Why do corpses look different

The cell division driving hair and nail growth stops when the body dies and the heart no longer pumps oxygen-filled blood throughout the circulatory system. It does look like things keep growing, though. When a dead body's skin loses hydration, it retracts—and retraction along the nail bed makes it appear as if the nails are getting longer. As for hair, drying skin on the face and head "pulls back towards the skull, making stubble appear more prominent," writes Claudia Hammond for the BBC.

There's no science to back up the idea that a dead and decomposing body is harmful to the living just by virtue of its being dead. This might sound obvious, but the belief that disease came from breathing in air infected by corpses was once common.

Miasmatic theory, as it was called, was a widespread belief among members of the medical profession and the public in the 19th century.

Miasma , an ancient Greek word for "pollution," was the bad air coming from "rotting corpses, the exhalations of other people already infected, sewage, or even rotting vegetation" and was thought to be responsible for the spread of disease. Professionally managed funerals with temporarily preserved bodies quickly became the convention; this is how the majority of Americans were buried in the 20th century. I have come to believe that the opposite is true. Embalming and the so-called restorative arts are about denial and, as a result, they unwittingly cause us greater pain.

What good is served by turning away from the fact of loss? Only delay. Only confusion , day after day, as reality collides with a dream. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, since , cremation has become more common than burial, largely because it is cheaper. But embalming is still more common in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

We do this even though there are alternatives that have always been with us. Most of the world does not choose embalming. Buddhists and Hindus usually choose cremation. Muslims and Jews, whose religious laws forbid embalming, embrace natural burial , the way billions of bodies have been buried for eons — without preservation.

More than twenty years after my mother died, my best friend, Carol, also died of breast cancer. Carol was not embalmed. She looked dead. She felt dead. At the viewing, her skin was very cold and hard when I kissed her goodbye.

It is the basis for the sale of profitable merchandise, the guardian of public health, the reason for much of our professional education and our protective legislation. Direct or immediate burial, without embalming, must be offered by all funeral homes. The body is simply placed in a shroud, casket, or other container, and buried within few days, without visitation or service.

Refrigeration can be used to maintain a body while awaiting a funeral service or when there is a delay in making arrangements. Not all funeral homes have refrigeration facilities, but most hospitals do.

What is embalming? How prevalent is embalming? Do any religions forbid it? When is embalming required? Does embalming protect community health? How well does it preserve the body?

Why is embalming promoted? What is the embalming process? This introductory paper to the session offers an overview of corpse positioning past and present — from the uninteresting extended supine graves to the baffling prone burials — and seeks to provide some critical reflections on how archaeologists approach and interpret dead bodies.

Facing the dead: Investigations of mummification and its social dimensions. Within this landscape East Yorkshire is both an iconic and fascinating region, containing some of the only formal cemeteries from this time period. Garton Slack and Wetwang Slack were excavated from the mids till the s, initially by T. Brewster and later under the direction of Dr John Dent , Despite their rich funerary archaeology and the international significance of these finds, a report on the sites were never fully published.

Stimulated by wider research, and burial practices, my research tell the story of five individuals who were buried at Garton Slack cemetery; presenting case studies with unusual mortuary positioning of the corpse in the ground. Through osteological and histological analysis this paper will reveal important results into complex mortuary rites which challenge our current notions of inhumation traditions in the Iron Age. Visualised denial of social identity in the mortuary process: Deviant burials during the Middle Jomon Period, Japan.

Various differences among mortuary treatments of the corpse have been interpreted to reflect the differences of various aspects of social identity or personae. On the mortuary studies in Japanese archaeology, the same framework of the interpretation has contributed to the reconstruction of past society. Meanwhile, deviant burials recently become one significant research theme for understanding past social and religious aspects with multidisciplinary attempts including forensic, osteological, and archaeological approaches.

However, the deviant treatments of the corpse have not attracted intensive interest in Japanese mortuary studies. As a consequence of the research trend in Japan, deviant treatment of the corpse, such as placing the inhumed body in a prone position, was not positively included in the mortuary analysis. This manuscript argues that past social identity could be denied through mortuary treatments of the dead.

I analysed the body posture in comparison with other mortuary treatments of the corpse, such as body direction, attachment of material items and manipulation of body part. In these mortuary attributes, deviant dead body treatments were mainly seen in male individuals. On the body posture, placing the inhumed body in a prone position correlated with minor or deviant body directions from dominant variation of male sample. From the results of inter-relationship between mortuary practices including deviant and usual variations, I argued that the deviant prone body posture was a way for denying an aspect of social identity of gender in mortuary process.

In his influential book, Andrew Reynolds integrated documentary, place-name and archaeological evidence to identify and interpret later Anglo-Saxon execution cemeteries as evidence of judicial practice, indicative of the political ideology, legal culture and dispersed administrative geography of the Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the 7th and 8th centuries AD and persisting as places of death and disposal into the post-Conquest period.

Reynolds' consideration of burial posture was primarily related to distinguishing execution cemeteries from contemporary communal cemeteries and identifying modes of punishment, including hanging and decapitation.