I have been told many stories by people who found it hard to let go of the everyday objects left behind by their loved ones after death. A woman whose mother had, just before she died, bought a large tub of malted milk drink powder called Horlicks, confided, “I could not throw this away. It was in the cupboard for five years! And it was solid. But because she’d bought it, it became like an artifact.” Similarly, another woman kept her grandfather’s “dreadful misshapen shoes,” saying, “I think you have to hold onto things until it’s time to release them.”
These stories were told to me during my time as a researcher on the Continuing Bonds Project from 2016–2018. The project was a collaboration between archaeologists like me and health care professionals at Bradford and Leicester in the U.K. It sought to use archaeology to encourage discussions around the often-taboo topics of death, dying, and bereavement. By discussing the diversity of customs and practices in past cultures, we sparked reflections about death today, so end-of-life caregivers would gain confidence in starting important conversations with dying patients and their families.
The project was hugely successful and demonstrated the therapeutic power that deep-time perspectives can offer in some of our most pressing societal challenges.
What really struck me during this project was how many of the personal stories told by project participants revolved not around the dead body but around the objects that loved ones left behind. As an archaeologist, I found this particularly significant because often it is through objects, not bodies, that we reconstruct the lived experiences of past societies.
