it’s highly unlikely that people from 10,000 years ago conceived of ‘vampires’ and other undead creatures in the same way we do, the ‘Archaeology of Fear’, as the funerary archaeologist Anastasia Tsaliki calls it, seems to link us with the past in unexpected ways.
Such fears are scribed deep into European history and soil. They are written into my ancestors’ bones. And they lead us to an understanding of death that greatly exceeds the one described by Bacon in 1612. Not only is it ‘as natural to die as to be born’. For much of our species’ history, it may also have been just as ‘natural’ to fear the dead.
According to growing archaeological evidence, this fear appears to stretch far beyond written history into deep time. And that leads to a much more complex and uncertain question: where did such fears come from?
To understand why early humans seemed to fear the dead, we first need to consider the long history of intentional burial. Only through excavated graves, makeshift tombs and other forms of interment can we begin making sense of prehistoric anxieties surrounding the dead. However, this history is not always straightforward: though we now have a rough idea of when burial became widespread, researchers are still vigorously debating exactly when humans began deliberately interring their dead.
One of the most controversial claims is that intentional burials may have been practised as early as 240,000 years ago... (MORE - missing details)