This presentation explores the cemetery as a site not only of remembrance, but of material transformation and ecological design. Drawing from my artistic research thesis Dressing for Decay, I investigate how garments made from biodegradable, biofabricated, and protein-based materials can actively participate in decomposition processes within natural burial contexts. Rather than treating the body as inert and the garment as a container, the work proposes the concept of the Garment-as-a-Body — a multispecies assemblage designed to decompose alongside the human it embraces. […]

Until now, GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and spatial analysis have been underutilised in the investigation of the development of extant historic cemeteries and their memorials. Using the main nineteenth-century cemeteries in Liverpool, UK, it is possible to explore how the material aspects of memorials affected, or were affected by, their location. The development of the cemeteries and the spatial organisation of memorials within them can reflect management style as well as personal choice, and comparing cemeteries reveals notable differences. […]

The cemetery chapel — also known as a funeral chapel (Latvian: kapliča) — is a distinctive type of building in Latvia, particularly in the historical region of Vidzeme (Livland) in the northeast. It combines two seemingly opposite functions. On the one hand, it is a utilitarian structure — a mortuary where the deceased were placed before burial. On the other, it has the qualities of a chapel, a sacred space for farewell rites. Symbolically, the chapel represents a threshold between life and death, […]

This study explores the potential of cremation as a land-conserving alternative to traditional cemeteries in Africa. Using a mixed-methods approach, we examine the environmental, cultural, and social implications of adopting cremation highlighting its potential to reduce land use, energy consumption, and environmental impact. Our findings suggest that cremation can reduce land use, energy consumption, and environmental impact. The research explores the intersection of death care, sustainability, and cultural heritage, providing insights into the benefits and challenges of cremation in the African context. […]

As climate change brings a greater frequency of extreme weather events, so cemeteries, churchyards and burial grounds alike face issues ranging from coffins floating in newly dug graves to floodwaters breaking open mausolea and dispersing bodies from their previously final resting places. Newspapers seize upon such events with great sensationalism, but this paper takes a more measured and pragmatic look at the technical, financial and emotional challenges flooding can bring. Floods can be caused by a range of mechanisms including pluvial, […]

Drawing on the anthropology of proximity, this paper examines the ethical, emotional and economic negotiations surrounding death and burial of patients who are medically referred from the Laccadive Islands to the Indian subcontinent in search of advanced healthcare. Death in the Lakshadweep archipelago unfolds within an entangled terrain of ecological precarity, political transformation, and enduring islandic Islamic traditions. For the Muslim-majority islanders, embalmment and post-mortem procedures are religiously discouraged, and the imperative for swift burial often prevents the return of the deceased to their homeland. […]

Vienna may have been the earliest European city to end churchyard burials and establish extra-mural cemeteries, seven of which were opened in 1740. Vienna may be said to have served as a testing ground for other innovations in cemetery management; in the 1780s the Emperor Joseph II instituted a programme of reform, transferring control of burial from the church to the state, and opening a new hygienic cemetery, St Mark’s, designed to be free from superstition and the cult of the dead. […]

Brompton Cemetery was opened in 1840 and like the other so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’ was owned by a private company with shareholders. Edwin Chadwick’s Metropolitan Interments Act 1850 nationalised the cemetery, which continues to remain under control of the state. In 1874 the first cremation took place at Woking in Surrey under the auspices of the Cremation Society of England. Desirous of establishing a crematorium in the London area, Brompton Cemetery was suggested, but a site was found at Golders Green. […]

The First World War was not only fought between the living, at times, it was also fought against the dead. Cemeteries were occasionally turned into battlegrounds where soldiers entrenched themselves among the deceased. Elsewhere, burial sites were blindly shelled and reduced to rubble by artillery fire. Alongside this mainly incidental damage, were also deliberate acts of desecration. Wooden crosses were kicked down, vaults forced open, headstones destroyed, latrines placed over graves, tombs looted, coffins broken open, […]

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. […]