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The book studies Neolithic burial in Britain by focussing primarily on evidence from caves. It interprets human remains from forty-eight Neolithic caves and compares them to what we know of Neolithic collective burial elsewhere in Britain and Europe. It provides a contextual archaeology of these cave burials, treating them as important evidence for the study of Neolithic mortuary practice generally. It begins with a thoroughly contextualized review of the evidence from the karst regions of Europe. It then goes on to provide an up-to-date and critical review of the archaeology of Neolithic funerary practice. This review uses the ethnographically documented concept of the ‘intermediary period’ in multi-stage burials to integrate archaeological evidence, cave sedimentology and taphonomy. Neolithic caves and environments and the dead bodies within them would also have been perceived as active subjects with similar kinds of agency to the living. The book demonstrates that cave burial was one of the earliest elements of the British Neolithic. It also shows that Early Neolithic cave burial practice was very varied, with many similarities to other Neolithic burial rites. However, by the Middle Neolithic, cave burial had changed and a funerary practice which was specific to caves had developed.
3981 Churchyard and cemetery:Layout 1 3/7/13 08:46 Page 35 2 Burial in 1850: national and local contexts It is always tempting to view the beginning of any research period as a static point from which substantial change then takes place. No such claim is made here. Even from the 1820s, burial provision was in flux. Early in the decade, the economic viability of the joint-stock cemetery format had been firmly proved by the establishment of cemeteries in Manchester and Liverpool, and from the earliest years of Queen Victoria’s reign cemeteries were becoming
6 Burial or resurrection? Modernisation and marginalisation (1984–92) Just outside Carcassonne at 10 p.m. on 20 April 1984, around 100 ‘wine commandos’ gathered in the car park of a Leclerc supermarket.1 The swelling crowd was soon spotted in the darkness by the store’s night watchman. Concerned, he tried to challenge them. Their response, sporting balaclavas and with weapons in hand, was a gruff warning that the guard should disappear and lock up his guard dogs. No sooner had he retreated than the hooded men advanced on the empty store.2 With iron bars they
3981 Churchyard and cemetery:Layout 1 3/7/13 08:47 Page 284 9 ‘Being desirous of avoiding a burial board’1: the churchyard as cemetery The previous chapter has indicated how far statutory civil agencies prevaricated over the need to meet demand for additional burial space in rural areas. In central North Riding, all tiers of local government tended to look to the parochial church council to address any shortage of burial provision. Accordingly, churchyard extension was remarkably common in this area during the twentieth century. Indeed, there were at least
Battlefields, burials and the English Civil Wars Chapter 1 Battlefields, burials and the English Civil Wars Ian Atherton T he idea that ‘military care’ extends beyond death to the treatment of the war dead is not new, though the forms it has taken have varied over time. Roger Boyle’s 1677 military treatise advised a victorious general to look after the wounded and prisoners, and see ‘his Dead honourably buried’. Similar ideas can be found in a number of sixteenth-century military manuals, and can be traced back at least as far as the Graeco-Roman world.1
During the Second World War and its aftermath, the legend was spread that the Germans turned the bodies of Holocaust victims into soap stamped with the initials RIF, falsely interpreted as made from pure Jewish fat. In the years following liberation, RIF soap was solemnly buried in cemeteries all over the world and came to symbolise the six million killed in the Shoah, publicly showing the determination of Jewry to never forget the victims. This article will examine the funerals that started in Bulgaria and then attracted several thousand mourners in Brazil and Romania, attended by prominent public personalities and receiving widespread media coverage at home and abroad. In 1990 Yad Vashem laid the Jewish soap legend to rest, and today tombstones over soap graves are falling into decay with new ones avoiding the word soap. RIF soap, however, is alive in the virtual world of the Internet and remains fiercely disputed between believers and deniers.
Just as the ‘system’ for death registration described in Chapter 7 gave the outward impression that the forced, slave and less-than-slave labourers who died on Alderney were treated in a dignified fashion, so too did the burial procedures that followed. The Germans were keen to suggest that the corpses of all of those who died were buried in an ordered fashion within the official marked cemeteries and that no mass graves or further unmarked burials exist on the island. 1 Official histories of the
Based on a study of intersecting French archives (those of the Val de Grâce Hospital, the Service Historique de la Défense and the Archives Diplomatiques), and with the support of numerous printed sources, this article focuses on the handling of the bodies of French soldiers who died of cholera during the Crimean War (1854–56). As a continuation of studies done by historians Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, the aim here is to consider how the diseased corpses of these soldiers reveal both the causes and circumstances of their deaths. Beyond the epidemiological context, these dead bodies shed light on the sanitary conditions and suffering resulting from years of military campaigns. To conclude, the article analyses the material traces left by these dead and the way that the Second Empire used them politically, giving the remains of leaders who died on the front lines of the cholera epidemic a triumphant return to the country and a state funeral.