Blog Post #67: Beyond the Grave with Melissa S. Cradic

For Halloween month, our blog posts focus on the presence of the dead among us, such as vampires, zombies, ancestors, and other types of Undead. Our authors specialize in mortuary practices across Greece, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. While the Undead are often treated superficially in popular culture, these researchers press us to think about the deeper social and spiritual meanings behind ancient beliefs and practices that attempt to manage the persistent presence of the dead amongst the living

Introduction 

Like many archaeologists, my research path has been shaped by finds that I have encountered during fieldwork. In my case, the field is mortuary archaeology with a special focus on the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean. In mortuary archaeology, typically archaeologists do not go out looking for burials given the many cultural sensitivities and legal restrictions that apply to excavating human remains, even those from antiquity (Nagar 2002; Nilsson Stutz 2012, 2013; Fletcher et al., eds. 2014; Giesen ed. 2014; Leshem 2015; Sulimani and Kletter 2017; Meloche et al. eds, 2021). Sometimes it is not even clear that a particular context is a human burial until the skeletal remains start to be exposed. These chance finds, like other archaeological materials and contexts, require slow, respectful, and careful treatment including scrutiny of contexts in order to make sense of the deposition. 

“Archaeothanatology” 

None of these explanations are satisfactory without close analysis of the contexts themselves. I apply an approach called burial taphonomy (also referred to as “archaeothanatology”) that applies close contextual analysis of the environmental and depositional conditions of burials to determine how, when, and how many times that graves were disturbed. The primary goal of this analysis is to differentiate between anthropogenic disturbances—meaning intentional human interventions—and natural disturbances from forces like bioturbation (animal digging, insects, plant roots), erosion, water action and flooding, or any other environmental cause (Duday 2006, 2009; Bello and Andrews 2006; Knüsel and Robb 2016; Schotsman et al., eds. 2017). The results of the taphonomic study then provide a starting point for posing deeper questions about the cultural meanings, practices, and even sensory experiences of disposing, disturbing, and interacting with the dead at different stages after burial.

As a field archaeologist and mortuary archaeologist, my goal is to make sense of the big picture and to frame it within the context of the ancient Middle East. Beyond analyzing the stratigraphy, depositional contexts, burial taphonomy, and material culture inside the burials, the field datasets in my research integrate many specialist fields. This multidisciplinary approach requires close collaboration with bioanthropologists, paleoethnobotanists, zooarchaeologists, and archaeologists who specialize in exact sciences approaches including isotopic analysis, ancient DNA, the analysis of the compositions of materials like metals and chemical residues of substances inside ceramic vessels. For example, recent findings from Megiddo demonstrate the presence of chemical signatures of vanilla and of psychoactive substances like opiates inside ceramic vessels found in tombs contexts, opening new avenues for research into sensory environments of mortuary rituals (Linares et al. 2019; Namdar 2022; Cradic 2021).  

Together, these different strands of evidence build a detailed story of who the deceased individuals were in life, such as their biological age and sex, where they grew up, what they ate, and their relative health and wealth status; how their bodies were treated after death and burial; how they may have been commemorated at their burial sites; and their genetic and social relationships to each other. The holistic approach to disparate sets of evidence means that there are always exciting results that keep this work fascinating and from which I can build a coherent, data-driven narrative about these individuals’ lives and afterlives. For some of these dead, both the archaeological evidence and ancient textual sources indicate that their afterlives may have included a social transformation into a supernatural entity after burial, such as an ancestor or ghost (Cradic 2021, 2022).  

The Dead Amongst the Living 

Ghosts, demons, spirits, and ancestors exist across many cultures and global contexts, including in the ancient world. Assyriologist Irving Finkel (2021), for example, recently published a new book titled The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies that chronicles some of the earliest attestations of the (un)dead in disembodied forms, which emerged in ancient Mesopotamia.   

Ghosts and spirits are closely connected to eschatological ideas about the afterlife, supernatural realm, and its relationship to the earthly world inhabited by humans. Often, the fears and stories created around these kinds of entities involve crossing of otherwise closed boundaries or thresholds that separate the “us” and “them”—the lines that divide the human world from the supernatural one. It may become dangerous when these lines are crossed in either direction. Entities like ghosts may be perceived, received, and interpreted differently across different contexts. They may or may not be considered spooky or creepy. For some, they are simply figments of the imagination while for others they are deeply grounded in material and sensorial realities. 

In ancient Mesopotamia, historical sources likewise shed light on relationships between the living and the dead. In this context, the unmoored nature of ghosts, and their lack of accountability, made them dangerous, unpredictable, and feared. They were the revenants who had no identities, no homelands, and most importantly, no families to care for them after death. Their lack of proper burial and/or of proper ongoing care after death prompted these beings to rove the landscape in search of luckless victims who could be harmed by the “hand of the ghost” (Cooper 2009; Sonia 2020: 34-35; Scurlock 2006).  

Dealing with the Undead 

The anonymous nature of ghosts served as a source of anxiety, as described in an incantation to the sun-god:

O Sun God, a terrifying ghost has attached itself to my back for many days, and does not release its hold, It harasses me all day, terrifies me all night, 

Always at hand to hound me, making my hair stand on end, 

Pressing my forehead, making me dizzy,  

Parching my mouth, paralyzing my flesh, drying out my whole body. 

Be it a ghost of someone killed in battle 

Be it a wandering ghost,…  

Drive it from my body, cut it off from my body, remove it from my body!… Remove the sickness of my body, that the one who sees me may sound your praises 

Eradicate the disease of my body! 

I turn to you, grant me life! 

[trans. Foster 2005: 650ff]

To an ancient Babylonian, these concrete and observable consequences of ghostly encounters showed the potency of the dead as agents who were fully capable of causing physical or material harm. In contrast, the dead who were cared for through burial and commemoration did not threaten the living. Whatever form they took, the dead served as significant sources of meaning-making and social negotiation in the ancient Middle East. Through ancient historical sources and mortuary archaeology, they continue to speak to us today from beyond the grave.