ABSTRACT
Cremation is a complex and variable fiery technology. Across the human past and present, fire has been variously deployed to transform the dead in a range of spatial and social contexts. Often operating together with other disposal methods, cremation has risen and fallen in popularity in association with many shifts in mortuary practice since the Stone Age (Cerezo-Román & Williams 2014; Williams et al. 2017). Yet ‘cremation’ is far more than just the fiery dissolution of the human cadaver: in the human past and present it is often part of a multi-staged mortuary process that can afford a range of distinctive spatial and material possibilities for the translation and curation of the ‘cremains’ or ‘ashes’ together with a range of other material cultures and substances. By rendering cadavers fragmented, shrunken, and distorted, burning bodies not only denies decomposition and speeds corpse transformation, it renders the dead portable and partible. In a range of subsequent post-cremation practices and beliefs, ‘ashes’ from pyres can be considered a versatile mnemonic and numinous substance which might be consigned to graves and tombs, but also readily strewn over land and water or integrated into above-ground architectures and portable material cultures. Hence, not only does cremation involve fiery transformation, it facilitates the creation of varied and distinctive landscapes of death and memory through the deposition and commemoration of the dead in which ashes facilitate remembering and forgetting through their presence and their staged absence.
