Using fire to burn the dead has a long, varied, and complex history. Archaeology has increasingly come to the fore in writing this story from early prehistory to the present day. Memorials, tombs, and cemeteries, and more recently pyre sites, of the cremated dead from prehistoric, ancient, and medieval societies have been explored throughout the history of antiquarian and archaeological research in Europe. Therefore, the story of cremation is key to understanding many of Europe's past societies and to the public understanding of its many rich and varied cultural landscapes in which traces of past cremation practices are found.
Yet cremation—and the use of fire in mortuary practices more widely—is still often side-lined in the archaeological, forensic, and other (inter)disciplinary studies of death, including heritage studies. Trail-blazing osteological studies of cremation have certainly appeared in the archaeological literature over the last half century. Yet it is only in the last two decades that cremated remains and cremation-associated contexts have been given the attention they deserve. They have been subject to increasingly careful field investigation, an ever-growing array of scientific methods and techniques, refined and bespoke theoretical frameworks and perspectives, and interpretations that situate cremation in relation to broader themes linking investigations of material culture, mortuary, settlement, and landscape archaeology.
Hence, a fully-fledged sub-discipline, ‘archaeology of cremation’, remains in its infancy. For example, in Tarlow & Nilsson Stutz's (Reference Tarlow and Nilsson Stutz2013) recent, definitive, and far-ranging The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial, only four of the forty-four chapters explicitly deal with the investigation and interpretation of cremation practices.
This situation is being rapidly remedied by two recent and important collections. The Analysis of Burned Human Remains, originally published in 2008, has just been released in a much-expanded second edition (Schmidt & Symes, Reference Schmidt and Symes2015). It contains a heavy emphasis on osteological, taphonomic, and forensic perspectives to burned human bone, but the new edition includes a range of case studies in the archaeology of cremation from across the globe from early prehistory to historic times. Another key collection is Transformation by Fire: The Archaeology of Cremation in Cultural Context (Kuijt et al., Reference Kuijt, Quinn and Cooney2014). This book pairs North American and northern European studies of prehistoric and early historic cremation practices for the first time and addresses cremation from a range of scientific and contextual perspectives, incorporating theories of personhood and memory in particular. These two collections provide essential background against which to appreciate the book under consideration here.
Tim Thompson's new edited collection augments and extends the archaeology of cremation by explicitly exploring and show-casing the latest research on cremation's traces and contexts. The book is well-presented, affordable, and contains only a few stylistic issues. In terms of content, this book complements the other recent collections, in particular through its geographical range—focusing on South America, the Iberian Peninsula, and northwest Europe—and its methodological and contextual emphases. Another key benefit of the book is its broad chronological range, exploring prehistoric, ancient, medieval, and modern contexts. Together, the book positions detailed site-focused osteological analyses of cremated remains within the archaeological contexts in which they were found, and the broader cultural contexts in which these sites are situated.
The book's ‘Foreword’ by Jacqueline McKinley deserved inclusion as a stand-alone chapter. McKinley has been at the forefront of osteological and taphonomic analysis of cremation in British prehistory and early history and she sketches the rich and varied terrain of modern research on cremation.
Next, Thompson's introduction (Ch. 1) begins with the importance of archaeological context in the investigation of fire-use in mortuary contexts. He rightly and cogently emphasizes the need for an archaeology of cremation as a theoretical field of enquiry, not only a set of methods to investigate heat-induced change on bone. Tabulating themes in burned bone research and bone terminology, he identifies the need for the increasingly detailed work on the physical and chemical changes to bone by heat to be utilized in archaeological interpretations. Thompson then pursues a grisly account of what fire does to human bones macroscopically and the microscopic changes to bone before refreshingly drawing on examples from both the recent and distant past and a range of disciplines to survey themes in recent research. He helpfully regards recent work on cremation as focusing on four themes: (a) identifying cremation from other uses of fire; (b) exploring cremation as transformation; (c) investigating cremation and religious change; and (d) interrogating cremation as economic investment and social display.
Subsequent to McKinley and Thompson's contributions, which firmly set the scene, the book comprises a series of methodologically innovative case studies arranged in chronological order from the Neolithic to the present day. Cataroche and Gowland's chapter on the Neolithic passage grave of La Varde, Guernsey, is notable because they show the potential of revaluating antiquarian archives and discoveries using the very latest osteological methods. By scrutinizing Lukis's antiquarian records from excavations in 1837 to ascertain details of the deposits, the authors query assertions by Lukis about deliberate defleshing and breakage. Cataroche and Gowland instead infer that the burned bones do not represent ‘standard cremation’ but only partial and low-temperature burning. They argue that some, not all, bones were subject to one or more burning event while partially or fully defleshed. It is left unclear what fraction of the skeletal material was subject to burning and whether some skeletal elements were more often subject to fire than others. In regard to broader interpretations, the authors rightly flag up the potential of Hertzian theories of death as transition from ‘ghost’ to ‘ancestor’ to help understand the deployment of fire in multi-staged mortuary rituals, but it remains unclear why some bones were burned and others not. Frustratingly, few parallels from the Channel Islands are pursued, let alone continental Europe, Britain, and Ireland where fire in Neolithic and Chalcolithic mortuary practice is a widespread and varied phenomenon.
Harvig's chapter shows the potential of moving beyond traditional osteological analysis, to employ CT scanning with macroscopic analyses of wear and fragmentation patterns to compare and contrast Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age cremation practices on Funen, Denmark. She shows the potential of revaluating to discern the regular under-estimation of bone weights, over-estimation of fragmentation and cremation intensity, and to take a more critical stance on presumed pre-cremation defleshing and post-cremation crushing of bones. Meanwhile, macroscopic examination revealed post-cremation handling of ashes in the early Iron Age cremation pits, indicating that they constitute ‘graves’ for sorted pyre material, not the final destinations of the majority of cremated individuals, who were evidently retrieved for curation and disposal elsewhere. While I would disagree with Harvig's dichotomy between modern cremation practices and the variety of multi-stage cremation practices we find in the prehistoric archaeological record, her chapter makes a valuable contribution to considering the complex journeys of bodies through the pyre and into various archaeological deposits. In the Late Bronze Age the focus was on burial of retrieved ashes soon after cremation, while in the Early Iron Age the focus was instead on collecting and burying the remains of the pyre. Therefore, Harvig's analyses lead to more refined diachronic mortuary interpretations.
Focusing on the far-from-straightforward interpretation of skeletal weight, Gonçalves et al. present a method-heavy exploration of ashes from cinerary urns from an Iron Age cemetery at Tera, Portugal. They advocate the need for bioarchaeologists to balance between ‘nihilism and megalomania’ when interpreting cremated human remains and making inferences about weight given variability in the modern comparative data and the many taphonomic factors affecting the size and character of each cremation burial. Unfortunately, their application of their methods was preliminary and they are reluctant to identify deliberate selection practices of skeletal parts at the Tera cemetery. A wider context in studying cremation in the Portuguese Iron Age is lacking.
Moving to the site of Monte Sirai, Sardinia, Italy, the Phoenician and Punic cremation practices of the seventh to fourth centuries bc are explored by Piga et al. They provide a good review of mortuary procedures associated with ‘primary’ cremation (presumably bustum graves), including one example of a cremation in a prone position and also ‘semi-combustion’ (partial cremation), supported by examining the nature of the crystal structure of the burned bone with XRD and FT-IR techniques. They link these practices to an historical and cultural phenomenon: the beginning of Punic domination of the region.
Silva explores a small sample of sixty cremation burials from around the Roman city of Augusta Emerita (Mérida, Spain) using osteological methods for the first time. She identifies dimensions of cremation technology which finds parallels throughout the Western Roman Empire. This work highlights the importance of studying cremation simultaneously in relation to local, regional, and inter-regional patterns and trends within complex hierarchical societies of the ancient world.
The collection then moves the focus from prehistory and the ancient world into the Middle Ages. Squires draws on her doctoral research investigating cremation graves of the fifth and sixth centuries ad from (early Anglo-Saxon) eastern England. She contrasts the analyses of cremation with the far more established investigation of mortuary variability in broadly contemporary inhumation graves. Drawing on a detailed analysis of two cemeteries in which cremation burials are predominant—Elsham and Cleatham—her work combines macroscopic and microscopic analysis (thin-section analysis and FT-IR spectroscopy) to explore differential burning patterns between and within burials. The skeletal distribution of burned bone shows reducing conditions on the dorsal surfaces of vertebrae, which, together with the distribution of iron and copper-alloy staining from artefacts, suggests bodies tended to be laid in a supine position. Squires identifies an efficient cremation process in operation and no instances of ‘failed cremations’. Most interesting was the correlation over a large sample between cemeteries in terms of the mean weight retrieved, with Mucking and Rayleigh revealing less effort paid to the collection of the cremains. Squires does not fully correlate bone weight with grave- or pyre-goods, however, which would help to appreciate whether the scale of retrieval related to the identity of the deceased. Still, her work reveals the importance of more careful attention to the regional variability in cremation technologies operating in early medieval Europe (see also Williams, Reference Williams2015).
Exploring the southern Brazilian highlands and three mound and enclosure complexes along the Pelotas River dating to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries ad, Ulguium advocates an interdisciplinary and contextual approach to cremation and provides a full account of the archaeological evidence before exploring heat-induced changes to bone. Her chapter is perhaps the most detailed and contextual in the book, and she cautiously but clearly provides a case study of the potential use of ethnohistorical evidence in the study of cremation in the archaeological record.
Our attention then moves to the present-day study of cremated human remains. Ubelaker looks at specific case applications of thermal effects on the skeleton from forensic anthropology. This is more of a literature review and one wonders whether it might have been better positioned earlier on, complementing the offerings by McKinley and Thompson in reviewing existing approaches. Still, his study briefly and usefully foregrounds his previous work on the Roman-period cemetery at Kenchreai, Greece, as a case study of the integration of archaeological and osteological analyses in the interpretation of a three-dimensional mortuary environment.
Garrido-Varas and Intriago-Leiva present a forensic case study from Chile where the analysis of scattered cremated remains allowed distinguishing between three proposed scenarios: murder, suicide, and accidental death, with homicide as the preferred interpretation followed by firing of the disarticulated remains. This last study shows how the archaeological and forensic study of cremation share many of the same interpretative challenges.
Closing the book, Thompson draws some key themes together in a brief Chapter 11, citing potential routes for future research in terms of more sophisticated dialogue between forensic and archaeological researchers, and more global perspectives on cremation research.
There is clearly much to be commended about this collection, but there are some inevitable limitations too. Given the timing of Thompson's work, it was clearly impossible for him and his contributors to cross-reference the cremation studies in Tarlow & Nilsson Stutz (2013), as well as the collection by Kuijt et al. (2014) and Symes & Schmidt (2015). Therefore, it is for future works to appraise these studies in relation to each other in detail, and tease out more fully theoretical and methodological differences as well as shared challenges. At present, what is evident, however, is the many parallels between Thompson's approach and those advocated by the studies found in Kuijt et al. (2014) and Symes & Schmidt (2015). Together, I suggest these books create the shared foundation for a new era in cremation research.
Where I would suggest more fundamental criticisms is that many case studies do not fulfil their potential of exploring the theoretical and historical significances of their investigations, both for the periods and places under consideration, as well as in terms of broader cross-period themes and issues. Furthermore, Thompson's introduction valuably characterizes past research, yet I would suggest his characterization of an ‘archaeology of cremation’ does not go far enough to consider the full range of mortuary variabilities, processes, and contexts for the study of fire and the body in the human past, including diachronic investigations of cremation's interplay with other disposal strategies. The emotive, mnemonic, and multi-sensory dimensions of cremation are barely mentioned. A further point lacking, despite Thompson's correct attention to modern forensic studies, is the potential of archaeologies of cremation to extend beyond forensic investigation in the modern era and investigate the origins, development, current variability, and character of cremation in the world today, including its technologies, material cultures, architectures, and landscapes (e.g. Williams, Reference Williams2011). Moreover, it is important to explore the varied ways in which past cremation is deployed in scientific, educational, and popular contexts in the contemporary world: the public archaeology of cremation (Williams, Reference Williams, Williams and Giles2016). A further theme for future research, lacking in all recent studies, including Thompson's, is to consider and promote how cremation practices might be more fully taken into consideration within the conservation, management, and interpretation of Europe's cultural heritage sites, monuments, and landscapes, from Bronze Age barrow cemeteries to early twentieth-century crematoria and their designed landscapes.
In conclusion, I congratulate the contributors and editor for producing a solid, valuable, and far-ranging collection that constitutes a timely and necessary addition to the study of death and burial in the human past. I agree with Thompson and his contributors regarding the importance of context for studying the archaeology of cremation across Europe and farther afield. Yet, I would propose a broader set of potential contexts that a fully-fledged ‘archaeology of cremation’ might profitably explore, for prehistoric, historic, and contemporary pasts, including burial and cemetery space, architectures, monuments, and landscape locations and settings. Cremation is an important theme for interdisciplinary, diachronic, and multi-scalar studies in archaeological, heritage, forensic, and other interdisciplinary research. The future of cremation studies needs to build on these dimensions as well as the careful and increasingly refined study of archaeological contexts and burned human remains outlined in Thompson's valuable collection.
