TOMBS. In many European languages, to speak of "the tomb" is synecdochically to speak of death. In other places this is not true, since mortuary rites do not involve anything resembling a tomb. Moreover, where they exist, there are a wide variety of structures that may be described as tombs.

Tombless Death Rituals

There are ethnographic instances where corpses are simply abandoned. When a death occurs in the camps of some of the hunting and gathering peoples of the Kalahari Desert, there is an outpouring of grief, but nevertheless the band rapidly decamps leaving the corpse just as it lay at the moment of dying. There is a ritual response in that the site is avoided for years afterwards, but it is about as minimal a response as can be imagined. Corpses abandoned in this way are generally disposed of by carrion creatures, most commonly hyenas. Across much...