This was an interesting read and I did enjoy reading it.

However the title is misleading I thought it would discuss the rituals and cultural differences of death and it was a very short read.

I accessed a digital review copy of this book from the publisher.
The book does not fulfill the promise of the title. It is ok as a book about the author's personal experiences.

This is a pretty comprehensive book about death and the rituals associated with burials. It's easy to understand and also has dedicated a little bit of the book to black death and other catastrophes. I really enjoyed this book. I feel like it changed my perspective concerning death rites.

I was initially attracted to this book because of the title. I wrongly assumed it would discuss the rituals and cultural differences of death but it reads more like a travelogue of the authors favourite cemetaries. I confess to being a little disappointed but in saying that, the pictures and brief descriptions of the various cemetaries were interesting and quite informative. It is an unusual publication and would probably interest the lay reader as the language is quite natural and easily read. My thanks to Netgalley and Pen and Sword who always provide interesting reads.

This was an interesting read and I did enjoy reading it, however, it wasn't what I expected in the slightest. I thought that it would be about different cultures and their treatment of the dead and the rituals that go hand in hand with that. I didn't really get that, bvut I did enjoy it nevertheless

I am sorry, but I didn't particularly like this book. This book was split into two sections- the first being somewhat repetitive at times and then the second half more about burials. I thought this would be more on death rituals and the treatment of the deceased rather than mainly on tombstones and funeral rites. I did learn from this book-just, but not the information I was hoping for.


I received a copy of this book through Netgalley; however, my opinions are my own. I want to thank the publishers for allowing me to read this.

Rituals of Death by Stan Beckinsall is an interesting read.

Its not the morbid read you would thing that it would be given the title. It wasn't quite what I expected either. It focuses more on the burial sites and the history of them rather than rituals leading up to death which is what I was expecting. The Author has worked on many historically interesting sites so he has a host of information which I did find interesting. I particularly enjoyed the part talking about grave markers and what the carvings on them meant. I have seen a few here and did wonder so now I have know!!

Not a book I would go back to but one I will be recommending to my son who is doing a history degree and is very interested in archeology.

Thanks to Netgalley and Pen and Sword for the ARC. This review is my own opinion.

I found the blurb interesting but the book seemed a bit too confused and didn't keep my attention.
Not my cup of tea
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

This book just really wasn’t what I expected it to be, and I really had a hard time getting through it.

My degree is in history, so I am no stranger to academic texts. I enjoy nonfiction, especially about history and archaeology. That’s not one of the problems I had with this book. I felt the title of this book was misleading, the chapters and sections were cluttered and unorganized, and there was way too much of the author’s bias and personal anecdotes for this to be the informative nonfiction book I expected.

First of all, the title gives no indication that the scope of burials covered is limited to British sites. I was hoping for a deeper dive into rituals and burials around the world, especially the prehistoric ones.

Next was the organization or sites mentioned. The first half or so of the book entirely consisted of archaeological sites that the author had worked on or visited. Especially considering that the author has no formal training or education in archaeology, this read as less of a comprehensive survey of prehistoric sites, and more as an disjointed memoir or list of his hobby digging. Many times he told just the location of the site and what he did there, forgetting to mention when the dig took place or the dating of the site and artifacts found. You can also see in the text his bias toward rock art as this is what his main focus is on, often not even mentioning any contents of the actual burial, such as individuals buried or grave goods.

The second part of the book was a short description of more modern Christian burials, with his obvious religious bias showing, as he says that Christian ideas of death and heaven have become ‘universal’ and Christian burial rites are ‘critical.’

Overall I was pretty disappointed in this book, as I felt like it could have been so much more. I probably wouldn’t have finished it if I had not received it as an arc.

I received this book as an arc from NetGalley.

After reading the title and description of the book, I was intrigued. I thought I would encounter a survey of how several societies treated their dead. After finishing the book, I felt as though I merely read a list of excavations and looked at pictures (of excavations and gravestones).

In the first part of the book, the author discussed pre-history, presenting and describing the excavation of cairns and henges. There were a number of pictures— so many in fact, that it felt like an attempt to supplement a lack of content. The book shifted— quite abruptly—into the monuments and mausoleums of the Middle Ages and today, accompanied by another large quantity of pictures. At one point, the author, who took part in excavations firsthand, digressed, critiquing the handling of human remains after excavations. I found this interesting, but, ultimately, distracting.

Generally, the topics in this book, while interesting, were presented with a level of superficiality and lack of cohesion that made this book difficult to enjoy.

A very interesting and well researched book .I would recommend it to anyone interested in a good book to read A real page turner,

I was really intrigued by the title and description for this book, and it certainly sounds like one that would have a great insight into how humans have celebrated and marked death and their dead loved ones through time, from prehistoric to modern day.

The book was well laid out and there was plenty of detail. There were quite a lot of images added that illustrated the different sections, along with photographs of some of the markers found, be these formal gravestones or carved and etched stones that highlighted the area in times gone by.

I liked the commentary that was added to the photos. It was a very easy and enjoyable book to read too as it covered social history and the habits and traditions of those that lives in the past. It was a great way to be able to look back in time to how they would have grieved and remembered those that they had lost.

It is 4 stars from me for this one, highly recommended

This rather short books gives a very personal view on the rituals of burial in the UK. The author Stan Beckensall already has an extensive publication history on the topic of rock art and life and death in prehistoric times. so it is no wonder the first part of the book is very detailed, though a bit repetitive. The second, much briefer part takes a look at Christian burials and comes along with a lot of example pictures - headstones in detail mainly. While it is a great book for everyone already immersed in the topic and looking for specific places, it's not so much for an audience that wants an introduction or overview.

Thank you to netgalley and Pen and Sword Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book read like a relaxed lecture from one's favorite professor. The title and cover don't make clear that the books subject is the historic mortuary rituals of Britain, specifically, but the author (a noted expert on British rock art) is clearly knowledgeable in that area. The book is full of helpful photos and illustrations, as well as more academic charts and figures. While this might make it seem dry to some readers, it's the exact content that makes this book a useful field guide for travellers and avocational archaeologists interested in the history and archaeology of the British Isles.

While I was expecting a tale vastly different to the one I read, I cannot say my disappointment overshadowed the importance of the information that was there. This is less about Rituals of Death as it is about Rituals of Remembering Our Dead. Glancing back to the time of the construction of Stonehenge, forward to the Black Death and superimposing these sights onto the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, it shows how the way we remember and honor people who have died has kept - in the West at least - in very similar a fashion.

I was skeptical when I started the book and was confronted by burial mounds and marked stones instead of blazing fires of ritual sacrifice, but the writing style had so much passion for every detail that I had to know more. The images of the old burial mounds brought the text to life and kept my journey through the evolution of graveyards exciting. It's interesting how it began with communal burials, then shifted to the individual (preserving the class system even in death) and when disaster strikes, mass graves are again a common occurrence.

I think I would have preferred if there was more discussion on why these changes occurred, The book focused heavily on descriptions of the graves themselves and how modern funeral rites are conducted, but not how the treatment of the dead can explain what people place importance on in life. Yes, there is separation by wealth and, in a Christian context, an ever-present judgement of morality, but wealth and morality have changed over time just as much as graveyards have. I would have liked an inclusion on the philosophy that surrounds the reverence and fear we place on the dead.

In all, I learned not what I set out to find, but information that is making me think nonetheless. It is clear that the author writes with passion and care, but it is also clear that his passion lies in archaeology first and writing second. It was a good jumping-off point and gives me questions to ask in order to find the next book on the subject.

I appreciate having the opportunity to review this eARC.

I did not finish reading the book. It did not have a ear direction for me, in the beginning, and launched into talking about things without setting a base for what would be covered. I was a little confused. I appreciate the content, but it was not for me.

This book is an interesting look at various burial locations and their history. I think the name of this book was a bit ill-chosen, because there are not any rituals in the sense that I would normally associate with the word. This book shows locations of historical burial sites for various cultures, crypts, tombs, catacombs, and grave sites (tombstones). In a way these are ritualistically associated, but I think I was expecting something more along the lines of actual rituals that various cultures would engage in surrounding death. In any case, the book is well written and interesting from cultural standpoint.

Thank you NetGalley and Pen&Sword!

This book is highly informational in general, however even more so specifically on burial sites and burial markings. While I did enjoy reading, I did find that this did tend to come across very dry and some parts seemed to have been over explained.

I received an ARC of “Rituals of Death: From Prehistoric Times to Now,” from NetGalley and Pen & Sword Books in exchange for an honest review.

Long before I entered a doctoral program, I was fascinated with mortality, both culturally and biologically. Years have passed since my graduation, but my fascination with all things dealing with death continues to persist. So when I saw this book, I knew that I had to read it; the title alone made my little anthropologist heart palpitate with joy. And then I read it…

Although the book has a TOC and is arranged in chapters, the text all appears to run into each other. Even though the titles use bold text, clear markers are needed (i.e., formatting) to show the beginning and ends of chapters. After reading it in its entirety, the book really seems to be arranged in 2 distinct parts. The first part discusses a variety of different sites in the UK—but is by no mean a comprehensive list—that are ancient burial places, while the second half of the book takes a brief look at Christian burials.

The first half of the book reads like a personal diary of the excavations that the author participated in. To be fair, Beckensall included some *magnificent* black and white line drawings and black and white photographs of archaeological sites and artifacts. But the author didn’t include any footnotes, endnotes, or chapter notes. He did, however, include a bibliography, but this was scant (only 1-1/3 pages long), and only 1 archaeology report and 4 society publications were included. The rest were non-academic books, with a large chunk of those being books published by the author. The minuscule biography forces readers to rely solely on the author’s “expertise” rather than on published works. This is a problem because even when works are created for the lay public, people need to be assured that the author’s presumptions and/or opinions are backed up by scientific literature, hence the need for both citations and an exhaustive bibliography.

As a young child, I visited Stonehenge and distinctly remember playing hide-and-seek with my brothers among the stones. I have fond memories of England, but I am not a British citizen, and non-British readers would have appreciated seeing a map of the sites overlaid on a British map. Doing so would have helped me to place the various sites in context.

The second half of the book was extremely brief. The author included a short history of Christian burial practices, but the vast majority of this section—pages 106 through 157—were simply photographs of tombstones and cemeteries with brief descriptions of the importance of the photos. 51 pages worth of images is *a lot* for any book, but when one considers that the book is only 170 pages long, the inclusion of so many images is excessive.

One of the biggest issues I have, however, is on page 95, which is almost like a frontispiece for the second half of the book. On this page, the author is referred to as “Dr. Stan Beckensall.” As an American academic, I am not familiar with how the UK higher education system operates, but here in the United States, universities hand out “honorary doctorates” like Halloween candy. In fact, a lot of people have them; each time a commencement speaker addresses new graduates, they automatically receive an “honorary doctorate.” Or someone will receive an “honorary doctorate” for their service to a specific community or to the community at large. But this honor does not entitle them to use the name of “Dr.”

According to his Wiki page, Beckensall received an “honorary doctorate.” He hasn’t completed any doctoral coursework, taken rigorous exams, written a dissertation, spent years being stripped of all human dignity by professors, or had any of his research and writing torn to shreds by the academic community. He’s not a doctor. He’s an English teacher with a hobby in prehistoric rock art who likes to dabble in archaeology. To claim otherwise is fraudulent and misleading. This does not mean that his work has no worth; Beckensall’s excavations, his research into ancient rock art, and his focus on burial sites is extremely valuable to the growing body of British archaeological data.

Unlike the United States, British people have a keen understanding of archaeology, even lay people. Metal detectorists can be seen throughout the United Kingdom scouring the land for artifacts and British television streams a gold mine of shows dedicated to uncovering the past. Given the ancient origins of Britain, the British live side-by-side with history, both discovering it and making it at the same time. And UK archaeologists and English Heritage are in constant motion, always endeavoring to bring the public into contact with the past. This is where I see Beckensall fitting in.

Does this book deserve to be in British libraries? Yes. Beckensall discusses various sites and includes invaluable information, and images, that will be of interest to the British public. Should libraries outside the UK purchase a copy of this book? I would say no. Would I recommend this book to others for individual purchase? At £16 (reg. £20) or $24.19, people would be paying for pretty pictures and a lot of opinions at a time when food prices, rent, and mortgages are skyrocketing. I would tell them to pay their rent and head off to a British library instead.

Rituals of Death by Stan Beckensall is a book that looks at how society treats its dead, from the ceremonies to the graves. It starts with the cairns and henges of the prehistoric eras and ends with the monuments and mausoleums of today, showing how the treatment of the dead has evolved and changed with time.

The subject is a fascinating one, and I am glad for all the pictures--a great deal of the book is, in fact, photographs. It is also interesting to hear from the author, who took part in excavations firsthand and is so able to impart his knowledge. If I could list some downsides, however, it would be that there is more detail and analysis paid to the prehistoric customs than modern, and the topics seem a little disjointed and not so cohesive.

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.