Mortuary behavior is one of the most fascinating and fruitful fields of investigation in the social sciences and one that has drawn widespread interest in historical archaeology. Since the pioneering early twentieth-century studies by Arnold van Gennep (1960) and Robert Hertz (1960), the study of mortuary ritual has been recognized as an important element of cultural anthropology (Metcalf and Huntington, 1991). Within the social sciences in general, the beliefs and rituals surrounding death are regarded as an important part of a culture’s worldview (Goody, 1975). Historians and other social scientists have also been attracted to the study of deathways, including the beliefs, activities, and literature associated with death, the afterlife, and mourning behavior (Pine, 1975; Shively, 1988)
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LeeDecker, C.H. (2009). Preparing for an Afterlife on Earth: The Transformation of Mortuary Behavior in Nineteenth-Century North America. In: Gaimster, D., Majewski, T. (eds) International Handbook of Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-72071-5_8
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