Beyond cremation: Theorising fire in funerary contexts

Abstract

When one thinks about the role and uses of fire in relation to mortuary archaeology, evidence concerning the practice of cremation understandably dominates the literature. However, a growing body of research is demonstrating how fire, its products and its effects were employed by people in the past for many different forms of interaction between the living and the dead. Fire can be employed for the desiccation, fumigation, purification, fragmentation, and manipulation of human remains or the funerary context as part of very different stages of the mortuary process. This paper will describe the development of approaches to fire in mortuary archaeology and suggest how we might theorise fire as an active participant in funerary ritual. Using examples from European and Mediterranean prehistory, it will be argued that fire is specifically selected for use in funerary practices for its ability to elaborate or extend the ritual process, to facilitate engagement with the corpse, and to create new materialities and immaterialities of interaction between the living and the dead. It will be demonstrated that fire is fundamentally transformatory, not only in terms of its action and effects on the body, grave assemblage or funerary monument, but also in terms of how it creates space for funerary ritual change. One can only conclude from the multimodality of fire – the simultaneous availability of different yet contextually relevant functional and conceptual discourses – that it is a multipurpose tool, with a range of applications in the mortuary sphere.