Why Do People Bury Objects With The Dead?

Objects in an Ancient Egyptian grave ~3,400 BCE. Source.

Throughout the ages, people have buried objects with their deceased loved ones. Anthropologists call these objects grave goods because they appear in several of the rituals that characterize our species' 100,000 year preoccupation with death (burial, cremation, mummification, etc.).

Grave good practices continue to this day and are so universal that some psychologists think that evolution has predisposed our species to think about the hereafter. To uncover this evolutionary “wiring,” scholars have begun cataloging the reasons that people give for wanting grave goods or for depositing them at the funerals of others.

One of the more obvious and historical reasons for the practice is to prepare the deceased for the next life. For example, Ancient Egyptians placed “Shabti dolls” with the dead to do their chores in the afterlife, while Ancient Greeks and Romans placed a coin in the deceased’s mouth to pay the ferryman, Charon. From China to Scandinavia, people have buried food, drink, weapons, books, and maps to help their honored dead on their journeys.

If provisioning the dead is the main purpose of grave goods, then these objects present scholars with the earliest evidence for religion anywhere in the world. For example, there are 100,000-year-old human graves inside the Qafzeh and Skhul Caves in Israel that contain animal bones, seashells, primitive flint tools, and red ochre (a pigment used in rituals). The presence of these objects suggests that people had afterlife beliefs 100,000 years ago.

Today, people are still leaving objects with the dead, including photographs, jewelry, special items of clothing, stuffed animals, blankets, cigars, alcoholic drinks, books, religious items (e.g., Bibles and rosaries), and notes to the deceased. According to some of the people surveyed, at least some of the items are for the deceased’s continued use and enjoyment.

Grave goods beside a skeleton stained with red ochre. Source.

Grave Goods Have Other Purposes

There are other reasons for grave-good practices. For example, some atheists do it, and they don’t usually express any belief in an afterlife (i.e., extinctivism. There are exceptions, but this article will treat atheism as interchangeable with extinctivism).

Scholars, including those cited above, have proposed various reasons for this anomaly, including that grave goods are for the emotional comfort of the living, perhaps via an act of giving, obtaining closure, or by depositing items that would be too painful to keep around.

Other reasons include comforting the deceased's family or honoring their wish to be buried with particular items (e.g., a wedding ring). In some indigenous societies, grave goods may also demonstrate the wealth, religious affiliation, or social status of the person providing them: something that anthropologists call social signaling. For example, you may want to show the grieving family that you cared for the deceased and respect their traditions.

A final reason concerns grave goods that supposedly contain the deceased’s “essence.” In some cases, this may be literal, such as sweat on a pair of glasses. In other cases, the object is believed to magically contain part of the deceased’s essence or aura, and that depositing it ensures that every part of them is in the grave. Of course, this “magical contagion” can also be a reason to keep an object for oneself (e.g., to remember them, or in the case of celebrity memorabilia).

An attraction to celebrity memorabilia may also explain a need to leave grave goods. Source. 

Are Atheists Overriding Their Implicit Afterlife Beliefs?

The problem with nonreligious reasons for leaving grave goods (e.g., emotional comfort and social signaling) is that atheists don’t mention them any more than religious people do, and these reasons aren’t that popular anyway! A 2023 study found that the most popular reasons for leaving grave goods are for the deceased's afterlife use or because the object contains “part of” their essence (both are supernatural reasons).

The study also found that atheists and religious people only differed in their choice of reason when the afterlife was explicitly mentioned (e.g., “to benefit them in the afterlife”). When the afterlife was merely alluded to, such as by implying the deceased’s continued consciousness and their ability to think and feel (e.g., “so that they will know I loved them” or “so that they will be at rest”), atheists endorsed these reasons just as much as religious people did.

These reasons were not designed to catch atheists out either. When atheists were asked to write down their own reasons for wanting grave goods for themselves (i.e., when they die), the same phrases that implied a continuation of consciousness appeared (e.g., “I want it with me”).

The pattern of results suggested that all human beings implicitly reason as if death is not the end, but that atheists are able to override this reasoning when explicitly asked about it. Of course, this finding does not require that an afterlife exists. Rather, atheists display a remarkable ability to override a biological predisposition by explicitly reasoning about the lack of evidence for an afterlife.

The popularity (%) of 12 motivations for leaving grave goods in the 2023 study.

 

So why does this predisposition exist? Some research points to it being an evolutionary accident. Human beings have many useful adaptations, including episodic memory — the ability to storyboard and relive important events — and its effects on how we imagine, predict, and prepare for unknown, future environments.

As a side-effect, these adaptations could make it difficult to think about "being dead" as a non-event that is not experienced (e.g., “when I’m dead, I’ll be X, think Y, and feel Z”), something that has been called a “simulation constraint.” Indeed, it is thought that Neanderthals (a species closely related to humans) did not possess episodic memory, and Neanderthal graves do not appear to contain grave goods.

If all people implicitly believe that consciousness continues after death, it could explain several other psychological studies. For example. a study found that most people (including atheists) find it difficult to imagine the cessation of mental and emotional states at death (e.g., loving one’s family), but find it easier to accept the cessation of physical states (e.g., being hungry). This anomaly may explain why most cultures think of the dead as ethereal spirits or souls.

Another study found that this difficulty with "mental death" diminishes with age (perhaps following a materialistic education), suggesting that it is an evolutionary default that we are all born with. Furthermore, studies have found that atheists can be reluctant to sell their souls and become distressed by the potential actions of a ghost; behaviors that are inconsistent with their stated beliefs.

In general, then, implicit afterlife beliefs appear to be the primary motivation for grave good practices, including among atheists, and that our difficulty with imagining being dead may have been part of the human condition since at least the Paleolithic era (~100,000 years ago).

Grave Goods Help Us To Interpret The History of Religion

The 2023 study (cited above) made several other interesting discoveries. For example, the most common items left with the dead were photographs and jewelry. While jewelry has been placed in graves for millennia, photography is a modern invention.

To explain their shared popularity, jewelry and photographs were found to share sentimental, emotional, and relational value (e.g., wedding rings and family photographs), which appears to be more important than economic, functional, and cultural value. Future grave goods should therefore utilize the same value system, perhaps including electronic devices such as memory drives and phones.

In sum, studies of grave goods should continue to yield important discoveries about the psychological biases that govern human behavior. Such findings also highlight the importance of religious history, in general, and its study by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. Without the efforts of these scholars, cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists would have little to base their theories on.