Introduction to the edited collection 'Cremation and the Archaeology of Death'

Building for the Cremated Dead Ephemeral and Cumulative Constructions

The Contemporary Archaeology of Urban Cremation

Focusing on artist’s impressions of early Anglo-Saxon cremations, we reflect on the potentials and chal- lenges of collaborations between artists and archaeologists to both convey the fiery transformation of the dead in the human past, and provide reflection on our society’s own engagement with mortality in which cremation has become a commonplace dimension. We show the potential of art to challenge pre-conceived notions and understandings of cremation past and present, positioning art as a key dimension of public mortuary archaeology.

The interpretation of early medieval deviant burials has come to the fore in recent mortuary archaeology debates. Yet, critical discussion of how early medieval execution cemeteries are portrayed in museums and other media has received no critical attention. Using the prominent case study of Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, this chapter reveals the interpretative and ethical challenges inherent in narrating and visualizing later Anglo- Saxon judicial killing in the absence of well-preserved human remains, but instead through the recording and interpretation of carefully excavated “sand bodies.”

Much of the debate regarding mortuary archaeology’s public interactions has centred on the ethics and politics of displaying articulated skeletal material and fleshed bodies. In contrast, multiple, fragmented, dislocated and cenotaphic mortuary traces which populate museums across the UK have escaped sustained attention. Local and town museums, and also the distinctive narratives required in Welsh museums, have also eluded consideration. This chapter explores how smaller museums create environments in which networks are created both with other memorial places and landscapes in the vicinity, and between discrete museum displays. This chapter focuses on one case study—Llangollen Museum—to present and inter- rogate how a diversity of mortuary material culture combine to create a mortuary network associated with local history, heritage and landscape in this distinctive North Welsh context.

Inspired by later medieval sagas and Viking Age historical sources, but underpinned and enriched by archaeological evidence and themes, the History channel’s Vikings (2013–) is a unique drama series explor- ing the late eighth/early ninth century conflicts and culture of the Northmen, aimed at a global television audience. This chapter introduces the series and its varied portrayals of mortuary practice. From the por- trayal of the deaths of chieftains and those slain in battle to family members and children, I identify key archaeological themes behind the depiction of death. This prompts discussion of mortuary archaeology’s influence on popular perceptions of the Early Middle Ages, the programme operating as education, enter- tainment but also reflecting on present-day anxieties over the nature of human mortality.

How can we begin to understand and explain the changing significance of cremation in past societies? From many parts of the world and for many periods of human history from as early as the Upper Palaeolithic (Bowler et al., 1980) to recent centuries, archaeologists have uncovered and investigated material evidence for the use of fire as a means of transforming and disposing of the dead. This chapter argues that in contrast to the rich and widespread evidence for cremation in the archaeological record, theoretical approaches in the archaeology of cremation have been relatively thin on the ground until very recently. This relative failure to adequately engage with the complexity and the variability of cremation practices across cultures seems connected to the fact that most of the theoretical debates and developments in mortuary archaeology have, until quite recently, been primarily geared to the investigation of unburned human remains. Therefore, alongside increasingly refined methodologies for investigating burnt bones, it is argued that archaeologists need to redress this imbalance by developing explicit theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of cremation. Such theories need to engage with broad cross-cultural themes and also remain sensitive to the considerable variety of mortuary procedures involving fire used at different times and in different places.

This article presents a fresh interpretation of square and rectangular mortuary structures found in association with deposits of cremated material and cremation burials in a range of early Anglo-Saxon (fifth-/sixth-century AD) cemeteries across southern and eastern England. Responding to a recent argument that they could be traces of pyre structures, a range of ethnographic analogies are drawn upon, and the full-range of archaeological evidence is synthesized, to re-affirm and extend their interpretation as unburned mortuary structures. Three interleaving significances are proposed: (i) demarcating the burial place of specific individuals or groups from the rest of the cemetery population, (ii) operating as ‘columbaria’ for the above-ground storage of the cremated dead (i.e. not just to demarcate cremation burials), and (iii) providing key nodes of commemoration between funerals as the structures were built, used, repaired and eventually decayed within cemeteries. The article proposes that timber ‘mortuary houses’ reveal that groups in early Anglo-Saxon England perceived their cemeteries in relation to contemporary settlement architectures, with some groups constructing and maintaining miniaturized canopied buildings to store and display the cremated remains of the dead.

This article reconsiders and extends the interpretation of the heterogeneity of early Anglo-Saxon (c. AD 425/50–570) cremation practices and their mnemonic and ideological significance. Cremation burials frequently contain grooming implements (combs, tweezers, razors and shears), often unburnt and sometimes fragmented. The addition of these items to graves can be explained as a strategy of ‘catalytic commemoration’ which assisted in choreographing the transformation and selective remembering and forgetting of the dead by the survivors. This article explores new evidence to reveal the varied character and fluctuating intensity of these practices among cremating communities across southern and eastern England during the fifth and sixth centuries AD. The evidence suggests new insights into how and why cremation was selected as an ideology of transformation linking the living and the dead.