Commemoration Through Cremation: A Cultural Analysis

INTRODUCTION

‘For both past and present, cremation can be regarded as a strategy of commemoration that involves the rapid, but culturally and technologically-varied, transformation of the corpse by fire’ (Williams, 2011, 113). This is the definition Williams (2011) gave to the term cremation, a concept which can be confusing, as most of the time the word is used in the meaning of ‘the remains of a cremation burial’ (McKinley, 2013, 149).

Officially, this essay should contain the analysis of the cremated remains without the secondary act of burial (McKinley, 2013, 149), according to Williams (2011) definition. Though in my opinion, the act of burial can not completely be separated from a cremation, as the place of the primary rite itself may

The aim of an osteologist is to retrieve basic osteological data from the cremated individual first, which comprises of the first two categories. Thereafter he or she will focus on the used cremation technology and ritual (McKinley, 2013, 149).

In order to determine the recovered data correctly, the archaeological context of the cremation remnants should be taken into account. As Cremation is not simply burning a body, there are myriad stages, technologies, and actions involved which can vary between communities and across time (Thompson, 2015, 1).The context can be influenced by several factors that are of influence on the quantity and quality of data that will be found. The type of deposit, taphonomic factors and disturbance can affect the amount of bone that will be recovered. Additionally, the contextual factors can influence the condition of the bones such as bone survival and the level of fragmentation. The degree of fragmentation is be caused by the circumstances inside (e.g. dehydration; McKinley, 2013, 162) and outside (e.g. stages of manipulation, burial microenvironment and excavation procedures; McKinley, 1994b) of the bone (McKinley, 2013,