Burial Space Research Articles

How to Enhance the Environmental Values of Contemporary Cemeteries in an Urban Context

The cemetery is an important element of the city’s natural system. It can create a system that has a great impact on shaping the city’s climate if it is integrated with the local landscape, designed with respect for the natural environment along with other green areas. In the face of negative demographic forecasts, urbanization and suburbanization processes, and climate change, the use of pro-environmental solutions in the development of cemeteries cannot be overestimated. On the basis of analyses of contemporary cemeteries from Europe (78 objects), including Poland (8 objects), a catalog of pro-environmental solutions is developed. The catalog is created based on the proposed functional and spatial model of cemeteries as a multifunctional space, integrating natural and cultural environments. Environmental activities related to the context, burial space, architecture, and other spatial elements, as well as the vegetation of modern cemeteries, are included. Then, in order to increase the environmental values of the cemetery, these solutions were implemented by developing an integrated concept for the project of a multifunctional and ecological municipal cemetery in Gniezno, Poland (the Greater Poland voivodeship).

“In This City of the Dead”: Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery and Middle-Class Aspiration

Like many other cities in the antebellum United States, Charleston, South Carolina, faced the challenge of managing longstanding, overfilled, urban burial spaces in an area with a large population and high mortality rates. Although Charleston would seem to have been an ideal candidate for an early rural cemetery, Magnolia Cemetery was not opened outside the city until almost twenty years after Mount Auburn’s founding. In Charleston, the modernizing impulse illustrated by calls for cemetery reform came in to conflict with the city’s dominant upper class. The establishment of Magnolia Cemetery was undertaken by middle-class Charlestonians who hoped to use burial to create an alternative social hierarchy that existed parallel to Charleston’s rigid slaveholding aristocracy.

Placing and remembering the dead in late Neolithic Malta: bioarchaeological and spatial analysis of the Xagħra Circle Hypogeum, Gozo

ABSTRACT This paper integrates the results of recent bioarchaeological and spatial analyses at one of the largest collective burial sites in Europe, the Xagħra Circle Hypogeum on Gozo. This suite of new approaches has addressed demography, funerary practices, interactions with the dead, and the changing use of space. Modelling structural events and reconstructing funerary practices from 2900 to 2350 cal BC, we trace persistent variation and flexibility in the use of space over time. Taphonomic analysis shows that young individuals (from foetal age and above) were included within the burial space, and their depositions occasionally informed subsequent interments. Such results resonate beyond this site and enhance our understanding of society in third millennium BC Malta. We advance a model of broad accessibility to the burial space, strengthening emerging narratives of heterarchical social dynamics in the Maltese islands.

Space Composition of Mesolithic Caves Habitation in Karst Area “Bukit Bangkai” Tanah Bumbu, South Kalimantan: Wetland Archaeological Study

Geologically, the karst area of “Bukit Bangkai” is located in the southeastern part of the Meratus Karst Mountains, South Kalimantan. The landscape of the “Bukit Bangkai” karst area is partly in the form of karst hills and is inseparable from the swamp landscape which is adjacent to the river and the coast. In the karst area of “Bukit Bangkai”, numbers of cave habitations and rock shelters have been found. In the cave habitations area, numbers of Mesolithic devices have been found, food scraps which accumulate in kitchenmidden, the distribution of cave paintings and burials. Based on the research data, it can be stated that numbers of habitation caves and niches are Mesolithic residential caves. As a Mesolithic residence cave site, it has not yet been studied about the space composition of residential cave spaces that carry out the distribution of cave habitation for the sake of residential space, kitchenmidden space, rock paintings and burial space. In this research, it stated the structuring residential cave space in conjunction with the swamps or swamplands landscape. The renewal of the results of this study is about spatial planning of Mesolithic caves habitation in swamp environments. Previous research on structuring Mesolithic caves habitation was associated with dry land landscapes, such as Mesolithic cave habitation in the Maros-Pangkep area, South Sulawesi. Thus, the renewal of this research can be used as a reference for Mesolithic cave patterns in the swamp landscape landscape environment or swamplands.

Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York by Allan Amanik

Reviewed by: Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York by Allan Amanik Heather S. Nathans (bio) Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York allan amanik New York University Press, 2019 272 pp. "How best to organize the dead," Allan Amanik queries in the first chapter of Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York (16). Questions of organization, based on geography, law, money, politics, family, and faith, thread through Amanik's richly researched study and inform his nuanced exploration of the development of Jewish burial practices and traditions in New York from the time of the earliest Jewish settlement to the turn of the twenty-first century. As Amanik argues, studying the abiding quest for control of cemeteries and rituals for the dead or dying can offer significant insights into the challenge so many struggling Jewish communities faced in establishing or maintaining control against the pressures of a predominantly Gentile American culture. Amanik divides the study into five chapters, plus an introduction, a conclusion, and an epilogue. As he notes in chapter 1, "A dedicated Jewish graveyard not only represented the first communal and public space that Jews created in North America but counted among several legal, social, and religious privileges that paved the way for long-term settlement in the colony" (19). Amanik uses the struggle to establish the first Jewish burial ground to wrestle with the dream of permanent settlement in the young Dutch colony. He describes the reluctance of the Christian Dutch rulers to grant the 1655 petition of three Sephardic Jewish merchants to purchase land for a graveyard, even though no Jews had yet died in New Amsterdam. As Amanik astutely observes, the Dutch leaders denied the petition, "likely hoping to discourage permanent settlement" (19). But despite the efforts of the Dutch and then the British authorities, Jewish families began to establish themselves in New York City, and the controversy over burial practices shifted to reflect internal debates within the Jewish community. Those ranged from disputes over family burial versus chronological burial (many early congregations maintained that burials should be organized by date of death, rather than family name), to how or whether to bury the Christian spouses of those who had married outside the Jewish community, but who had not converted to Christianity. Additionally, synagogues faced hard financial realities in trying to maintain their activities among [End Page 895] comparatively small populations, and as Amanik notes, burial practices and the access to sanctioned burial spaces provided leverage for synagogue leaders to shore up their scanty resources by requiring that regular dues be paid (or be paid retroactively at the time of a loved one's death) in order to provide access to these all-important sites. Chapter 2 focuses on the ways in which death rituals and funerals helped to shape a new system of "grassroots Jewish burial societies" that pushed back against the authority of synagogue leaders and the community's wealthiest families (46). If the burial regulations of the colonial and early national era had defined who was "inside" and who was "outside" centers of power in Jewish New York, the rising fraternal organizations demonstrated that Jewish citizens were willing to establish their own structures based on "collectivism and mutual regard" (49). Perhaps not surprisingly, these emerging organizations mirrored the national rhetoric as it shifted toward a more sentimental concept of citizenship. While American Jewish communities might have gotten a later start in creating burial societies than some of their European or colonial counterparts, their post-Revolutionary activity shaped them into "transitional institutions" (55). As Amanik argues, the increasing schisms among late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century synagogues decentralized the synagogue's collective influence just as fraternal organizations began to demonstrate that they could offer more effective (and less restrictive) opportunities for Jewish philanthropy and community. In chapter 3, Amanik focuses on the "Rural Cemetery Movement," as a watershed moment in the history of Jewish American burial practices. The movement marked a trend toward establishing cemeteries outside of crowded city centers and making them resemble lavishly landscaped gardens. Moreover, in a reversal of earlier policy, the new Jewish cemeteries traded on being...

Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780–1830 by Erin-Marie Legacey

Reviewed by: Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780–1830 by Erin-Marie Legacey Alice J. Strange Legacey, Erin-Marie. Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780–1830. Cornell UP, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5017-1559-4. Pp. 210. This work examines the crisis in the burial practices of Paris prior to the French Revolution and the chaos that followed as a new burial culture was created. For centuries the remains of the dead of Paris had been deposited into anonymous mass graves in one of the thirty-two churchyards in the city. The oldest and largest gravesite was the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in central Paris, in use for more than five hundred years. By the late eighteenth century, it was overflowing with decomposing human remains and was a peril to neighboring residents. Although the space was surrounded by a wall, it emitted noxious airs and underground vapors that invaded surrounding buildings and made their way into living spaces. In 1780, a royal proclamation ordered the closure of this and other cemeteries and the relocation of remains to an underground quarry on the urban periphery, which eventually became the Paris Catacombs. The Old Regime failed to address the burial problem before its own demise in 1789, and cemetery reform was left to successive regimes. Legacey argues that the French Revolution was central to transforming attitudes about the proper treatment of the dead. Revolutionaries called for an end to religious burial practices and a new system based on the ideals of equality and fraternity. They were unable to realize these goals, and during the Terror, the remains of thousands of secretly executed victims were placed in open mass graves, complicating the problem. Instability continued into the Napoleonic Empire. It was gradually accepted that individual burial sites were preferable to communal graves. Architects and urban planners offered innovative reforms. One proposal, for example, argued that the dead should be judged for their civic contributions and assigned a place in a new cemetery according to their worthiness. Finally, in 1804, burial standards were codified by Napoleon in a decree that set forth twenty-six articles governing the design for burial spaces. Cemeteries were to be located on the periphery of cities rather than within urban areas, preferably on an elevated terrain east of the city. Père-Lachaise cemetery was opened in 1804 in accordance with the guidelines. Cemeteries were no longer unpleasant and unhealthy places to be avoided, but aesthetic and attractive sites. The new design aimed to accommodate individual gravesites with monuments, although some communal graves continued to exist. The living were encouraged to contemplate the achievements of the heroic dead. Ideally, the new cemetery would unite Parisians of all classes and instill a sense of shared history. The Paris Catacombs, opened to the public in 1809, were an indispensable component of the new culture. Bones from many cemeteries were arranged artistically to draw visitors, combining a macabre appeal with a reminder of the leveling effect of death. In this thoroughly researched study, Legacey presents compelling archival material to trace the revolution in Parisian cemetery culture and the corresponding transformation of attitudes toward the dead. Her work [End Page 240] makes a significant contribution to the social history of Paris in the early nineteenth century. Alice J. Strange Southeast Missouri State University, emerita Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Secularity and burial space in 19th century England

Este artículo cuestiona la afirmación de que la secularidad ha sido siempre un debate central en la idea de cementerio. En gran parte de Inglaterra se impuso una ‘guerra cultural’ entre partidarios de la Iglesia Anglicana y varias confesiones de Disidencia protestante. El cementerio fue un foco de conflicto, centra- do en el grado de control ejercido por la Iglesia Establecida. Este conflicto no reflejó la demanda de funerales ‘civiles’. Los protestantes No Conformistas buscaron asegurar un espacio de enterramiento y donde pudieran expresar sus propias creencias. A lo largo del siglo XIX y hasta la I Guerra Mundial, la formulación del derecho de enterramiento estuvo acompañada de conflictivos debates. Los cementerios llegaron a significar tanto la libertad religiosa como la influencia opresiva de la Iglesia Establecida. También estuvieron acompañados de una regulación sobre el gestión de entierros sanitarios, pero esto no definió el espacio de enterramiento como específicamente secular. Más bien, en Inglaterra, el cementerio fue, y sigue siendo, una coproducción espacial de tecnología sanitaria, burocracia municipal y expresión espiritual. This paper challenges the contention that secularity is always central to the idea of the cemetery. In largely England a ‘culture war’ was enjoined between supporters of the Church of England and various denom- inations of Protestant Dissent. The cemetery was a focus of conflict, centred on the degree of control exercised by the Established Church. This conflict did not reflect demand for ‘civic’ funerals. Protestant Nonconformists sought to secure burial space where they might express their own beliefs. Through the 19th century and up until the First World War, the framing of burial law was accompanied by divisive debate. Cemeteries came to signify both religious freedom and the oppressive influence of the Established Church. Cemetery establishment was also accompanied by regulation on sanitary burial management, but this did not define burial space as being innately secular. Rather, in England the cemetery was, and remains, a spatial co-production of sanitary technology, municipal bureaucracy and spiritual expression.

Urban Burial Reform in William Wordsworth’s “Village Churchyard”

Katherine E. Blake “Urban Burial Reform in William Wordsworth’s ‘Village Churchyard’” (pp. 279–304) This essay looks at the relationship between space and class in nineteenth-century English burials in order to shed new light on William Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs (1810, 1876) and “The Brothers” (1800). While Wordsworth’s work dwells on pastoral images of burial, I argue that his representations in fact align more closely with the cultural practices and values underpinning urban burial conventions. Through his representation of burial space, Wordsworth’s work plays out urban concerns about burial in the countryside. Ultimately, this essay argues that the exportation of urban concerns to imaginary rural sites accounts for the utility of Wordsworth’s work to mid-nineteenth-century burial reformers, and particularly to Edwin Chadwick, a utilitarian known for his work on the 1832 Poor Law and sanitary guidelines for burial. By reevaluating what prior studies have said about Chadwick’s reforms in light of recent work on his economic theories, I argue that Chadwick’s citation of Wordsworth’s first “Essay upon Epitaphs” transforms the latter’s pastoral vision into an endorsement of a national cemetery. I explore the extent to which Wordsworth’s early-nineteenth-century ideas are and are not compatible with Chadwick’s mid-century reforms.

Cemeteries as Cultural Heritage: Implementing the Model of Cemeteries-Cultural Heritage as Education Environment

Nowadays we can notice significant changes and variations in dealing with death around Europe which requires adaptation of services that cemeteries provide in their vast space. Providing new services is a challenging management issue that first requires a change in the perception of cemetery away from burial space. Purpose of this paper is to analyse how cemeteries can be used as education environment.
 Analysis of cases in 3 cities around Europe provides insights into how a cemetery can become perceived and used as rich cultural heritage learning environment for schools in combination of use of modern IT solutions. In discussion we are exploring the positive effects of this development on cemetery management.

Las doctrinas militares: la represión política en Tucumán, Argentina (1975-1983)

La represión política que tuvo lugar en la década del 70 en Tucumán, en la región Norte de Argentina, se inicia “legalmente” en febrero de 1975 con el operativo militar decretado por el Poder Ejecutivo Nacional conocido como “Operativo Independencia”. Distintos jefes militares, como parte del Comando de la V Brigada de Infantería, estuvieron a cargo del plan represivo. Cada uno de estos militares fue formado bajo distintas doctrinas militares impartidas al ejército argentino. A través de la identificación y diferenciación de las estrategias militares ejecutadas ?en tanto inteligencia, ocupación del territorio, instalación de centros clandestinos de detención y espacios de inhumación identificados? en las consecutivas etapas represivas, analizamos las diferentes doctrinas militares que guiaron el plan de ejecución del operativo militar. A partir de este análisis, se abrieron una serie de interrogantes para desarrollar en trabajos futuros, ya que cada desarrollo doctrinario pudo haber influenciado en el manejo que se hizo de los cuerpos de los detenidos desaparecidos y en las formas de ocultamiento.

A Taphonomic Examination of Inhumed and Entombed Remains in Parma Cemeteries, Italy

People of different cultures bury their dead in different ways, based on religious beliefs, historical rituals, or public health requirements. In Italy, cremation is still a limited practice compared to entombment and inhumation. Accordingly with the law, a buried body can be moved to the cemetery ossuary only if skeletonized. Generally, complete skeletonization occurs within 40 years following burial, but sometimes the body may mummify, or it may turn into adipocere. Globally, today burial space is limited with cemeteries facing a growing need for both burials and entombments. The present study considered the thanatological, taphonomical, anthropological, microbiological and geochemical examination of 408 human bodies exhumed from grave pits and stone tombs located in two cemeteries in Parma, Italy. Intrinsic and extrinsic factors associated with the process of the decomposition of such bodies were documented in order to identify which factors promote or reduce the time needed for skeletonization. Overall, the aim of this study was to improve the management of the body turnover in cemeteries, providing recommendations for cemetery management and turnover planning, with the goal of avoiding extra costs that may be attributed to the family and the State. The results of this study show that inhumation in burial grounds and soils with a high percentage of sand and gravel promote decomposition and skeletonization, whereas entombments inside stone tombs and the presence of stone slabs on the ground covering burials, aid in the formation of adipocere, slowing down the decomposition process.

Meaning and mnemonic in archaeological studies of death

ABSTRACTThis paper highlights key characteristics of memorialisation processes linked to dying and death. The study demonstrates that, in all periods, the mnemonic triggers engendered by multi-sensory experiences surrounding the treatment of the dead serve as fundamental elements of the memorialisation processes which generate lasting impacts on the living through people’s engagement ‘in a collective social act’. Roles attributed to the dead are ‘active and powerful’, and the links between the living and the dead are imbued with myriad meanings, articulated through a variety of activities. These resonate across time and exist in many aspects of contemporary practice. We could argue that dying itself is not simply a social process, and in reality, it is an inherently, and on occasion an aggressively, anti-social act that is negotiated and ‘normalised’ by the social conventions that society has developed to cope with dying and death. With a focus on the British context, this study explores the ways in which society has dealt with the troublesome and anti-social aspect of death, and dying, through a consideration of past social praxis. It considers the ways in which a broadening of contemporary societies understanding of the variety of approaches to death, burial, bereavement and mourning in a deep time perspective can offer legitimate and authorised options for future practice at a time when there a crisis in available burial space is occurring in England (e.g).

The National and Confessional Diversity of the Population in the Soviet Projects and Documents Regulating Burial

This article examines how issues of national and confessional diversity of the country were reflected and resolved in Soviet official documents concerning the funerary sphere. Analysis of such sources as decrees, rules, instructions, regulations and their projects concerning cemeteries and funerals demonstrates that their discourse and content reflected approaches in national politics, changes in the economic course, and objective and subjective conditions at different stages of the country’s history. Methodologically, the issues considered are included in the research contexts of the history of national politics, imperial history, economic history, and the history of Soviet social engineering. Until the end of the Great Patriotic War, despite state-proclaimed atheism and anti-religious campaigns, a targeted elimination of denominational cemeteries was not seriously considered in the context of the campaigns. Rather, their disappearance was a result of growth and redevelopment of cities and, consequently, the “relocation” of cemeteries from the centre to the outskirts and the emergence of new cemeteries. The latter were arranged without considering the national-confessional principle and were often called “international”, which emphasised their difference from the former denominational cemeteries. The emergence of a project in 1946 which divided burial space according to the denominational principle, in fact, proposed the establishment of denominational cemeteries and reflected changes in national policy from the 1930s, i.e. the strengthening of power-state and nationalist tendencies. However, this too radical an approach for state atheism was mitigated in Soviet documents of the late 1940s — 1970s concerning the burial sphere: they recommended to consider “national” customs with regard to the funerary issue and burial space with the prevalence of quasi-secular “clean” form of Sovietness. As the analysis of the 2014–2017 bill demonstrates, the confessional criterion is in demand in Post-Soviet time again as very significant for differentiating burial space and the national and confessional diversity of the population.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grace, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry

Reviewed by: The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grace, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry Daniel Livesay The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grace, in the Building of a Nation. Daina Ramey Berry. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8070-4762-0. 256 pp., cloth, 27.95. Among the countless horrors and injustices of slavery, surely one of the most abject for the soul of enslaved people was the knowledge of their bodies' monetary values. This information followed them for their entire lives under bondage, the price moving up and down in tandem with age, health, and appearance. It dictated their daily demands, the formation of their relationships, and the cohesion of their families. As Daina Ramey Berry vividly demonstrates in her gripping new book, however, valuations were not limited to life itself. For enslaved individuals, their price tags preceded birth and remained attached even after death. Through these pricings, Americans waged a brutal battle, in both real and spiritual ways, over the body of the enslaved. Across six chapters, Berry chronicles the lifecycle of enslaved African Americans in the early republic and antebellum years, through the transformations of their supposed worth. These stages are pre-birth, infancy, and childhood (ages zero to ten); puberty and young adulthood (eleven to twenty-two); middle age (twenty-three to thirty-nine); old age (forty and older); and post-death. She identifies four separate categories of human value within these ranges: the self-determined measures enslaved people made, enslavers' idiosyncratic appraisals, actual prices paid at the market, and the "ghost" fees fetched for cadavers. Assessing the first category of value is a challenge, but Berry pores over autobiographies, personal testimonies, and escape narratives to estimate how enslaved Americans resisted the economic labels imposed on them. The other three categories are much more straightforward to evaluate, but Berry's work is nevertheless rigorous and impressive. Using a database of tens of thousands of estate appraisals, insurance policies, and plantation records, she provides detailed accounting of how the numerical worth of enslaved people's bodies changed over their lives. Berry's findings give a precise sense of how the slave market worked for those in the business of purchasing humans as well as for those who had to endure its ravages. Even as conceptual beings, African Americans influenced the trade. Pregnant women, and those identified as potential breeders (both female and male), commanded high prices, for the workers they would eventually create. Enslavers' excitement dissipated upon the children's birth, however: in both appraisals and sales, infants—along with the very old—commanded some of the lowest prices, owing to their lack of productive power. The value of young adults skyrocketed as anticipated and realized labor extraction enticed eager buyers. Yet the highest sales went to those in middle age, thought to be in prime working condition. In each of these life stages, boys and men commanded higher prices than girls and women, and pseudoscientific ratings systems affixed a wide range of values within [End Page 194] every group. Throughout each stage, Berry brings out voices of those who were sold, and the trauma that the market brought to them and their families. There are harrowing depictions here that lay bare the most despicable elements of the peculiar institution. In perhaps the book's best and most chilling chapter, Berry uncovers the illegal practice of selling African American cadavers (both enslaved and free) to medical students and colleges for experimentation. Not only did this further enrich enslavers even after the deaths of their workers, but it robbed communities of sacred burial spaces and contributed to the vicious propagation of scientific racism. Altogether, Berry effectively argues that African American bodies have always been the subject of scrutiny and assessment, while the humans inhabiting them have largely been ignored. The timing of such a book could not be better, and undergraduates and the general public alike will find in it a superb synthesis of recent work on the most damning aspects of antebellum slavery that reach into the present day. Indeed, it is bound...

Persistent Romance: Landscape, Canadianness, and Kingston’s Cataraqui Cemetery, 1850–1900

Beginning in the mid-19th century, garden cemeteries were founded across North America and Europe as a solution to the growing problem of overcrowded urban graveyards. Although the garden cemetery was a practical innovation in burial, these burial spaces also carried cultural meaning as symbols of modernity and progress. Using Canada’s first garden cemetery, Cataraqui Cemetery, in Kingston, Ontario, as a case study, this article situates Canadian cemetery design and development within broad transnational trends, such as the use of the picturesque in cemetery design and the commodification of burial, while assessing the place of the garden cemetery within the local context of industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of nationalism in the post-Confederation period. By emphasizing that the garden cemetery movement emerged at a critical point of national and industrial development for Canada, this article provides an entry point for the examination of romantically derived modalities as the visual and cultural vernacular of Canadian nationalism in the late 19th century.

Materialized Genealogy: From Anonymous Cemetery Populations to Creating Alternative Narratives about Individuals and Family Burial Space

Archaeologists frequently excavate historic burials and the vast majority of the graves will be unidentified. It is rare, and also surprisingly difficult, to unite documentary sources and gravestone identities with the burials underneath. Sites are therefore interpreted and analyzed as holistic anonymous populations rather than as individual graves. Excavation of a 19th and 20th century cemetery in Copenhagen created an opportunity to explore the topic of working with identified graves through connecting to genealogical sources and theoretical approaches which are rarely encountered in archaeology. This study used alternative genealogies of grave plots based on different source materials: family trees, burial plot registers, and excavated archaeological evidence to illustrate the complementary interpretations that can be created. The research touches upon important issues of the rights and responsibilities of using the names and personal data of the dead; particularly in relation to their descendants. The conclusion is that it is vital to consider including names and sometimes personal information as doing so has deepened understanding of the variations within burial customs, the use of grave plot space and invited more personal narratives within a heavily structured system of burying the dead.

Stable isotope ratio analysis of bone collagen as indicator of different dietary habits and environmental conditions in northeastern Iberia during the 4th and 3rd millennium cal B.C.

The Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods are poorly understood in northeastern Iberia. Most of the information comes from the sepulchral structures rather than habitat settlements. The high number of individuals usually recovered from this types of collective burial spaces, together with the low number of direct radiocarbon dates available on them, forces us to be cautious and consider all the studied assemblages as belonging to the so-called Late Neolithic-Chalcolithic time period. To evaluate human dietary patterns of the Late Neolithic-Chalcolithic populations from the northeast of Iberia, stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis was carried out on 78 humans and 32 faunal bones from Cova de la Guineu (Font-rubi, Barcelona) and Cueva de Abauntz (Arraitz, Navarra), both of them sepulchral sites. Results show a common dietary pattern in both sites, indicating an homogeneous protein diet based on C3 terrestrial resources and no isotopic evidence of the consumption of C4 plants. Only one individual from Cueva de Abauntz, who directly dates to the first moments of the use of the cave as a burial place, suggests a different protein intake. The inter-population analysis shows a significant difference between both human and faunal δ13C values, suggesting an environmental influence on the isotope values depending on the geographic location. This effect should not be discarded and always assessed with baseline isotopic values in future studies at each area of Iberia and for different chronological moments.

Urban cemeteries’ potential as sites for cultural encounters

Population increase has drawn attention to the need in cities for easily accessible and attractive public spaces that will promote interaction regardless of gender, age, ethnicity and religious belief. This paper focuses on the role urban cemeteries play in a culturally and religiously diverse society. Norway is described as an increasingly secularised society. Immigration and transmigration, on the other hand, have brought a revived interest in religion and interreligious interaction. We explore two questions that relate to the cemetery as a public shared urban space: The first concerns the need for communities of all faiths and none to access burial space that meets their need. The second relates to the appropriateness of using cemetery as amenity space in a multicultural context. Diverse qualitative methods have been used; a focus group interview with participants from different religious and life-philosophy communities, interviews with key informants representing various religious communities and with visitors in two cemeteries in Oslo in 2014. The findings imply that there is a commonality that bridges differences: sharing human compassion. These sites have a potential in stimulating intercultural and interreligious encounters. Their special character as open shared urban sites can increase understanding and acceptance of each other’s difference and hereby render strangeness and differences harmless.

The Other Dead. An Ethnohistorical Approach to Religious Diversity in the Spanish Cemeteries

Cemeteries become social spaces where many symbolic meanings converge both in their material and immaterial dimensions, and perhaps above all, in their expression of communities and their construction of identities and otherness. This article explores how religious diversity has found its place within Spanish cemeteries. Although this debate is linked to contemporary immigration and the religious groups it has brought, religious diversity has challenged Spanish funerary customs for a long time. As we will argue in this article, the debates around where to put the “other dead” are an inherent part of funerary heritage in Spain. By looking at four spaces dedicated to the burial of non-Catholics who died in Spain, we will attempt to show how some symbolic and identity-based constants related to the separation of graves persist today and how Spanish society is opening up to considering burial spaces as part of a common heritage.

Transformation of burial space in the cities of Northern Illyricum during the Late Antiquity

Das nördliche Illyricum mit seinem langen Donaulimes und Grenzstädten war von den Einfällen und Ansiedlungen der Westgoten und Ostrogothen sowie den Wanderungen der Alanen und Hunnen stark betroffen. Diese Einflüsse gipfelten in den hunnischen Einfällen der Jahre 441 und 443. Die Standorte der spätrömischen Nekropolen in den ehemaligen Wohngebieten weisen auf das Schrumpfen großer Stadtkerne im 4. Jahrhundert hin, was auch durch den Rückgang der städtischen Bevölkerung in den großen Städten entlang der nördlichen Grenze des Imperiums veranschaulicht wird. Nach den Beweisen von Sirmium, Singidunum, Margum, Viminacium und Naissus im Inneren des Balkans war die Besiedlung der Barbaren nicht überall von gleicher Dauer und Intensität. Besonders in Singidunum und Viminacium, teilweise auch in Sirmium kann man die materielle Nachlassenschaft der donauländischen germanischen Stämme (Goten, Gepiden, Sueben usw.) aus dem 5. – besonders der zweiten Hälfte – und 6. Jahrhundert studieren. Die Gräber aus dem 6. Jahrhundert enthielten Analogien aus westlichem und nordgermanischem Milieu. Obwohl wir über die frühbyzantinische Bautätigkeit in und um Viminacium oder Singidunum nicht viel wissen und andere archäologische Spuren nicht aussagekräftig sind, weisen die Bestattungssitten und Funde von römischer Provenienz darauf hin, dass man die Einwohner, die die Neuankömmlinge in den Städten angetroffen haben, nicht außer Acht lassen darf. Die grundlegende und gleichzeitig am schwierigsten zu beantwortende Frage ist, inwieweit ihre Ansiedlung die ethnische Zusammensetzung der Städte im nördlichen Illyricum verändert haben kann. Die Untersuchung der Lage der Friedhöfe, der Bestattungssitten und der materiellen Kultur bietet einen grundlegenden Einblick in die turbulenten Veränderungen im Leben der einst großen städtischen Zentren, die bald aufgegeben und dem Zerfall überlassen werden sollten.