Piecing together past human encounters with death: a theory and practice of the archaeology of death (The Gordon Childe Lecture for 2025)

How can archaeologists understand the human experience of death in the deep past? More specifically, how can the archaeological record, consisting of fragmented material traces of past people’s actions when faced with death, provide real insights into past lives? This article, which is a version of the Gordon Childe Lecture presented at UCL in May 2025, approaches these fundamental and ambitious questions by drawing inspiration from two foundational materialist thinkers – Gordon Childe and Pierre Bourdieu. Through the example of analysis of mortuary ritual practice in the European Mesolithic, it examines the potential for archaeological analysis of materiality and suggests different analytical pathways for analysis, drawing on insights from ritual theory, practice theory, archaeothanatology and cultural anthropology. Ultimately it asks how we can archaeologically approach human experience not only through an engagement with the material, but also if and how we may move beyond it in our enquiry and address aspects of past lived experience that have left no material trace.