Beyond the living

The unmusical mouse in Kafka's last completed fiction who tells us about Josephine, the mouse who thinks she is Maria Callas, says at the end that, whether Josephine turns out to be a star or not, she will when she dies "joyfully lose herself amid the countless crowd of the heroes of our tribe, and quite soon (for we mice are not good at history) be forgotten on the heights of redemption like all her brethren". We humans have rarely mustered such insouciance about our own perishability, we cling to various notions of a posthumous identity parade from which someone - a god, history, DNA - will always be able to single us out. But the facts are against us, as Timothy Taylor records: "In the last 10,000 years alone, it is estimated that 100 billion human beings have died, and far fewer than 0.01 per cent are accounted for." The Buried Soul is crammed with ponderable detail about that great silent majority, the dead, and how, over the centuries, they have been disposed, in long mounds and tree-tops, de-fleshed or embalmed, foetally curled, flat out and oriented towards the dawn.

Taylor unearths many poignancies from the frail bric-a-brac that often accompanies a corpse: "a dead child laid out ... on a swan's wing" eight Mesolithic dogs which were apparently cherished for they died natural deaths at a decent age and their heads and pelvises have been anointed with red ochre as was then the custom for their anthropoid best friends.

He has a nice line in the gently macabre as when he points out that the celebrated bog people's astonishingly-preserved bodies still look so good because a "polysaccharide contained in the sphagnum moss ... sets in train a chemical sequence ending in humic acid - the same reactions that cause roast meat to sweeten and brown."

Taylor's book honestly tackles the difficulties of interpreting archaeological evidence and comes clean about the times when his professional colleagues have been swayed more by their own will to believe than by cogent reasons for believing. As in the case of the Neanderthals buried 60,000 years ago in Iraq, along with "the pollen remains of multicoloured bouquets of wild hollyhocks and juniper", who were discovered in the 1960s and acclaimed as "the first flower people".

"Before this no one had really considered that Neanderthals might have been capable of spirituality," he observes and sharply criticises how the site was assessed; he doesn't, though, ask why "spirituality" was assumed to have meant to the Neanderthals exactly what it means to peaceable academics with a heightened tendency to say, "Oh wow!"

Archaeology straddles two time-scales - the couple of million years it surveys, and the mere couple of centuries that the surveying has been going on.

It is a young science of old things, and self-critical care is needed when thus switching perspectives to prevent the observer from going cross-eyed.

Taylor aggrandises his own profession because it relies on "scientific and rational procedures rather than esoteric chanting" but forgets the evidence he himself admirably presents to show that there is often a bit of chanting to be heard in the background while the carbondating proceeds, as in the Holocaustdenial of cannibalism and infant sacrifice by some of his colleagues such as William Arens, whose The Man-Eating Myth, according to Taylor, became "influential, not because it was soundly argued, but because it was what a new generation wanted to hear". The appetite for chanting has not died out.

Taylor suffers from the muddles he diagnoses in others. On the one hand, "I am certain that the idea of the soul that modern humans have elaborated ... first emerged in deep prehistory", though, on the same page, "inferring ideas from objects rather than words", as the prehistorian must, "is challenging and controversial". As his certainty, therefore, is not based on his inferences, where does it come from?

He is incisive about slack talk of "collective consciousness" in accounts of ancient peoples but uninhibited by such caution when telling us what we are all like now ("We have forgotten what it is like to be really and truly afraid of malevolent, disembodied human spirits"). Yet it is heartening to see an expert enmeshed in quandaries rather than skating over them, as many do. He is right that "it would be surprising if the first burials meant the same to the prehistoric people who may have dug them as our burials mean to us, over 100,000 years later", though this admission imperils his certainty that "the idea of the soul" is constant from "deep prehistory" to "modern humans".