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This volume addresses the relationship between archaeologists and the dead, through the many dimensions of their relationships: in the field (through practical and legal issues), in the lab (through their analysis and interpretation), and in their written, visual and exhibitionary practice—disseminated to a variety of academic and public audiences. Written from a variety of perspectives, its authors address the experience, effect, ethical considerations, and cultural politics of working with mortuary archaeology. Whilst some papers reflect institutional or organizational approaches, others are more personal in their view: creating exciting and frank insights into contemporary issues that have hitherto often remained “unspoken” among the discipline. Reframing funerary archaeologists as “death-workers” of a kind, the contributors reflect on their own experience to provide both guidance and inspiration to future practitioners, arguing strongly that we have a central role to play in engaging the public with themes of mortality and commemoration, through the lens of the past. Spurred by the recent debates in the UK, papers from Scandinavia, Austria, Italy, the US, and the mid-Atlantic, frame these issues within a much wider international context that highlights the importance of cultural and historical context in which this work takes place.

The fiery transformation of the dead is replete in our popular culture and Western modernity's death ways, and yet it is increasingly evident how little this disposal method is understood by archaeologists and students of cognate disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In this regard, the archaeological study of cremation has much to offer. Cremation is a fascinating and widespread theme and entry-point in the exploration of the variability of mortuary practices among past societies. Seeking to challenge simplistic narratives of cremation in the past and present, the studies in this volume seek to confront and explore the challenges of interpreting the variability of cremation by contending with complex networks of modern allusions and imaginings of cremations past and present and ongoing debates regarding how we identify and interpret cremation in the archaeological record. Using a series of original case studies, the book investigates the archaeological traces of cremation in a varied selection of prehistoric and historic contexts from the Mesolithic to the present in order to explore cremation from a practice-oriented and historically situated perspective.

Archaeologists have long acknowledged the absence of a regular and recurrent burial rite in the British Iron Age, and have looked to rites such as cremation and scattering of remains to explain the minimal impact of funerary practices on the archaeological record. Pit-burials or the deposit of disarticulated bones in settlements have been dismissed as casual disposal or the remains of social outcasts. In Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain, Harding examines the deposition of human and animal remains from the period - from whole skeletons to disarticulated fragments - and challenges the assumption that there should have been any regular form of cemetery in prehistory, arguing that the dead were more commonly integrated into settlements of the living than segregated into dedicated cemeteries. Even where cemeteries are known, they may yet represent no more than a minority of the total population, so that other forms of disposal must still have been practised. A further example of this can be found in hillforts which, in addition to domestic and agricultural settlements, evidently played an important role in funerary ritual, as secure community centres where excarnation and display of the dead may have made them a potent symbol of identity. The volume evaluates the evidence for violent death, sacrifice, and cannibalism, as well as age and gender distinctions, and associations with animal burials, and reveals that ‘formal’ cemetery burial or cremation was for most regions a minority practice in Britain until the eve of the Roman conquest.