In 1985, he was awarded his PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge for a thesis entitled "Death, society and societal change: the Iron Age of southern Jutland 200 BC – 600 AD."

Ultimately, she felt that The Archaeology of Death and Burial read like a series of essays, with the epilogue and the appendix being poorly integrated with the rest of the text, but nevertheless considered it to be "very good" overall.

[3] "Apart from the boldness of its vision, the clarity of its argument, and the breadth of its learning – the bibliography is 26 pages in small type – this book's most impressive feature is the rich diversity of its exempla.

The author vividly illustrates the customs of many different historic and geographic realms, from the frozen barrows at Pazyryk in central Asia to Sutton Hoo, the Berewan of Borneo, African Americans in colonial Manhattan, and Chilean and Peruvian druglords.

In it, Rife described Parker Pearson's work as a "cogent, learned and entertaining" study that he believed would become both the primary textbook in the field of funerary archaeology and the prime example of a post-processual approach to the subject, arguing that the influence of Ian Hodder was "profound".

Luby felt that the book would have been greatly enhanced had Parker Pearson sought to unite processual and post-processual approaches rather than pitting the latter against the former in an "either/or" situation.

[5] While referencing Parker Pearson's work in their 2005 book, The Quest for the Shaman, archaeologists Miranda and Stephen Aldhouse-Green commented that he had produced "a major contribution" to the study of "ancient death rituals".