Living with the dead? You need to know these 7 gruesome facts about the history of human burial

From the depths of prehistory, human societies have grappled with the same question: how do we treat the dead? Those many varying answers offer a valuable insight into how people across history have understood life, faith and human relationships.

From Tutankhamun’s tomb to the mysterious Anglo-Saxon burial at Sutton Hoo, many of the most famous – and culturally significant – historical and archaeological discoveries have centred around the notion of burial.

It’s for that reason that historian Roger Luckhurst, author of Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead, thinks that burial practices say as much about the living and their societies, as they do about the dead.

In a conversation on the HistoryExtra podcast, Luckhurst shared seven important (and unsettling) facts that trace how our relationship with death has evolved across history.

1. Homo sapiens weren’t the first to bury our dead

For centuries, archaeologists thought deliberate burial marked the beginning of humanity. Care for the dead, they argued, was the dividing line between Homo sapiens other human species, like Homo heidelbergensis or the Denisovans.

“It used to be the case that archaeologists thought that they could identify Homo sapiens by how they cared for their dead,” Luckhurst says. “Actually, there are other versions of [archaic humans] who were burying their dead probably intentionally.”

But recent discoveries have challenged that assumption.

• Read more | When and why did Neanderthals go extinct?

Now, archaeological evidence seems to suggest that other human species, including Neanderthals, carefully laid their dead in shallow graves, possibly alongside flowers. One of the most famous examples is in Spain’s Sima de las Palomas archaeological site, where a Neanderthal woman and her child seem to have been buried together, with their bodies positioned in a specific way.

Far from the brutish caricature of early humans, Neanderthals may have shared our impulse to mark death as a meaningful part of life.

2. Nations recruit their dead to tell stories about themselves

From ancient empires to modern democracies, death has always served politics in the form of monuments and memorials.

“If you think about most national narratives, it's nearly always about the sacrifice of the people who founded the modern nation,” says Luckhurst. “In England we have this celebration of Memorial Day in November to mark the Armistice [at the end of the First World War]. And there are monuments in every village and every church for those who died in the two world wars.”

Across Europe, the aftermath of the world wars turned graveyards into civic altars. Cenotaphs, war cemeteries and endless rows of white crosses framed sacrifice as the foundation of unity and national image.

But the phenomenon of using the dead to tell a broader story extends beyond the West.

“In Africa, one of my favourite graveyards is in Zimbabwe,” says Luckhurst, “where the cemetery is shaped like an AK-47 rifle because that's the rifle that the people buried there used as independence fighters … the graves are [shaped like] bullets in the magazine.”

3. Lenin’s corpse sparked a modern cult of preservation

When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, the newly formed Soviet Union faced a problem: how should its revolutionary hero be memorialised?

“He died after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun,” says Luckhurst, “and the Soviets thought, ‘There's a preserved body that’s laid for thousands of years, why don't we do this with Lenin?’”

A special laboratory was built beneath Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square, where scientists experimented with chemicals to halt decay. The result was a body that has been preserved for nearly a century, tended to by teams of embalmers who still adjust his features under carefully controlled conditions.

“[The Russians] even did this with Ho Chi Minh,” Luckhurst adds, “and kept it hidden for about six years until the Vietnam war was over.”

What began as a self-contained Soviet experiment became a Cold War phenomenon, as other communist states adopted the same secular sainthood, embalming leaders from China’s Mao Zedong to North Korea’s Kim Il-sung.

4. Mummification began long before ancient Egypt

The Egyptians made mummification famous, but they weren’t the first to use it as a means of caring for their dead.

“Mummification is a way of preserving a body by drying it out,” says Luckhurst, “but 2000 years before [ancient Egypt], in Chile there was a culture that was preserving bodies in a different kind of way.”

Luckhurst was referring to the Chinchorro culture of coastal Chile and Peru, who as early as 5000 BC carefully prepared their dead with clay masks and natural salts. The region’s arid air and saline soil acted as natural preservatives, inspiring deliberate human techniques.

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Egyptians would later transform that process into a religious art, codified under the Old Kingdom (around 2600 BC) into a 70-day ritual involving resins, oils and linen wrappings.

5. The Catholic world turned bone piles into works of art

In medieval and early modern Europe, churchyards filled up quickly. The dead were buried close to sanctified ground, and when space ran out, bones were exhumed to make room for others – leading to the establishment of the ossuary, a monument built to be filled with the bones of the dead.

Perhaps the best-known example of an ossuary can be found in the French capital.

“Underneath the streets of Paris are hundreds of thousands of skulls,” says Luckhurst. “It's a very Catholic practice and it's designed to help you contemplate death.”

In the Catacombs of Paris, six million skeletons were arranged into geometric walls of skulls and femurs. In the Sedlec Ossuary of the Czech Republic, monks turned human bones into chandeliers and coats of arms. Meanwhile, the Capuchin Crypt in Rome displays skeletons posed in niches.

These were all intended to show that death was part of salvation’s cycle.

6. The Romans built cities of the dead outside their cities of the living

Ancient Rome regulated death with remarkable precision. By law, burials were forbidden within city limits, a rule designed to protect both hygiene and sanctity.

“They built laws quite quickly that set out that you must bury the dead outside the city limits. And that's where the word ‘necropolis’ comes from,” Luckhurst explains.

Along the Via Appia, tombs of senators and freedmen lined the roadside. These necropoleis (literally ‘cities of the dead’) were public spaces that served as memorials and monuments.

Visitors passing through could read inscriptions, admire the sculpture and reflect on the continuity between life and death.

7. Europe’s graveyards became dangerously overcrowded

By the late Middle Ages, after the disaster of the Black Death, death once again loomed over Europe – and as the population grew, so did the problem.

“From the medieval period onwards, some societies decided that they were going to live with the dead, crammed around Christian churches in classic churchyards, but also in the walls or in the crypts of these churches as well. So they started to become part of the architecture in a fundamental way,” says Luckhurst.

“But by the 18th century, you start getting a real crisis with people thinking, ‘What on earth are we going to do with all of these dead?’”

As cities expanded, burial grounds grew packed. Corpses were layered in shared plots, and decomposing bodies seeped into wells and cellars. In London, decay became a very real public health hazard.

It was a crisis that led to reform, and a massive social change.

From the early 19th century, the garden cemetery movement transformed burial into something akin to landscape design. New cemeteries such as Père Lachaise in Paris (1804) and Kensal Green in London (1832) created tree-lined avenues and manicured plots that restored order to how the dead were buried.

It was a distinct shift. Now, people weren’t surrounded by the dead in the cities; the dead were no longer ever-present. Instead, they were separated from the living – out of sight, and, eventually, out of mind.

Roger Luckhurst was speaking to Ellie Cawthorne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.