Death is a transition. Societies past and present have created suites of practices that help us navigate this universal experience. But what happens when we change how we treat dead bodies? In Death and the Body in Bronze Age Europe: From Inhumation to Cremation, coauthors Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury seek to understand how mortuary practices change and what these changes in the treatment of bodies from death to burial and beyond mean for past societies. On the surface, this book engages with a particular phenomenon: the shift from inhumation to cremation in the second and first millennia BC in central and northern Europe. More deeply, this book presents a broader approach to understanding changing cultural practices in the past. As quickly becomes clear, there is no single, unidirectional shift from inhumation to cremation across Bronze Age Europe. Instead, the authors focus on the contexts and consequences of changing mortuary practices. The book examines sites, regions, and periods for which there is evidence of multiple ways of treating the body after death. Through a focus on time, process, and practice, this book makes a case for why transformations in treating the body after death are central to understanding past societies.

This book is organized into nine chapters. In chapter 1, the authors lay out its aims, approaches, and structure. They argue that it is more important to focus on the diversity in practices of treating bodies than on specific beliefs, because death is a central context in which conceptualizations of the body and social relationships are worked out. In chapter 2, the authors shift to a historiography of cremations and their importance within the German tradition of European archaeology. This chapter highlights two contradictory aspects of cremations. First, cremation has been at the center of European archaeological approaches since its inception, from defining archaeological cultures like the “Urnfield Culture” to models of change and spread through diffusion and migration. Second, cremation has been overlooked as a complex multistage phenomenon of death. Chapter 3 explores in detail the theoretical framework introduced in chapter 1. The authors situate their work within mortuary archaeology traditions that emphasize the importance of the body, the material entanglements in which mortuary practices are embedded, and the importance of understanding mortuary practices as a process and a set of steps that help transform the body from life to death. These steps have temporality, they occur in space, and they leave material traces. This framework sets up the case studies as explorations of these issues.

In chapter 5, the authors provide details on the eight multiscalar case studies that they draw on for their synthetic analyses in chapters 6–8. The case studies focus on the corridor in central Europe from Hungary in the south, through Germany, to Denmark in the north. The authors acknowledge that these case studies are more illustrative than exhaustive of the processes by which cremation was introduced across Europe. Each case study was selected for its potential insights into understanding the diverse ways in which the transition from inhumation to cremation was experienced.

The next three chapters draw on the case studies to explore three stages of mortuary practices: the treatment of the body, the construction of graves and burying the body, and engagement with the body after burial. Dividing cremation practices into multiple stages, each with its own materiality, spatial dimension, and temporality, the authors identify substantial variation in cremation practices and suggest different motivations for different communities across Europe. For example, Vatya and Encrusted Ware communities in the Middle Bronze Age Carpathian Basin used different cremation processes to mark cultural identities that were different from each other and from those in contemporary and neighboring groups that practiced inhumation. Alternatively, in northwest Germany cremation was a venue for showing off social and economic connections to neighboring regions where distinctive cremation and mound-building practices were common. The authors identify links within cremation practices to earlier mortuary practices, suggesting that the shift to cremation was part of a continuity and not a full rupture with the past. They argue that communities often spent several generations experimenting with new forms of treating the body, constrained by previous notions of the body, before these new practices resulted in a broader change. In their conclusion, the authors argue for a process of change that includes multiple pathways of the shift that must be considered across different scales.

This book is an important contribution to the mortuary archaeology tradition in Europe and will be of interest to archaeologists dealing with changing mortuary practices in other world areas. Although it does not engage deeply with emerging archaeological and bioarchaeological scientific approaches in the study of cremations, it will be an important companion to future research in this area.