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- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal.
Naked.
Large brain.
Long the master of fire,
tools, and language.
But still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable
yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from
our shared understanding
of the past.
Carta brings together experts
from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who
we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible
by the generosity of humans like you.
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- Well, thank you very
much and I'd like to thank
the organizers and say
how glad I am to be here
and participating in this
very interesting symposium.
And indeed to have the opportunity
of discussing together a problem
which we all sooner or later
will have to come to terms with.
And that is, indeed, an interesting point.
So I'd like to start with
just a couple of quotations.
This from Wittgenstein.
And it makes an important point, I think,
that we are talking of death.
But death is a concept.
Obviously there are individual deaths
or there are dead bodies, dead people,
that we may or may not
come into contact with.
But death is a concept.
And as humans, we may,
in the modern world,
not witness many deaths,
but from the earliest times,
hominins and humans have experienced
the deaths of relatives.
So the condition of being dead
will have been a familiar concept,
at least as soon as human language
could find a word for it,
namely the adjective dead.
But I think it is
crucial to the discussion
to realize that without
the concept of death,
and indeed without a
language which could find
a word from it, then it's not possible
to communicate about death
and it's not possible
to have a shared concept of death.
And so the awareness of
death as a general phenomenon
is very much when that came to be,
in evolutionary terms,
is very much associated
with the question of when
human language emerged
in a sufficiently sophisticated form
that one could have an
abstract noun, dead,
or an abstract adje...
Death, I mean.
Or an abstract adjective, dead.
Which could give a word to the concept.
And so I suspect that
when we're discussing
when did the awareness
of death become a reality
for humankind, the answer is when language
had been developed to find a word for it.
It's worth mentioning also,
it's interesting perhaps that Epicurus
had a similar concept to Wittgenstein's
and a couple of thousand years earlier.
But as archeologists, we don't
encounter death very often
and indeed we don't even
encounter dead bodies very often.
As archeologists, we more
often encounter burials.
That is to say dead persons
that have been inhumed deliberately
and it's unusual for archeologists
to discover dead people
and it's so worth looking,
reminding ourselves,
of these extraordinary
images of moments of death
found at Pompeii and Herculaneum
and the archeologists who found cavities
in the volcanic ash and
poured plaster of Paris
into these cavities, were able to get
these extraordinary images
of death, if you like,
of the moment of death of a kind
which is exceedingly unusual
in archeological terms.
The business of burial is
often very much associated,
or at any rate in later
times, with notions
of what is to follow.
Whether or not there is an afterlife,
and that is why I've given my talk
the notion, the title of The
Archeology of Immortality.
And this slide is from the
Capuchin Cemetery in Palermo
and of course the Capuchin
monks were very much aware
that there would be a day of resurrection
and so this is now the
Capuchin Cemetery in Rome
where we see these extraordinary,
elaborate, and sometimes very
decorative configurations,
which I think to us today,
to most of us today,
perhaps because we don't very often
see skeletons or dead
bodies in the modern world,
that's in the mortuary
which we don't visit,
and it's in the cemetery but
you don't see the dead body
in most Christian burials,
and indeed in many faiths,
so that we are very much
insulated from death
and these are perhaps rather
shocking images for us
and we find the apparent frivolity
which you encounter in
the Capuchin Chapel,
perhaps a little unseemly.
But it's worth remembering, and I think
we should pause and recognize,
that we live in the Americas or in Europe
or in Western Asia, in a society
today dominated by two or
perhaps three religions
which hold that the supreme deity,
God or other, promises
that life after death
will be the destiny for those who believe.
And so I take you to the Sistine Chapel
to Michelangelo's Last Judgment.
And there will be many people here today
who follow some version
of the Christian faith,
so well expressed by Michelangelo
for the Church of Rome in his vision
of the Last Judgment, where the blessed
and the damned are judged on the basis
of their conduct during
life and sent accordingly
to their ultimate destinations.
There are two ultimate destinations.
And it is conventional,
in the scientific world,
which is particularly
inappropriate for this occasion,
that we don't discuss faith very much.
Maybe they're a symposia on faith,
but they tend to, or they can degenerate,
into alternative expressions
of personal faith.
And so it's an irony, really,
that we're here today discussing awareness
of death but the
belief systems which determine,
to some extent, what a number of us
will feel about death
are not openly expressed,
and I think that's worth saying
because underlying all the discussions
is that some of us here are believers,
perhaps of those two or three religions
which predominate in the Western world,
and others of us are not believers
and are agnostics or atheists,
and therefore inevitably
have a very different
approach to death.
And many agnostics or
atheists will not believe
in the existence of the
human being after death,
although of course some may,
and obviously I don't have time to talk
about the Buddhist faith on this occasion.
So I move right on to the
earliest accumulations
of human bones, which may
or may not be burials.
This is Sima de los Huesos in Spain,
which is early hominins.
Early neanderthals, probably,
around 400,000 years ago,
which were tips into these pits,
these caves, and
presumably deliberately so.
Though that is not certain.
But they don't really constitute burials
in a deliberate sense.
And the first human burials
are archaic hominins.
This is from Skhul in Jordan,
and that is something
like 100,000 years ago.
These are archaic hominins of humans
following the slide we saw
in the last presentation
who have left Africa
and with these burials,
we do find, sometimes, other objects.
Sometimes a bone signifying meat.
Not a human bone but a bone of mutton,
or something like that.
And so that is certainly
a deliberate burial,
which is certainly signifying
awareness of death.
You can't come about
having a deliberate burial
without some awareness of death.
But it doesn't necessarily
signify an afterlife.
And this is one of the first
sites in European Romania
where we find deliberate burials.
You do, of course, have
neanderthal burials.
For instance, at the Shanidar Cave,
something like 40 or
more thousand years ago.
But it's not until the
Upper Paleolithic Period,
until the arrival of
homo sapiens in Europe
that we find deliberate
burials of this kind,
this very striking
body inhumed with a headdress,
which comes from the site of Sungir.
And this is another such burial.
This is around 28,000 years ago in Russia.
But although it's impressive,
it's important to understand
that it's clearly recognizing death,
it's a formal burial, but
not yet in a cemetery.
It's a formal burial
and so that indicates something,
but not necessarily a suggestion
of awareness in the afterlife.
This is a similar burial from the site
of Arene Candide in Northern Italy.
And here now is one of
the first cemeteries.
A number of burials grouped together.
And you find these at the
very dawn of sedentism,
just before the
domestication of agriculture
is fully achieved in the
Natufian Period in Palestine
and in Western Asia around 12,000 BC.
And here is another of these sites
where we find a cemetery.
And clearly a cemetery is a
different response to death.
It's a place specifically chosen
for the formal disposal of the dead.
And here is another such example
from an early site in
Jordan about 15,000 BC.
And it's Jericho in the
Pre-Pottery Neolithic A Period
that you find these
remarkable plastered skulls.
And these are one of
the most striking finds
that one has where death
is being responded to
and it's possible that this relates
to a belief in the afterlife,
but it's also just as possible
that it relates to a
belief in the significance
of the ancestors, whether
or not the ancestors
are presumed to be still
living in some sense,
it is the ancestors who
give often one's right
to inhabit the land, the territory,
which one inhabits today.
And so this, moving on very rapidly,
to Northern Europe, to the Orkney Islands,
this is a site I excavated myself
of Quanterness in Orkney where you see
a constructed tomb, a very
handsomely constructed tomb,
here is a reconstruction of it,
and this is a place of collective burial.
And collective burial
is another phenomenon
where the bodies of the
community are together buried
and that is an important point.
It is when you come to ranked societies
that you find burials
with very strikingly wealthy grave goods
and here is one of the jade
burials of the Songze culture
around 3300 BC in China.
And here is another of these jade burials
of the same period, also in China.
And there's something special
about the material of jade,
just as is special
about the material gold,
which one finds here in
the earliest occurrence
of gold in the world at
Varna, something like 4500 BC.
And the inclusion of these materials
doesn't necessarily indicate
a belief in the afterlife,
but there is with the
purity and survival of gold
and the purity and survival of jade,
something which certain in later times
is associated with immortality.
And I think there's a possibility
that this is the time
that immortality first
enters the archeological
record, as it were,
in these rich burials.
This is another burial from Varna
in Bulgaria around 4500 BC.
But it is with the arrival
of state societies,
and with the arrival of
the belief in deities,
in transcendent deities,
that you certainly find
a systematic belief in the afterlife.
And deities, of course,
are by definition immortal.
And you find deities in
the archeological record,
it may be argued for the
first time in state societies
such as Ancient Egypt.
So here you see the pyramids.
Here you see the
wonderful gold sarcophagus
from the tomb of Tutankhamun.
And we know a great deal
about Egyptian beliefs,
and here is from the Book of the Dead,
is the weighing of the soul of
the deceased in the balance.
And if the soul of the deceased
was sufficiently free from sin
as to be sufficiently light in weight,
then the deceased would be accepted
into a favorable afterlife.
And so it's in China again,
with the Shang dynasty
that you find these
enormously rich burials.
And with the first bronze is in China.
And these are of great abundance.
And it's also in Mesoamerica that
with the development of state society,
for instance with the Maya, that you find
very elaborate burials which do clearly
involve the belief of an afterlife,
at least for the ruler.
And this is the tomb of the
inscriptions in Palenque.
And here is the wonderful tomb slab
of the deceased person of Pakal.
And here is Pakal himself being taken
down into the underworld.
This is around 603 before the common era.
And here is the contents of his tomb,
including this wonderful jade mask.
And there is the jade mask.
And it's interesting to compare
that with the jade masks
which in China used to surround
the body of the deceased person.
That was Liu Shang and this is
the burial suit of Princess Dou Wan
who was buried around 113,
or died 113 before the common era.
In Europe, it's the necropoleis,
the cities of the dead
of the Etruscans, which give
the most wonderful example.
Here is Cerveteri.
Here is the Sarcophagus of
the Spouses from Cerveteri.
And it's there that we find
the wonderful painted tombs.
Here is the Tomb of the Leopards.
And this is a funeral banquet,
or certainly a banquet.
The deceased person reclining
with relatives and friends
and being served on as Roman
banquets were transacted.
And here is a very beautiful wall painting
from the Tomb of the Baron, around 500 BC.
And this too is Tarquinia, around 500 BC
from the Tomb of the Baron.
And here is one of the most delightful
depictions of music and
dance from the ancient world
likewise of that period.
And so we obviously find
in the ancient world
wonderful representations.
Here is the goddess Athena in mourning
at the grave stele of a deceased youth.
And here is one of the
most delightful series
of paintings of deceased persons,
which you find on the mummy
coverings in the Fayum.
And they have a wonderful vivacity,
but they're commemorating
a deceased person
for whom a belief in the afterlife
was probably a doctrinal reality.
And then you have the grandiose.
This is from the Tomb of Mausolus,
from whom we have the term mausoleum,
meaning a grand, eloquent,
commemorative tomb usually.
And this is the funeral
effigy of Mausolus,
which is now in the British Museum.
And here is a reconstruction
of the Tomb of Mausolus
as it would have been in Western Anatolia,
Halicarnassus in Anatolia.
And here in Rome is the great
monumental Tomb of Hadrian,
which is today the Castel Sant'Angelo.
And here is a reconstruction
of how it may have looked.
And this is obviously the
notion of death of an emperor
as a significant event.
And of course the emperors
of Rome were deified.
And so on their death, it was presumed
that they went on to live an eternal life.
And indeed the later emperors
were already regarded
as divine before their death.
So there was no trouble about that.
And here is Hadrian indeed.
And so just to come to the conclusion.
Obviously, we continue
to use grave monuments
as a suitable locus for
celebrating the dead.
And this is the Tomb
of Guiliano de' Medici,
from the Medici Chapel in Florence.
This is again, Michelangelo.
Michelangelo now as sculptor
rather than as painter.
And here, as you'll
recognize, is the Kremlin.
And here in a similar guise is Lenin,
still immortalized and embalmed.
As you remember, Stalin was
put beside him for awhile,
but then perhaps was simply interred
very wisely subsequently.
But Lenin still continues to rule supreme.
And my last image is from the Taj Mahal,
this lovely memorial to
the bride of the Shah dating
from the 17th century AD.
So some notions of
immortality do continue,
but of course immortality is usually part
of a belief system which involves,
in the modern world certainly, a faith
of whether it's Christian or Muslim
or indeed Buddhist faith, but I haven't
had time to discuss the Buddhist notion
of transubstantiation, how the soul
can move from one individual
on death to another individual.
And that of course is a
different concept of immortality.
But as I said right at the beginning,
I think the awareness
of death simply depends
on having a word for death.
And I would say that when
we developed as humans
in awareness of death as a concept,
must be very much when we
developed the linguistic capacity.
And that linguistic capacity is usually
associated with our own
species homo sapiens,
as indeed was very well
documented by the last speaker
with his map of the out of
Africa expansion of our species,
something like 60,000 years ago.
So that I think gives
a very brief synopsis
of the concept of
immortality for humankind.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
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