Anthropologists Probe Why Global Societies Once Buried the Dead at Home

In many societies, the dead were not treated as something to be left behind. Instead, burial could be integrated into daily life—sometimes placed inside or immediately beside family homes. In a new study in American Antiquity, researchers analyze why this practice, known as residential burial, appears frequently in archaeological contexts while seeming comparatively rare in more recent ethnographic reports.

Sabina Cveček of the Field Museum notes that early settlements often involved close coexistence between living people and the dead. While residential burial has been documented in multiple parts of the world, explaining its origins—and especially why it later declined in many regions—has been difficult to assess systematically.

To test one long-standing idea, the team built a cross-cultural dataset from 60 societies using ethnographic records spanning several centuries. In that sample, about 12% practiced residential burial. The result was unexpectedly low, prompting the researchers to question whether the ethnographic record itself was missing evidence rather than the practice being truly uncommon.

Cveček, along with collaborators Carol Ember and Tim Earle, then turned to archaeological evidence. Archaeology can reach far deeper in time, including millennia of burial information that ethnographers—limited to modern observation traditions—cannot capture. The team examined burial records from 49 archaeological sites worldwide.

The archaeological results were striking: roughly 33% of the communities showed at least some family members buried within or around their homes. This mismatch suggested that residential burial may have been more common earlier in human history, or that documentation patterns changed over time.

The researchers tested whether residential burial correlated strongly with how settled or mobile a society was, and found no strong relationship. Instead, the study points to a different mechanism shaping what we read in later accounts.

Across the past several centuries, colonization and the spread of major organized religions often transformed local mortuary practices. Ethnographers sometimes described earlier residential burial as having ended after colonial contact—shifting burials to churchyards, cemeteries, or new treatments such as cremation under changing religious regimes.

Even so, the authors emphasize that mortuary behavior is dynamic rather than fixed. As William A. Parkinson and Gary Feinman note, cultural practices can shift long before colonial eras, meaning the archaeological timeline may reflect multiple transitions in belief, social organization, and place-making.

Overall, the study provides a framework for interpreting how funeral choices illuminate household organization and social identity. The authors’ key message is that keeping the dead close to home has appeared across human history in many forms, offering a “universal” thread amid remarkable cultural diversity.