Death and the Body in Bronze Age Europe: From Inhumation to Cremation

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Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (University of Cambridge) Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Death and the Body in Bronze Age Europe

From Inhumation to Cremation

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (University of Cambridge), Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

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English

Cambridge University Press
05 January 2023

European history; Ancient history: to c 500 CE; Archaeology; Worship, rites & ceremonies

This volume offers new insights into the radical shift in attitudes towards death and the dead body that occurred in temperate Bronze Age Europe. Exploring the introduction and eventual dominance of cremation, Marie-Louise Stig Sørenson and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury apply a case-study approach to investigate how this transformation unfolded within local communities located throughout central to northern Europe. They demonstrate the deep link between the living and the dead body, and propose that the introduction of cremation was a significant ontological challenge to traditional ideas about death. In tracing the responses to this challenge, the authors focus on three fields of action: the treatment of the dead body, the construction of a burial place, and ongoing relationships with the dead body after burial. Interrogating cultural change at its most fundamental level, the authors elucidate the fundamental tension between openness towards the 'new' and the conservative pull of the familiar and traditional.

By: Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (University of Cambridge), Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 262mm, Width: 185mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 650g
ISBN: 9781009247399
ISBN 10: 1009247395
Pages: 350
Publication Date: 05 January 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

1. Introduction: changing practices and perception of the body; 2. A brief history of urns, urnfields and burials in the Urnfield Culture; 3. Theoretical framework; 4. The Bronze Age: setting the scene; 5. The changing Bronze Age body – introduction of case studies; 6. The treatment of the body: compatibility and divergence; 7. The construction of graves: coherence and variations; 8. After the burial: prolonged engagement with the body; 9. Conclusions: on the nature of change in burial practices.

Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen is Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. She has made important contributions to the scholarship on the European Bronze in a range of topics, including dress, creativity, the construction of identities, and the role of 'things.' Katharina Rebay-Salisbury is Research Group Leader at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She specializes in interdisciplinary approaches to analysis of Bronze and Iron Age burials. She was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for her project 'The value of mothers to society.'

Reviews for Death and the Body in Bronze Age Europe: From Inhumation to Cremation

'The (renewed) focus on the agency of the (dead) body is refreshing indeed and I think that Stig S�rensen and Rebay-Salisbury have taken an important step towards a new interpretative paradigm. This has been achieved by not only attributing agency to the dead body but, in my view, even more so by attributing agency to local communities by not just seeing them as the passive recipients of new ideas coming from elsewhere. It will be interesting to use their book as a thinking platform in its own right for more detailed and comparative research in the years to come.' Arjan Louwen, Antiquity