Abstract
This descriptive study uses eHRAF to examine the use of textiles and animal skins in various funerary rituals across roughly 50 societies around the world throughout the last two centuries. The author suggests that throughout the sample, funerary textile practices (including the choice of material, the style of garment, and whether or not the body of the deceased is clothed) accurately reflect the societies’ eschatological beliefs and symbolic framework regarding death and the afterlife. This finding has implications for the interpretation of funerary textile materials in archaeological contexts, which the author argues can effectively be used to infer information about a past society’s ideological, religious and social dimensions when compared to the ethnographic record. Hypotheses were not explicitly tested.