Since colonisation, Australia’s distance from perceived centres of European culture has been a defining feature of its local, national and international identity. Blainey comprehensively challenged the impact of Australia’s liminal position in the 1960s, and this misconception is still being readdressed. Studies demonstrate substantial cultural and material exchanges between Europe and colonial Australia. One understudied exchange is the transference of burial preferences, funeral customs, and funeral markers. Consequently, this paper draws on an ongoing project to present a brief history of the material and cultural exchange of memorial designs and structures between Britain and Australia during the Victorian period. […]

Inexorable growth has dramatically transformed the city-state of Singapore. From a modest colonial entrepot in the 1950s with a population of barely one million, despite its land scarcity, Singapore has expanded to embrace over 6 million residents today with a GDP per capita of over $80,000, one of the highest in the world. In that remarkable process, however, Singapore has lost over 90% of its cemeteries and graveyards, and with them, a large part of the natural resources that enveloped them, […]

This study examines the regulatory frameworks and landscape designs of burial grounds in contemporary Lithuania, focusing particularly on the legal documents and municipal regulations governing cemetery maintenance and development. While the majority of regulations target users of the graveyards, designers and administrators are afforded considerable latitude due to the absence of precise guidelines. This flexibility allows for diverse approaches to shaping burial landscapes across municipalities. Although the arbitrary planting of trees, bushes, and shrubs is permitted only upon request, […]

It is well-established that the majority of the dead were not commemorated, as supported by studies including the University of Leicester Graveyards Group (2012). The use of funerary monuments to mark graves and commemorate the dead gradually increased across the 18th and 19th centuries – but some of the deceased were better remembered than others. This paper posits we re-examine funerary monuments with a more critical eye and examine the inequalities present in their prose (or lack thereof). […]

The Norwegian Cremation Society celebrated the legalization of cremation as a facultative practice in Norway in 1898. This milestone was followed by an architectural competition in 1906, commissioned by the Society to find a suitable design for the country’s first purpose-built crematorium. Leaning on experiences from its international peers, the Society recognized the need for a balanced architectural expression that merged the vague concepts of appropriateness, modernity and tradition. This was essential in order to have the crematorium gain agency on its own and garner support for a changed view on death and funerals. […]

Following the Highgate Cemetery Act 2022, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust is able to extinguish rights of burial and to disturb human remains in Highgate Cemetery for the purpose of increasing the space for interments and for the conservation of the Cemetery. The Trust may also use appropriately or remove altogether from the Cemetery memorials on such graves. Clearly Parliament recognised that change was necessary to ensure the sustainable future of the Cemetery, but in England the re-use of graves is not yet widely practised, […]

In September 1878, William Holland, the only remaining original member of the Holly Springs, Mississippi Yellow Fever Relief Committee, described the presence of the plague in his small town as, ‘living in the midst of the very garden of death’. According to available sources, this epidemic, which relentlessly swept across the state, claimed over four thousand citizens in five months, with the total number of cases exceeding sixteen thousand individuals. Although the pestilence was well-known in the region, […]

When Barthelemy Dagnan bought three plants of the Helichrysum Orientale (= immortelle) in 1815 at the market of Marseille (France) and planted them in his garden, he could not have guessed that in doing so he gave a new twist to the funeral and commemorative culture of the 19th century. The Helichrysum became the commemorative flower of 19th-century Europe and far beyond. As the natural flower disappeared from the economic scene, it remained in memory, well into the 20th century, […]

The Church of England have embarked on the largest systematic churchyard mapping project ever attempted. The CofE are working with surveying company AG Intl to produce digital maps of all their churchyards (approximately 17,5000 sites) showing the location of churchyard features, all extant monuments, and incorporating data from births, marriages and deaths registers. When completed these maps will be freely available online through the Church Heritage Record and open a wealth of new research avenues. Caring for God’s Acre have funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England to run a programme of public engagement alongside the mapping, […]

From the 1950s to the 1960s, China witnessed a significant transformation in private cemetery property rights. Historically, preceding the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the execution of land reform, the authorities implicitly sanctioned the transaction of lands designated for private cemeteries. The government upheld individual ownership or usufruct rights to these burial grounds, instilling confidence among Macao’s residents, who were under Portuguese colonial dominion, to buy or rent cemetery plots within mainland China. […]

This dissertation’s focus is finding evidence of grief for women who died in childbirth in the Victorian era. The grief and mourning practices of the era were researched, with extra focus on what was expected from masculine mourning of the husbands. The attributed identities, in life and in death, of these women and their place in society was also researched and parturition medical procedures of the time were called into question. This was accomplished by researching primary sources such as cemetery records, […]

As George Orwell already warned in the 1940s, ‘fascism’ is one the most used and misused – and least studied – words in the recent history of humanity; however, in no other country except Italy it can still make some sense. Vanished from History with the death of its founder, Benito Mussolini, and basically removed from the Italian political scene after the disappearance of the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano) in 1995, fascism nevertheless continues to exercise a fascination in small groups which, […]

The later 19th and early 20th century saw the erection of numerous opulent cemetery monuments which incorporated bronze sculpture. These ranged from single reliefs to substantial sculptures, such as the dramatic group at Brookwood Cemetery by George Wade to Lady Matilda Pelham-Clinton (d. 1892), in which a grief-stricken mourner weeps over a draped corpse while an angel hovers overhead. They have not been considered as a group before and are notable both for their aesthetic quality and for their special place in the fin de siècle British cemetery. […]

Someone dies in eastern Bangalore and happens to be Hindu, invariably Sowri Raja gets a call. Sowri Raja is the seventh-generation grave digger working and “living” in the Kalpalli Hindu burial ground. There has been an upgrade in the graveyard two decades ago. The city municipality has developed a high-tech crematorium which is managed by Sowri Raja’s brother Kutti. The front office of the cemetery is handled by Sathya, Sowri Raja’s daughter. Does it sound like a case of nepotism? […]

On March 11, 2011, the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Tohoku region resulted in the deaths and disappearances of over 22,000 people. The remains had to be managed through a process that included searching for and collecting the bodies, their systematic administrative registration, identification, and the return of their remains to the families for funeral procedures, specifically cremation, in accordance with Japanese funerary customs. However, in the Ishinomaki region, a major coastal city in the Miyagi prefecture, […]

Tamara Ingels will bring new and innovative insights on the role, interpretation and possibilities of intergenerational dialogue within our death care and managing (historic) cemeteries. Starting from her own practice as a cemetery consultant and cemetery guide/docent, she developed a set of practical techniques and educational ideas. These focus on an adequate methodology for the intergenerational dialogue in a cemetery context and on the impact of this method on lifelong learning strategies within these unique places. […]

During the two world wars, Britain’s wartime enemy lost their lives in all corners of the country. German soldiers and civilians died in internment camps from sickness, disease and wounds, while in the skies above, German airmen died in First World War Zeppelin raids and in even great numbers some 25 years later during the Battle of Britain. Yet there are very few signs of these large-scale losses today. Despite the enemy generally being buried near where they died, […]

The emergence of new disposition technologies such as electric cremation, CNG-based cremation, biomass-based gasifier cremation, and improved wood crematoria (IWC) have opened a new area of death and technology in India. However, in the contemporary science, technology, societies (STS) literature intersection between death, belief and technology is less explored. The socio-political, cultural and economic structure is different in both the countries, India and China. The Confucian belief influences traditional China while, Hindu belief influences disposition technologies in India. […]

Reading Old Cemetery and Newbury Newtown Road are two early examples of Victorian garden cemeteries set up in Berkshire before 1850. We consider them as sister cemeteries, not only as they are located in the same county, had similar priorities around public health and civic pride when they were setup but also share connections in terms of families or individuals buried in their sites. Both have active special interest volunteer groups and organise regular community engagement events. […]

This paper discusses the emergence of nature burial in the Netherlands by drawing attention to the politics of defining this practice. On the basis of qualitative interviews and the systematic mapping of nature burial sites, it discusses how is nature burial defined, and by whom? What practices are included and excluded by these definitions, and why? By tending to such questions, the paper draws attention to the often-overlooked politics of nature burial. As a ‘green’ or ‘natural’ death practice, […]