Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-31T23:01:29.129Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Temporality and the Transition to Cremation in the Late Third Millennium to Mid Second Millennium bc in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2013

Jo Appleby*
Affiliation:
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK Email: ja253@le.ac.uk

Abstract

Time and temporality have been at the centre of a number of accounts of burial practices in the Bronze Age of Britain in the last twenty years. Up to now, however, the temporality of practice has been taken as an indication of past understandings of time and/or the ancestors. In this article I wish to argue that the temporality of mortuary practices was not merely reflective of understandings of time, but in fact was constitutive of them, and that through the changing temporality of mortuary practices, people's engagement with monuments themselves was changed. These changing temporalities were driven by the transition from inhumation to cremation as the dominant mode of disposal of the dead. By invoking chaînes opératoires for each mode, I will demonstrate the underlying similarities and differences of the two rites, showing how cremation led to a fundamental change in the temporality of mortuary behaviour, and as such created new understandings of funerary monuments and place.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)