Human beings around the world and throughout human history have engaged in communication with the dead. In Africa, the likely first birthplace of human beings and of human culture, rituals that invoke the spirits of dead ancestors, often using masks, have been performed throughout traditional memory in a large number of distinctively self-conscious human groups.^ Texts and artifacts from Asia testify to widespread concern for spirits of ancestors from the Shang period of about 3050 to 3500 years ago through to the present day. Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs, among others, all understand a person’s capacity for communication to not end with death. A leading academic historian has recently invoked as a model for scholarly inquiry “bringing out the dead” and making their distinctive voices intelligible to the living.^