‘The Unanswered Question’: Investigating Early Conceptualisations of Death

The diffi culty that each of us faces in seeking to comprehend death is neatly expressed by Wittgenstein in the epigraph at the head of this chapter. A related insight of the sculptor Damien Hirst led him to create the work entitled ‘The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living’, which was fi rst shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1992 (Gallagher 2012 ; frontispiece). This gives material presence to the enigma that humans have faced since the dawn of measured time and before ‘the unanswered question’ as the American composer Charles Ives expressed it in 1906 (Ives 1953 ; the fi rst of Two Contemplations , the second being Central Park in the Dark ). It comes with the emergence of that self-awareness that is often taken as a defi ning quality of our own species, Homo sapiens . One of the principal aims in collecting the papers assembled here was to undertake a fresh look at early human attempts to recognise, to understand, and to conceptualise death. The project may be said to fall within the scope of cognitive archaeology, involving, as it does, the world of ideas and of concepts. Such a project can only be undertaken by relying primarily upon the archaeological record. For inescapably consideration must be given to prehistoric times – that is to say to times when there is no adequate historical (and therefore written) account or narrative for the periods in question. The archaeological record is indeed a material record: it is constituted by the surviving material evidence of the human past. But that does not imply that it is concerned only with material things. As D’Altroy points out (this volume): ‘essential features of human aff airs are often deliberately not given enduring physical expression . . . because of the threat that material existence may pose. . . . An approach that assumes a parallel or mirrored relationship between things material and not strikes me as having the potential to confuse key issues’. That observation indicates clearly one of the problems that cognitive archaeology must seek to confront.