taphology

From tapho- +‎ -logy.

taphology (uncountable)

1. The study of graves and burial.
   • 1906, “Tuberculosis. Some Thoughts, Observations and Cases Illustrating What Can be Done in Apparently Hopeless Conditions. ”, in Medical Century: The National Journal of Homœopathic Medicine and Surgery, volume XIV, page 69, column 2:

     So much has been written upon the subject of this direful malady, a disease which, up to the present time, has baffled the most skillful followers of the Esculapian art, that it seems unnecessary to enter into detail describing the character of the tubercular bacillus, or the numerous failures for destroying this germ, or the taphology developed by the action of these germs upon the human organism.

   • 1907 March 13, “Clairvoyant—Prof. Dante’s Defy”, in Indianapolis Morning Star, volume 4, number 281, Indianapolis, Ind., page 13, column 7:

     I hereby challenge Prof. Hagamon to meet me in any hall and debate the following questions: ASTROLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, TAPHOLOGY, TAPHORNOTATHOLOGY, or anything else he chooses.

   • 1930 July 6, “Is It True That Morley Is Lamb’s Inheritor?”, in The Vancouver Sunday Province, number 100, Vancouver, B.C., section “A Weakness for Puns”, page 4, column 8:

     In Precis of a Journey, he says: “The O and the Rare in the original slab are so spaced that it is hard to know whether they were meant as one word or two. Was Jack Young who had the inscription cut a punster? Or did the stonecutter misunderstand? Certainly, a play upon words would have been much in the sentiment of the seventeenth century. So I suggest that the well-beloved epitaph may have been intended as Orare Ben Johnson—pray for Ben Jonson (a use of the infinitive frequent in taphology.) […]”

   • 1966 October 19, “Staff Changes at SDSU Announced”, in Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, Sioux Falls, S.Dak., page 22, column 4:

     K. P. Gerhard Holm, visiting professor, agronomy; Howard A. Gilbert, assistant professor, economics; Mington Lai, postdoctoral fellow, plant taphology; Norma Seerley, instructor, rural sociology; John G. Nickum, assistant professor, wildlife management.

   • 1988, Yuri Smirnov, “Mousterian Burials”, in Social Sciences, volume XIX, number 1, USSR Academy of Sciences, page 138:

     The habit of treating the dead in this way should be seen as a specific sphere of human activity, taphology; we should note its universality and the presence of its own particular means and ends. […] Unintentional burials continued to persist when the practice of deliberate burial had appeared. It is therefore necessary to establish the dividing line between taphonomy and taphology, and to further define the main tendencies governing the act of deliberate burial.

• taphological
• taphologist

• logopathy, pathology