ABSTRACT
Religious participants all over the world ritually burn, bury, cremate, pickle, mummify, wrap, wash and decorate dead bodies. Archaeologists speculate that the religious act of dealing with dead bodies may go back even to the time of Neanderthals some 50,000 years ago (Mithen 1996: 20-21, 198-9). Small bands of hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago may have had the tendency to treat dead bodies in specic ways for emotional reasons, remove an unwanted object from their midst, or to raise their odds of survival; the loss of one or more (of a few hunters) might have resulted in disastrous consequences for the group heightening the signicance of a death. Additionally, the kinds of actions surrounding death and dead bodies may represent one, if not the earliest documented, type of ritual behaviour (see Parker Pearson 1999).
