RESEARCH General Education

DEATH
'Death course' to study memorials at World Trade Center, elsewhere

Andrea Lynn, Humanities & Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; andreal@uiuc.edu

9/1/03

Photo by Bill Wiegand Helaine Silverman's "death course" has added a new section on memorials. Students will now review the extensive literature on the competition for a World Trade Center memorial in New York City.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Professor Helaine Silverman’s "death course" will have a new twist this semester.

In response to 9/11, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign archaeology professor has added a new section on memorials, so her students will now review the extensive literature on the competition for a World Trade Center memorial in New York City. In addition to readings, lectures and discussions, her students, who will meet in the classroom and at Mount Hope Cemetery, near the Urbana campus, will explore other memorials, including the Lincoln Memorial, view six feature films, including "The Loved One" and "Soylent Green," and prepare a cemetery project.

Silverman described her death course, an anthropology honors course titled "Anthropological and Archaeological Perspectives on Death," as a "cross-cultural introduction to the celebration of death across time and space. As I teach it, the course is humanistic, with a consideration of burial patterns from around the world and throughout time."

According to Silverman, death is "the greatest of the life crises," and "since time immemorial all human societies have devised ways to cope with and explain it." Cultural responses to death, she added, "are highly varied and tightly patterned."
A field archaeologist and one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient Andean societies, including the Nasca, Silverman has excavated ancient burial sites and done ethnoarchaeological research, including a new project on contemporary monuments in the ancient city of Cusco in Peru.

She worked on the south coast of Peru from 1983 to 1996 in an effort to understand the origin, growth, decline, organization and ideology of the Paracas, Topara, Nasca and Carmen social formation, "and how power and authority within these societies were achieved, manifested and manipulated over time."

Silverman is the author of several books, the most recent being "Ancient Nasca Settlement and Society," published last year.
The Illinois professor is not alone in teaching a "death course." Several other university archaeologists around the country also teach such a course, she said, adding that these courses "if taught with a cemetery fieldwork component, are a reflection of interest in the field of archaeology in application to the real world."

The study of historic cemeteries is a kind of ethnoarchaeology, Silverman said, "that lets archaeologists apply models from the prehistoric period while bringing to bear dimensions of social history and cultural theory." Having taught the course since 1996, she has found that students are "excited by the original research they do in the cemetery and readily grasp the comparisons and contrasts with prehistoric archaeology."