This is a study of buildings created to honour the dead. It explores the links between socio-religious and existential perceptions of death and how this has been interpreted in architecture over the 20th century.

In Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600, Meghan C. L. Howey uses archaeology to make this connection. She shows how indigenous communities of the northern Great Lakes used earthen structures as gathering places for ritual and social interaction, which maintained connected egalitarian societies in the process.