The comparative study of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer burials at Skateholm (Southern Sweden) and Vedbæk-Bøgebakken (Eastern Denmark) underscores that archaeothanatology can bring both more information and deeper insight, even when applied to previously studied materials. Not all information gleaned from archaeothanatological approaches must neces- sarily be the product of applying the approach in the field, but analyses can be highly valu- able in studying older excavation documentation. Archaeothanatology was conceived as a field approach, hence its original name ‘anthropologie de terrain’ (i.e. Duday et al., 1990), and there is no doubt that the approach can be most fully realised when the excavation and documentation of the human remains is carried out in the field and under the supervision of anthropologists with the appropriate training.Yet, as the activity of excavation itself is destructive (e.g. Bonnie, 2011; Demoule, 2011), it seems appropriate to explore the potential of transferring the approach to archival materials.This may be especially valuable when researching archaeological periods for which burials are relatively unusual, the record is extremely partial, and for which there is a need to extract as much information as possible from all available sources.This is certainly the case for the Mesolithic in Europe.Archives are rich with documentation from older excavations that were not carried out with an archaeothanatological approach. Today, several projects, from the Baltic and Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, illustrate that the archival approach can be very productive (Nilsson Stutz, 2003; Peyroteo Stjerna 2016;Torv, 2016).