Cremation and the Archaeology of Death.

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing archaeological attention devoted to the information that can be extracted from cremated human remains, with a proliferation of conference sessions, edited volumes, and publications designed to bridge gaps between method, theory, and interpretation. In Cremation and the Archaeology of Death, Jessica Cerezo-Román, Anna Wessman, and Howard Williams expand on the 2011 Society for American Archaeology session and subsequent Amerind Foundation seminar that also led to the publication of Transformation by Fire: The Archaeology of Cremation in Cultural Context (Kuijt, Quinn, and Cooney, 2014). The new edited volume builds on these earlier discussions, incorporating themes and participants from a follow-up session at the 2012 conference of the European Association of Archaeologists. Unsurprisingly, the editors’ stated intention is to assemble a collection of chronologically wide-ranging studies with an explicitly European focus, with northern Europe and Britain and Ireland receiving the most scholarly attention. Similarly, while the periods covered range from the Mesolithic to the present day, the majority of case studies examine either late prehistory or the Anglo-Saxon period.