Animal Archaeology

This blog post is part of the first ever Real Archaeology festival! Myself, along with several other archaeology-focused content creators, have come together to celebrate real, factual (not pseudoscience!) archaeology over the next few days, with new content coming out on a variety of themes. To see the full schedule and learn more about the event, check out the website: www.real-archaeology.com.

As long time readers may know, I have been in a fierce battle against inaccurate Halloween decorations for the past seven years. But this year, I’ve decided that perhaps it is time for me to try and understand the issue that lies at the crux of this raging (albeit one-sided) fight…

..why do people love such inaccurate, plastic depictions of skeletons so much?

To be honest, my interest in understanding the love of the macabre has come up in past blog posts, whether it’s the popularisation of ‘death positivity‘ or why we love utilising death in memes. Frankly, its quite difficult to avoid thinking about how we engage with death when you’re someone who researches the dead! But I am constantly fascinated by the juxtaposition of how we culturally and socially are obsessed with death while also being so fearful and uncomfortable about it as well. And by Halloween time, those conflicting attitudes come into full light, with decorations ranging from gruesome gore to more lighthearted and aesthetically pleasing iterations of the (un)dead.

I should note, however, that I’m specifically talking about an obsession with spooky, scary skeletons on an aesthetic level – obviously, many cultures have very different attitudes towards the dead and towards the use of remains (or representatives of their remains) in celebrations or rites. But come Halloween season in many western countries, you can find a plethora of skeletal décor: from grim, realistic replicas to pastel, glittery versions. As an archaeologist, I can understand an appreciation for the skeleton, of course…but what does the Average Joe love about them so much this time of year?

Let’s quickly back up for a second and first examine why skeletons have become such a Halloween mainstay to begin with. The origins of the holiday continue to be murky; while some still point to the pagan festival of Samhain as the starting point, arguments as to the extent of the festival’s connection to the dead have led to continued debate as to whether or not it should be considered part of the holiday’s lineage (Bender 2020, p. 31). Regardless, Halloween has often been categorised along with other cultural celebrations around the world as a celebration of the dead, with many of its traditions having longstanding connections with Christian practices of remembering the dead during All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day – although this perhaps becomes a more tenuous categorisation with the continued commercialisation of the holiday (Montillo 2009, 2-3). While it may not have the same spiritual significance as it once did, the fact that contemporary celebrations of Halloween continue to boast a variety of depictions of the dead (from the spectral ghosts to the more gruesome zombie) illustrates how deeply embedded the conceptualisation and acknowledgement of the deceased is within the holiday.

That skeletal ephemera continue to be such a prominent part of the Halloween aesthetic may also be due to cultural entanglements as well; for example, it has been theorised that in North America, the holiday has become further enmeshed with the influence of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, particularly following the popularity of films such as 2017’s Coco. This is perhaps most evident in the popularisation of decorations utilising the colourful skeletal motifs traditionally used for Día de los Muertos (Bender 2020, 17-20).

So that explains why skeletons are such a common refrain this holiday season – but what is it about them that makes us want to plaster them all over our houses, our home goods, or even across our clothing? If we want to travel far back through time, we can find the importance of the skeleton as an object among Europeans starting in the 16th century; here, the skeleton was becoming a vital part of not only the burgeoning study of anatomical science, but also an aesthetic object as well (Guerrini 2022, 34-35). Progressing into the 17th century, we see an overlap between the scientific value of a properly articulated skeleton and its artistic value as well with the proliferation of public displays of skeletons as part of curiosity cabinets and faire exhibitions; eventually, the skeleton would become a vital component of art, whether as a symbol itself or for its contributions for representing realism in the human body (ibid 65 -66).

Fast-forwarding to something a bit more contemporary, we can see the more religious and existential associations with skeletal iconography begin to fade during the 20th century, with more political and commercial appropriations taking place following World War I (Kearl 2014, 6-8). While there are many socio-cultural influences at play in contemporary symbolism of skeletons, perhaps we are still in a state of what Kearl refers to as ‘apocalyptic chic’, in which a society so exposed to death in the form of global crises and the continued march towards collapse would of course embrace and commodify a clear symbol of it, possibly to the point of utilising it as a means of staying “defiant” in the face of death as well (ibid 12-14).

But why must they be so damn inaccurate? What would those 16th century anatomists think, seeing how poorly rendered our plastic facsimiles are? Well, to return to an older post I made about those horribly inaccurate animal skeletons they sell around Halloween, it’s about keeping a sense of familiarity that allows for the human brain to easily digest what they are seeing – so while not everyone has seen a real human skeleton before, they can still understand and recognise the “broad strokes” of what constitutes as a “skeleton”. But perhaps there’s also an underlying tension to not want to be too realistic – maybe that realism can be a bit too much for what has become a much more lighthearted and commercialised holiday.

Before I end, I do want to be a bit critical for a moment as well and ask – is this a good thing? While I deeply resonate with the aim of death positive movements such as the Order of the Good Death, where increased engagement and interaction with death is meant to cultivate healthier attitudes towards death and support better advocacy around death as well (Doughty 2011), I also know the dangers of passive consumption and objectification as well. In writing on mummies in the public imagination, Angela Stienne (2022) noted that mummified bodies had become commodified and commercialised to the point of being seen as “non-human cultural objects” (p. 196), where the humanity of the deceased person is no longer acknowledged and, in some cases, even stripped from the identity of the mummified individual through the way they are spoken about and contextualised.

So in a similar vein, are the dead more broadly being objectified through our skeletal obsession? Perhaps they already have been. Or, maybe the skeleton as a symbol has taken a new life of its own, far removed from the realities of death and our own mortalities, free to live on as a representation of life in spite of death? Or perhaps even exist as a sort of familiar companion to us in life, to allow us to grapple with death and perhaps even extend a warm hand (skeletal, of course) to us to further embrace it. Or hey, maybe a plastic skeleton is just a plastic skeleton, and doesn’t mean anything else at all.

I guess, at the end of the day, people will always be fascinated by death and the macabre, and that has become deeply embedded not only in our holiday traditions, but also in our everyday lives as well. But perhaps we can be a bit more thoughtful and critical about our consumption of the dead and all of its aesthetic iterations – that we remember that the dead were once flesh and blood like ourselves, and that we never strip them of their humanity (or otherwise, if we’re talking about our animal friends) in the process of utilising them for our own enjoyment and pleasure.

That said, I will never understand why some of you love this horrible, not-even-remotely-close-to-realism skeletal octopus so much. What the hell.

Thanks for reading! And if you’re looking for more real, factual archaeology content, check out the other contributors to the Real Archaeology festival at the website: www.real-archaeology.com.

References

Bender, J.L. (2020) Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature. Springer Nature.

Doughty, C. (2011) The Tenets of the Death Positive Movement. The Order of the Good Death. Retrieved from http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/death-positive.

Guerrini, A. (2022). The Whiteness of Bones: Sceletopoeia and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 96(1), 34-70.

Kearl, M. C. (2014). The proliferation of skulls in popular culture: a case study of how the traditional symbol of mortality was rendered meaningless. Mortality, 20(1), 1–18.

Montillo, R. (2009). Halloween and Commemorations of the Dead. Chelsea House Publishers.

Stienne, A. (2022) Mummified: The Stories Behind Egyptian Mummies in Museums. Manchester University Press.

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