By the later Bronze Age, almost all of Europe had ‘converted’ from inhumation to cremation burial practices. Although this change began a few hundred years earlier, it is commonly associated with the spread of the ‘Urnfield Culture’, the beginning of which is dated to c. 1300–1250 BC, depending on the region investigated. By then, cremation had become a dominant rite as witnessed by thousands of cremation burials in urns located within flat cemeteries, ranging in size from a few to many hundred burials. Although poorly understood, the change raises significant questions about alterations of cultural practices at the most fundamental level of society – its attitude towards death and the status of the deceased body. It is the nature of these changes that this volume aims to address.

The case studies selected were aimed at a broad overview of the transitional period in a wide region stretching from central to northern Europe. They included individual graves and cemeteries, in which the change from inhumation to cremation and associated ideas of appropriate burial practices could be most directly observed (such as Pitten and Vollmarshausen), but also regional studies. The case studies provided us with the opportunity to analyse a number of specific places from different parts of Europe in depth (Fig. 5.1). They acted as our ‘thinking-pieces’, although other examples were also drawn on, when useful.

In this chapter, we trace the diverse manners in which cremation urns and urnfields have been interpreted through time; how their discoveries gave rise to ideas of changing beliefs and spreading cultures. For the periods until the development of professional archaeology, we use examples ranging widely within Europe, whereas from the mid-nineteenth century onwards we shall focus more specifically upon discussions within central Europe and especially the German tradition, due to their significance for the historiography of the introduction of cremation as a research topic. The aims are to search for and reflect on the assumptions that still affect the framework within which we work, and the terminology used within Bronze Age mortuary studies. We shall not detail the parallel distinct historiography of how the cremated remains themselves have been perceived and analysed (but see Schafberg 1998).

In the previous chapters, we aimed to provide detailed scrutiny of the change from inhumations to cremations by focussing on what we initially proposed as a transition period, as a time during which core elements of burial practices were gradually transformed or changed and new normative practices developed.

Post-burial engagement with graves can take different forms. One obvious motivation (based on historical, ethnographic, and contemporary evidence) is to visit the grave to cater to the perceived needs of the deceased and for social-community reasons, probably at meaningful dates like the anniversary of death or at important times in the community’s calendar. It is, however, mostly impossible to tell whether this was part of Middle Bronze Age communities’ worlds and rituals. The continued effort invested in the physical construction of graves in many (but not all) the areas studied does, however, suggest that graves continued to be meaningful places and had some kind of significance beyond the short duration of the burial itself. ‘Having a place to go to’ for post-funerary practices can be necessary for mourning and various issues of societal cohesion and restructuring, drawing attention to the importance of creating a place where the living and dead can interact, and where cross-generational connections can be confirmed. In some ways, the ‘final resting place’ of the body – the grave, the burial mound, or the place in a cemetery – is a natural location for post-funerary practices. In this context, it is interesting to note that in our own society, cremation burials in communal graveyards and ‘woodland burials’, which are becoming increasingly popular in Europe, appear to drop the concern with making a specific place. This renunciation of an individualised burial place is often explained in terms of a decreased emphasis on community cohesion and genealogy, expressed, for instance, through the wish not to burden children or relatives who would have to maintain the graves, or it is due to environmental concerns. In our time, a place of memorialisation mainly seems to matter in cases of accidents and atrocities. Increasingly we witness crosses and candles placed at sites of such events, including terrorist attacks, like the marking of the March 11, 2004 attacks at the Atocha train station in Madrid (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011, Sánchez-Carretero 2006, Truc and Sánchez-Carretero 2019). To move beyond generalised expectations about people’s behaviour and need to remember, we do, however, need to locate the specifics of whether and how this was indeed part of the Middle Bronze Age community’s mortuary practices. Were such needs invested in, and accommodated by, the burial constructions or in other ways performed and reiterated? For this argument, it is important to recognise the difference between individual involvement, which may have used a range of unauthorised and personal outlets, and that of sanctified social practices through which such post-cremation death practices were incorporated into the cultural canon.

In this chapter, we return to some of the theoretical issues briefly introduced in Chapter 1. Our primary aim is to explain the core theoretical premises that underwrite our analyses and to provide some reflection on the approach we shall unfold. Secondarily, we clarify our position regarding research on the body. We do not aim to use any specific theoretical school to provide directives for the research; we would find that counterproductive. We think of theory as thinking tools, as arguments and reflections that can help us to sharpen our attention, create new sensibilities, and encourage curiosity, but not as a means of dictating the direction of research or its outcome. Theory should be liberating and challenging, not censorious. We reject the notion that one has to follow a particular theoretical school and the attitude that there is a correct and faithful way of understanding theoretical arguments (see also Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2017). The relevance of theories, we believe, is tested by how they help insights and arguments to move forward; the selection of theoretical apparatus should be guided by needs arising from the interpretative engagement.

In this chapter we set out to provide a sense of the societies in which the change from inhumation to cremation took place; how they were they organised and how people lived. What were the primary characteristics of peoples’ understanding of their worlds, how did they organise relationships amongst themselves and engage with the outside – both other communities and the supernatural? What characterised their interactions with material things, new ideas, and people? Can we discern their attitudes towards their bodies, how it was presented and performed through manipulation and dressing, and how this might have influenced their understanding of the body in death? Most importantly, as burial practices are our focus, what were the characteristics of the already existing burial practices and rituals?

Contrary to the expectation that cremation burials must be motivated by either the desire to reduce the body to some kind of essence or the wish to erase it, our investigation of the cremation burials that appeared and became common in different parts of Europe during the Middle Bronze Age suggests different motivations and reveals substantial variation. In particular, the range of activities that took place after the cremation shows clearly that the cremation was not usually the final stage of this ritual and the handling of the dead body. Rather, this stage was followed by different kinds of actions that involved manipulation of the remains, presumably as part of a long chain of articulations about what these remains were or were about. In the following, we shall outline some of the main practices observed and demonstrate their conspicuous concern with the physicality of the body. We show how cremations during the transitional period, when a normative understanding of cremation burials was being formed, implied a distinctly different internal logic and way of reasoning than that underwriting, for example, Hindu cremations or modern European ones. We argue that this was strongly influenced by contemporary perceptions of the body. Furthermore, we suggest that the wide-ranging variation and ‘experimentation’ show that beliefs or body ontologies when it came to cremation were not immediately fixed but for a couple of generations were in the process of becoming formulated. It was only after a while, something like the lifetime of a few generations, that a normative understanding of the status of the body in cremation burials had been established. It is this duration that we defined as the transitional period in Chapter 1.

There are several reasons why we decided to discuss the construction of the grave separately from the treatment of the body per se, while simultaneously maintaining an approach that sees them as interconnected. The main reason is that the two events are not necessarily done consecutively – they are not automatically linear in a temporal sense. The construction of the grave can begin independently of the cremation – it may be started before, during, or after the cremation and thus may imply difference and differentiation in terms of planning and involvement. The decisions made will reveal perceptions of the needs of the body, including views about, for example, ‘the afterlife’ of the deceased and what stages this involved, and they were also affected by various social needs. The second main reason is that there is an architectural and material aspect to the construction of the grave, which affected both its links to tradition and created possibilities for symbolism and metaphorical connotations (see also Harding 2000: 113). In addition, drawing on architectural similarities with other constructions, such as houses, pits, or earlier graves, was not only one of the main ways of creating an understanding of the grave as a resting place, it was also a way of using the vocabulary of the familiar in the construction of (new) meanings: similes and similarities were probably some of the main means of creating shared meanings and ontological security around grave constructions. These links helped to assure that the changes in practices and forms were done in a manner that retained a sense of familiarity, benefitting from a notion of being knowledgeable of cultural practices. We suggest this as a core mechanism that enabled the rapid and wide uptake of cremation. This is especially of importance because the change from inhumation to cremation challenged and altered established fundamental beliefs – cremation introduced a change to the treatment of the body and its subsequent appearance that was dramatic and absolute. As discussed in Chapter 6, during the transition phase various activities were carried out to counteract the impression of the cremated remains being substantively different to the body whole, but a cremated body is nonetheless radically different from an un-cremated one. In comparison, the grave constructions themselves did not necessarily constitute a similar radical choice, and the choices made were more open-ended.