Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1995 - 161

You

Can

Take
By John

fall, 76-year-old Betty
Young surprised the town
Last of Foster, Rhode Island,
by opting to be buried in a
color-coordinated casket tucked
into her 1989 honey-colored
Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Fosterites, like people everywhere,
have departed this life accompanied by their favorite trinkets,
and perhaps the comfort of a
compass or fishing rod for the
outdoorsmen among them. But
a full-size car?
Personally, I find nothing
bizarre about Betty Young's last
ride in her Coupe de Ville. People have been taking their
favorite vehicles with them for millennia. In pre-dynastic Anyang,
Chinese leaders liked to have chariots, horses, and charioteers accompany them in death. The First
Emperor of Qin was escorted by
real chariots drawn by terra-cotta
horses, driven by terra-cotta attendants, and guarded by an army of
fully equipped terra-cotta soldiers,
all discovered in a great pit in front
of his third-century B.C. tomb at
Xian. Indeed, what may have been
the world's first chariots, dating to
as early as 2100 B.C., were buried
along with their charioteers, ready
to race in the hereafter.
Old Kingdom Egyptian pharaohs favored boats for postmortem transportation.
Khufu
tucked away a whole royal funeral
bark in a pit at the foot of his great
pyramid. His ka traveled in a style
more lavish than Betty Young's.
Nor can we forget the Vikings, who
were fond of burying their chieftains in boats dragged up on land
and covered with a mound of
earth, as at Sutton Hoo. Ibn
Fadhlan, an Arab missionary who
in A.D. 922 journeyed up the Volga
to convert the Viking Rus to Islam,

Illustration

With

You

L. Cotter

by Philip Anderson
«*

reported seeing a maiden sacrificed
and placed aboard the ship burial
of a chief, whose ka required a
female companion who sang and
danced.
Burials have often evoked musical salutes. The recent discovery of
the tomb of a fifth-century B.C.
Chinese ruler, buried with string,
wind, and percussion instruments,
including the largest assemblage of
bronze bells ever recovered, would
have left King Tut mute. This ruler
also fancied chamber music and so
took with him a second collection
of instruments that included five
25-string zithers, five-string and tenstring plucking instruments, two
panpipe mouth organs, and a tambourine. He, too, wanted the comand
pany of female consorts
attendants, and so had 21 of them
strangled and put away with him.
The records of the French in
Mississippi in the early eighteenth
century tell of the burial of the
Great Sun of the Natchez, who was
favored with funeral offerings that
included a number of royal relatives, among them La Glorieuse, a

noble and gifted herbalist who
was revered by the French
explorers for giving them an
effective treatment for gonorrhea. She was strangled and
buried before the mournful eyes
of her beneficiaries.
It is simply human nature to
want the company of something
or somebody familiar, or both,
for the journey to the "undiscovered country from whose
bourne no traveler returns," as
Hamlet put it. I once found a
silver diadem, a musket, and a
tin cup with a Chickasaw chieftain buried in the early nineteenth
century
along the
Natchez Trace in Mississippl. My
longtime friend, the writer and
Loren Eiseley, was
philosopher
buried with two enigmatic artifacts
that had special meaning for him: a
stuffed lion from a childhood he
never forsook, and a silver Byzantine cross from a religion he never
adopted. He once wrote a moving
poem about "the lion with shoebutton eyes." Closer to home, a cabinetmaker friend of the family was
buried in a grandfather
clock
case- his masterpiece.
Nowadays, most people settle for
being boxed and put away attired
in a nice suit or dress, sometimes
wearing glasses. The few like Betty
Young who opt for a grander, more
deluxe exit are following a ritual
practice almost as old as the human
race. Call it a power trip, fueled by
the satisfactions of a life wealthily
lived and the hope for an afterlife
of similar promise. After all, I have
never heard of anyone being buried
in a Honda Civic.

John L. Cotter is curatoremeritusof
the Universityof PennsylvaniaMuseum of
Archaeologyand Anthropology.

Archaeology

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1995

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