Illustration by Juliana Penkova
Life after Death. The role of Human Remains in a somewhat sustainable (After)life.
Ana Lema Seabra
Abstract
Funerary practices have been around since the dawn of humanity serving two main purposes: the need for body disposal and to help the grieving community process the loss. We will focus on mainland Portugal during the Medieval Period up to present day to provide a brief overview of how people have dealt with death, from evolving perceptions from the Past to Present, to the emergence of a “new type of dead” – human remains of archaeological provenance and the obstacles towards sustainability.
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Ana Lema Seabra
Author
Ana Lema Seabra is a member of CIAS Anthropology and Health Research Centre under the Past Cultures and Populations research cluster, and an ongoing PhD student at the University of Coimbra, with a thesis on “Funerary Practice in late Medieval to Post-Medieval period in Portugal”.
An Archaeology graduate with MSc in Human Biology and Evolution, her studies have focused in the Paleobiology and Paleodemography of Past Populations from the Late Middle Ages to Post-Medieval period with a special interest in Funerary Rites and Burial Practice.
Juliana Penkova
Illustrator
Juliana Penkova is born in Bulgaria . She studied architecture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Now she is living in Berlin with her family. She is working for Aquila Magazine and is giving collage workshops in community colleges in Berlin.
Introduction
Death is usually a concern until we die and afterwards becomes the concern of others. Historically, Death has been considered one of the great themes of what is known as “the history of mentalities” (Mattoso,1995). How we, both as individuals and as a community, deal with the cessation of life, in a variety of processes that ultimately only has two end-goals: the disposal of the body, and the facilitation of the grief process through the transition of living person to memory of the deceased.
Even in an increasingly secularized world, “our” dead are still so much a part of our community that they too can face targeted attacks, like the destruction of gravesites during acts of war and even be held for ransom from their living loved ones.
Portugal is located in the South-westernmost part of Europe, with a dominant Catholic population – 80% according to a 2021 survey , although many other faiths coexist peacefully. Aside from Christian Catholics, two other religions have been present even before the Middle Ages – Muslim and Jewish. Within Christianity itself, the presence of fully organized Protestant communities would only appear during the 19th century (Vilaça,1999). The following presents an overview of the impact of burial practice in mainland Portugal from the Middle Ages up to the present day, since from this period onward the practice of body inhumation – meaning the burial of the deceased under the soil will become the standard procedure especially for the three main religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It has been argued that due to the preference to bury the deceased as opposed to other methods, that “space” became increasingly an issue (Arezes,2017) which may even lead to a seemingly disorganized appearance of archaeological gravesites (Arezes,2017) as maximization of all available space increasingly became a necessity.
Looking back
The idea that the world of the dead could provide a window into the study of living gained traction in Portugal during the 90’s with foundational works such as José Mattoso’s studies on the History of Death (Mattoso,1995), and Eugénia Cunha’s Paleobiological Study of a Medieval Population (Cunha,1994). It was also during this decade that Portuguese Heritage Law made the presence of an on-field biological anthropologist – someone specialized in the study of skeletal human remains – mandatory in every excavation site where the presence of human remains might be expected. Today, due to the application of Duday’s method of Anthropologie de Terrain (Duday,1990), the excavation of burial sites with human remains without a bioarchaeologist or bioanthropologist present is unthinkable in what concerns heritage best practices.
All these things combined have permitted a deeper look into the deceased of the Past and the living communities to which they had belonged to – History’s interest in Death allowed for the study of documents related to burial and individuals last wills providing an image of how a sick or dying person made their final preparations and their last wishes. On the other hand, the application of Anthropologie de Terrain’s methods strengthened Paleobiological studies – these studies analyse Past Populations by looking at the skeletal remains and burial information that is collected during the process of excavation, and standardized recording forms emerged in order to collect on-field information that won’t be possible to recreate once the excavation is over. However, as we will see later, the need for space – namely different kinds of storage – will once again become a problem.
All this interest regarding the “world of the dead” has led to the concept of Deathscapes also known as Necroscapes (Brooks,2020) which are perspectives which emphasize the role of “space” as well as the importance of the study of the dead in order to understand the living, because funerary gestures and treatments allows us to infer on the worldview, hierarchisation and the role of personal Identity – such as sex, gender, age and faith in relation to social status. This means, for example, that the value of women or children in society may be viewed differently than of adult men. The chosen place of burial can also be an indicator of wealth as especially from the Late Middle Ages onward there will be a variation in monetary cost related to the most desired spaces.
The existence in itself of an organized burial place is demonstrative of a collective mental state and a set of socially accepted imperatives that are seen as essential to a community (Arezes,2017) as well as provides important clues to how individuals perceive the afterlife. For example, although both words “necropolis” and “cemetery” allude to burial places, the latter emphasizes the notion of “resting” and a subsequent belief in an outer worldly afterlife. This will further stress the importance of inhumation as the main burial practice as well as the position of decubitus dorsalis – in which the deceased lays on it back as if ready to “rise”.
Although for non-Christian religions the burial space has always been preferentially separated from the areas ascribed to the living – including Synagogues and Mosques, from the Middles Ages onward, the location for Christian burial places itself will change from apud ecclesia (near or inside a church) to the creation of municipal operated cemeteries in specific areas, not only due to the rise of sanitary concerns but also as a by-product of the Extinction of the Religious Orders in Portugal in 1836 (Dias,2001) that would lead to the creation of the burial chapel “capela jazigo” for the people who could afford one, these were burial graves in municipal cemeteries that were built to mimic a small chapel so as to bring religion as close as possible to their final resting place.
How did people in the Past deal with the more practical issues regarding burial and disposal of human remains? The main issues from de Middle Ages onwards concerned: space and service, consequences of war and epidemic diseases.
Space and service are concerned with the normal effects of mortality, especially in a culture where the only available option was inhumation, since cremation was considered a punitive measure that denied the soul of the deceased access to the afterlife. Near the moment of death, it was customary to get one’s affairs in order to ensure a “good death”, this meant the acquisition of burial space, or simply identifying the space where they had a right to burial (family grave for example) and to leave a certain amount of their estate to pay for burial and maintenance of the burial site which included not only candles to remain lit, but also the prayers and masses done by priests. So while burial was a form of income for religious orders and parishes, it was also a source of expense of resources. The number of masses and prayers to which the clergy became obliged kept adding up even when the allocated funds had run out. The sin of Simony conditioned the ability of re-selling a grave even after the 2-year period, or up to skeletonization of the body, which was when it was assumed that the soul had fully separated from the body, as stated in the papal bul Detestande Feritatis which aimed to uphold this minimal period before exhumation and reburial even when death occurred away from the desired place of burial.
This was particularly difficult to uphold during times of war, as it would mean that if death occurred in a faraway battlefield, it would be necessary to return to the place in order to proceed with the exhumation to return the combatants home. This was often seen as unfeasible, so depending on means and distance methods arose to enable the transportation of the dead. In shorter distances temporary embalming methods allowed to preserve the body during transport and the body would still decompose once it was buried in the desired place. Another method developed, used in longer distances, would resort to boiling down the body until it became fully skeletonized and then transported to the burial site. Although these practices may seem strange nowadays, it is important to keep in mind that cadaver treatment and manipulation were not totally unknown in the catholic faith due to its relationship with relics which were often a source of prestige and power for the churches that kept them – which would only formally cease in the 20th century with the 2nd Vatican Council.
It is very interesting to note that, although it is very common to find ossuary’s and reductions – sets of skeletonized remains in archaeological excavations, plague pits, which are almost synonymous to the medieval plague epidemics are absent in the Portuguese archaeological record, although there are many mentions of their existence in the historical sources.
As we approach the early modern period, full or partial permanent embalming would become more popular among the elites mostly for symbolic reasons of which heart burials were an example – allowing for part of the body to be able to be with spouse and original family or another location that held particular significance for the deceased, adding the benefit of more religious services from each burial site.
Dying Nowadays
In 2023 a total of 117 809 deaths were recorded in Portugal. Despite maintaining a catholic majority, Portuguese burial practice has slowly started to change due in part to a new trinity: religion, environment, cost. The openness of the Catholic church to accept the cremation of its faithful first in 1963 and having recently reiterated their acceptance in 2016, the growing environmental concerns and a desire to be brought closer to nature or a specific place of significance, as well as the overall cost have made cremation an increasingly preferable choice for many Portuguese when making arrangements for how they want their bodies to be disposed, despite a funerary industry that still caters largely to the traditional practice of inhumation and use of ornate coffins (Mendes,2018). Public awareness of the lack of physical space and an increasing overcrowding of cemetery plots has also contributed to the search for alternatives for burial besides inhumation.
The need for burial space has influenced contemporary legislation regarding cemeteries, not only at the level of establishing criteria to ensure the sustainably of cemeteries, namely the specification of types of soil and the amendments required in the case that a less suitable soil had to be selected, but also has banned the use of lead coffins and reduced the time for exhumation from 5 years (in 1962 and 1968) to 3 years (1998) with additional 2 year intervals in the case that skeletonization is not complete (Nascimento and Trabulo,2008). It is of interest to note that maintenance of some of the old requirements for the creation of a burials space are specifically still mentioned, like the need for the cemetery to be surrounded by walls with gated access points, as well as banning behaviour deemed to be potentially insulting to the memory of the dead like bringing animals, the presence of children without the presence of an adult, and organizing political rallies within cemetery grounds. Additionally, some purely sanitary measures are also introduced such as the prohibition of planting edible trees anywhere within the cemetery, trees should be planted within a fair distance of the graves in order to avoid the disturbance created by roots and the use of specific amounts of lime on the inside of coffins per adult cadaver and type of coffin. The legal definitions of “inhumation” and “cadaver” appears in the 1998 cemeterial legislation, and currently it has been argued that cadavers become a tertium genus neither possessing “personality” nor being fully equated with an object, rather something that once had personality (Samelo,2015). This is of interest because it means than even in a growing secularized society there is still a measure of respect pertaining to the remains of the deceased, which can be seen in recent times, since cemetery law allows, even if only in very specific circumstances, for the use of mass burials or cremation and disposal of remains ordered by the cemetery – these apply to foetuses up to a certain number of weeks; anatomical body parts, and in the case of a state of calamity. The latter was recently experienced by the sars-covid-19 outbreak, which falling under the legal framework mentioned the government initially tried to uphold them, but the measures adopted ended up being less strict, allowing for the regular burial of bodies, provided that they would be buried in specific bodybags inside the coffins, although with no wake to mourn the dead, and a very limited number of people allowed to be present at the moment of burial.
. Sustainable Dead?
As we can see modern day death is slowly becoming more mindful of their post-mortem environmental footprint despite the majority of people who still prefer the traditional ways. But in later years we gained a new type of deceased – the archaeological human remains, most often skeletonized remains, that are recovered from the excavation sites. In Portugal, they do not fall under Cemetery Law but in Heritage Law as organic remains so to a certain extent after exhumation they fall under the broader category of any materials recovered from archaeological excavations and as such they cannot be sold, reburied or destroyed, and while there has been recent debate over the possibility of disposal of archaeological materials – human remains have not been included in the discussion due to ethical concerns. These ethical concerns have also impacted the way museums feel about housing and displaying Human Remains. However, the main reason against reburial has been the recognised scientific importance of human remains for the study of past populations, and the lack of descent community which could express the wish for reburial, in specific cases when a positive identification is able to be made descendent family members show no interest in claiming the remains. When the archaeological intervention occurs in funerary spaces that are still active – churchyard i.e. a compromise solution is sometimes possible, the remains stay with the religious institution but are not reburied, thus access to them for scientific endeavours is still possible. However, in many cases, the space where the excavation occurs will be repurposed for other uses and the remains will either be kept in an university department related to the study of past population, a municipal museum or remain indefinitely with professionals responsible for the excavation. This highlights the need for specific deposits where these skeletal remains may be housed permanently assuring assess and study and proper conservation however funding for long-term sustainably of such deposits is a major obstacle not only in the case of Portugal (Freiwald and Wolf,2019).
REFERENCES:
Arezes,A. 2017. O Mundo Funerário na Antiguidade Tardia em Portugal: As Necrópoles dos séculos V a VIII
Brooks,S.,2020 Necrography and necroscapes: living with the dead in World Archaeology 52:1, pp1-15
Cunha. E. 1994 Paleobiologia das populações medievais portuguesas. Tese de Doutoramento Universidade de Coimbra
Dias,G. 2001 Religião e Simbolica O Sonho da Escada de Jacob Granito Editores e Livros Lda Porto.
Duday et al.1990 L’Anthropologie « de terrain » : reconnaissance et interprétation des gestes funéraires in Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris pp. 29-49
Freiwald,C. Wolf,K. 2019 Considering Conservation of Human Skeletal Remains in Archaeological Contexts. In Advances in Archaeological Practice 7(I) Society for American Archaeology.
Mattoso J. 1995. O Reino dos Mortos na Idade Media Peninsular [dir José Mattoso]
Mendes, R. 2018. Viver da morte a indústria funerária em Portugal Col. Retratos da Fundação. Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos. Lisboa.
Nascimento,E. Trabulo,M.2008 Cemitérios Ordenamentos e Questões Jurídicas 3ª Ed. Almedina Coimbra
Samelo,T. 2015. Aspectos relativos à tutela post-mortem da Personalidade Humana no Direito Civil: uma abordagem juscivilística do problema dos cemitérios. Dissertação de Mestrado na Área de Especialização em Ciências Jurídico-Forenses apresentada à Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de Coimbra.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/may/12/animalwelfare.topstories3
