Nineteenth-century Brazil underwent transformations in its funerary practices, shifting from burials inside churches to the interment of the dead in a new resting place: the cemetery. In Brazilian necropolises, new rituals, symbols, spatial arrangements, materialities, and perspectives on death and the deceased were developed, while certain practices also continued. Recife, located in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, was one of the first cities to implement this new model for the place of the dead, […]

Cemeteries are multidimensional cultural and spatial entities where memory, architecture, and ritual converge. In the Greek context, they reveal a dual nature that reflects both monumental heritage and living social practice. Urban cemeteries, often inactive within the expanding city, function as ‘urban voids of memory’. Despite their extraordinary wealth of funerary sculpture and architectural expression, they frequently remain isolated enclaves or as repositories of past social and religious values but detached from contemporary daily life. By contrast, […]

This paper considers cast iron within the context of commemoration using the author’s field data and also that from the archive on cast iron grave markers – CIGMs – created by the late amateur archaeologist (a professional pharmacist) Tony Yoward, assisted by his wife Mary, and now housed at the Ironbridge Museum Archives. Cast iron monuments could be made from one or more components, but most were single pieces and could be elaborately decorated or very plain. […]

Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, evaluates the sufficiency of public amenities in their current state and in comparison with demographic projections to 2050. An update to the Prague Population and Public Amenities Forecast 2023-2050 was released in 2024, and an update for 2024-2050 is now being worked on. This project includes an assessment of the sufficiency of the funeral infrastructure to meet the current and future needs of the city. This relates in particular to the sufficiency of grave space capacity in cemeteries, […]

The commercial deathcare industry, which emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades around 1900, faced reputational challenges and public criticism since its inception. In many ways, funerals were a ‘taboo market’ and industry professionals soon saw the need to develop strategies to ‘legitimize’ their businesses. This paper analyses comparatively the marketing and publicity efforts by German and U.S.-American funeral firms throughout the twentieth century. While they faced many similar challenges (e.g. critiques of immoral profiteering, […]

Historic cemeteries are multi-use sites with many different audiences engaging with them in a multitude of ways and there has been some work exploring who these audiences might be. A number of cemeteries in the UK now have champions or support network: a Friends-of group, a Trust, a volunteer network, or someone with in the owning local authority who work hard to promote the site. However, what is less clear whether these champions are aware of who is engaging at a site level and why. […]

Père Lachaise, the first garden cemetery, which opened outside Paris in 1804, was created in response to changing attitudes to death and overcrowding of Parisian burial grounds. This new form of sacred landscape became successful and was imitated in Europe and North America. Highgate Cemetery in North London opened in 1839 and was compared at the time to Père Lachaise, alongside other British cemeteries. This paper examines the landscape development of these two cemeteries up to 1914 and assesses how directly the Père Lachaise ‘model’ was applied at Highgate. […]

As a form of tourism that gradually emerged at the beginning of this century, cemetery tourism was first accepted by the general public in China in the form of visiting the imperial tombs, which is a special form of cemetery tourism. Since the 1980s, with the development of Chinese archaeology, many archaeological sites have been excavated and converted into museums, which still attract a large number of tourists. Meanwhile, as an important base for patriotic education, […]

Willesden Jewish Cemetery (est. 1873) is one of Britain’s most significant Jewish cemeteries, with some 29,000 interments, including numerous figures of cultural, religious and civic importance. Traditionally regarded as a space of private mourning, the cemetery underwent a major transformation through a National Lottery Heritage Fund – supported project (2015–2020), repositioning it as a site of public heritage, community memory, environmental sustainability, public open space and learning. Today, Willesden Jewish Cemetery is a hidden gem in North West London, […]

Cemeteries represent a unique aspect of a country’s heritage, encompassing various dimensions of cultural, historical, and social significance. More than many other forms of heritage, cemeteries often reflect what can be described as ‘heritage from below’. This paper examines cemeteries in the borderlands of the Czech Republic, specifically the region historically known as the Sudetenland. Before the Second World War, this area was predominantly inhabited by Germans, most of whom were expelled and replaced by Czech settlers after the war. […]

Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground forcing people to exhume their family members. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese funeral parlours and cemeteries, anthropologist and mortician Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates that as part of a large shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled ‘Protestant’ Buddhism. […]

Cholera first appeared in Britain in 1831, originating from India, where it had spread across Europe during a time of increasing global mobility. Subsequent outbreaks of cholera occurred throughout the nineteenth century, most notably in 1848-49. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 marked a culmination of a century of infectious disease and subsequent burial reform. These diseases not only claimed countless lives, but they also overwhelmed local authorities and an infant and overstretched burial industry. Somewhat out of necessity, […]

The paper attempts a socio-political study of coffin-less burial practices adopted by two Catholic churches in the district of Alappuzha, Kerala. The paper argues that the practice reterritorializes and deterritorializes the contemporary churchyard scene while also examining its scope of expansion as a sustainable practice. The Kerala Catholic Church has traditionally relied on coffin burials, where coffins of varying quality and wood were used, typically as an indicator of social status. However, the increasing plastic content in the materials has hampered the decaying process of the body, […]

This presentation reflects on a three-year collaboration (2023–25) between the Metropolitan Cemetery Board and the School of Design at Rockingham Regional Memorial Park. Here, Master of Landscape Architecture students developed innovative masterplans addressing contemporary challenges of cemetery design, memory, and memorialisation through research, fieldwork, mapping, and design exploration. Harkening back to the elemental origins of Landscape Architecture as a discipline, students engaged with landform as well as the intersection between future ecology and existential inquiry, to create personalised designs underpinned by creativity and scholarly rigor. […]

To what extent was cremation practised among the Bradford Reform Jewish community? What role did social class and migrant status play in shaping Jewish cremation rates? How did the practice of cremation among the Bradford Reform Jewry and Berlin’s Jewish communities shape the topography of their cemeteries? Previous studies of the rise of cremation among Jewish and non-Jewish Germans have overlooked the German Jewry in the diaspora. Therefore, this paper provides new insight into the ongoing dialogue between migrants and their country of origin by conducting a transnational study of cremation. […]

The functions and tasks of cemeteries, especially urban cemeteries, have changed fundamentally in recent decades. In addition to the former almost exclusive functions of burial, memorialisation and cultural history, functions linked to the relatively large green areas of urban park cemeteries have been developed, and city dwellers have started to use cemeteries in a similar way to parks (see recreational and tourist use), which has also had an impact on the operation of cemeteries. In our previous research, […]

The functions of cemeteries have been altered over the past decades. Urban growth, climate change and covid have fundamentally changed the way we think about cemeteries. In our previous research, we found that the primary function of cemeteries (burial place, memorial site) has not changed, but the secondary (green infrastructure, climate protection, cultural heritage protection) and tertiary functions (education, tourism, recreation, community service) have emerged. Multifunctional use and the enhancement of these functions require that cemeteries collect data related to each of these fields, […]

Europe has been the arena for various armed conflicts over the centuries, including two called world wars. As a consequence of these armed conflicts, it was and is also the place where we are confronted with the location of many war cemeteries and individual and mass graves. These places are the burial grounds for the country’s citizens on whose territory they are located, the citizens of allied countries, and the citizens of those countries with which the armed conflict took place. […]

Belief in ghosts is often thought of as a relic of the past—an outmoded belief linked to the traditional cultures of rural China.  But ghost stories are commonplace in Hong Kong and other large Chinese cities and evidence of the fear of ghosts can be found in the ways that modern urban people treat death, funeral homes, and cemeteries. This talk analyses belief in ghosts as a facet of modern, urban living. I suggest that traditional Chinese beliefs about ghosts have transformed rather than diminished as China has urbanized, […]

The origins, rediscovery, and preservation of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan represents a multi-layered view of the experience of people of African descent in the area, from enslaved and free black people in the colonial era to late 20th and early 21st century African Americans who became involved and invested in the discovery, protection, and preservation of this important site. Lower Manhattan in New York City is a palimpsest of the history of European conquest, […]