As you might suspect death management refers to the way individuals, cultures, and entire societies handle death. However, this term encompasses more than the rituals and traditions people engage in when they encounter death. In order to manage death people must also hold beliefs, values, and perspectives towards it as well. While death itself remains a constant, in that all living things die, the way humans manage death is constantly changing. In fact, the way a person manages death differs from person to person and culture to culture. However, for the purposes of this paper, time will be used as a means to measure change among death management practices, with specific focus on the immense amount of change that has occurred since the industrial revolution.
Evidence of the human need to manage death has been found by archeologists that predates written history. “A cave excavated at Atapuerca in northern Spain is said to be the first evidence of human funerary behavior, dating to at least 300,000 years ago” (DeSpelder 86). Other burial sites uncovered date back tens of thousands of years. Among the skeletons of some ancient burial sites are what appear to be the personal belongings of the deceased. So long before knowledge of disease, humans intentionally buried their dead, but why? Why did they not leave their fellow human beings where they lay, as they must have witnessed all other animal species doing? The specific answer to this question is nearly impossible to decipher from bare bones and simple artifacts. However, it is clear through their intentional burials that these ancient people, much like us, participated in death management practices. While the sites uncover the physical aspect of these peoples’ death management systems, their specific values, beliefs, traditions, and perspectives toward death remain, and will always remain, a mystery to us. Instead our true understanding of past death management practices must begin sometime after the onset of...