Pet Cemetery

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Undoubtedly there is good reason why archaeologists value human burials as one of the most valuable finds in the sense that they have the potential to tell us so much about the conditions under which the individual came to be buried in a certain way. Archaeologists can look at grave goods, the type of vessel for the deceased, body positioning, the number of individuals in a grave, and the location of a grave and its proximity to other burials to speculate about the individual’s role(s) and status. A common theme that I have noticed in many of our class discussions is the idea that perhaps these things say more about the person or people doing the burial than they necessarily do about the individual(s) in the grave. In short, people don’t get to bury themselves. I think that we can get much of the value from intentional animal burials that we can get from human ones.

I started thinking about this in relation to personal experiences and conversations with people about the treatment of pets after they die. Particularly in the context of many modern societies I think that pet burials could speak enormously to the attachment that many people feel to their pets, an attachment that is not dissimilar to that which we see in many human burials past and present.

Many of my thoughts on this topic stem from the death of my pet budgie last summer. Although he cost under $30, Felix was a definite and long-term presence in the apartment that I share with my significant other, and his death was fairly sad. This was the first time I ever witnessed my boyfriend actually crying, a reaction that I certainly didn’t expect (luckily he doesn’t read this blog). I taught him (the bird that is, not the boyfriend) to wolf whistle and say “how are you?” and the apartment was eerily silent after he died. Needless to say, Felix didn’t get tossed in the dumpster like any old chicken. We wrapped him lovingly in a t-shirt and took him to nearby Summit Park to bury him. We fully intended to bury him with his favourite toy but realised when we got there that we had left them at home, and frankly it’s a damn steep walk back up from the apartment.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that if some future people found our little birdie grave they could ask some of the same questions about us as if they found our bigger person grave (just kidding…we hid that one way better). Archaeologists could tell that we valued our pet enough to make the effort to bury him, that (pretending that we had brought the toys) we felt it symbolically appropriate to bury him with a little bell and a mirror, and that we owned Fruit of the Loom t-shirts.

The symbolic treatment of deceased animals has an ancient history and is certainly not just limited to modern situations. A short news release in the July, 2004 issue of Archaeology informs of a 9,500 year old wildcat burial on Cyprus (Neolithic) which was found feet away from the grave of what is thought to be a high status individual. The cat is orientated symmetrically to the human with both of their heads facing west. Searjeantson and Morris (2011) describe the deliberate burials of crows and ravens at Iron Age and Roman sites in Britain. Additionally, I recall reading about bear worship by Neanderthals, a very old dog burial at a Native American site in Orange County, California, and small animal tombs (yaokeng) placed beneath the waist region in Chinese human burials.

Anyway, I apologise for the length of this post. Got a little carried away I guess. Basically what I was trying to say was that perhaps human burials are not the “be all and end all” of archaeological value when it comes to interments of the dead. Furthermore, I think that modern pet cemeteries (and there are some enormous ones with up to 70,000 burials) would definitely tell archaeologists a thing or two about our own society.

2004 Man’s Best Friends. Archaeology 57(4): 14-14.
Searjentson, D., and J. Morris. 2011 Ravens and Crows in Iron Age and Roman Britain. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 30(1): 85-107.