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. […]

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, […]

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. […]

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. […]

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 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, […]

I examine trends in the commemoration of older adults over the age of 70 by analysing monumental commemoration rates in Cambridgeshire cemeteries from the period 1845-1925. With full access to a database of nearly 80,000 graves, an initial observation showed a lower rate of commemoration for the elderly compared to younger adults. Through historical documentation and basic summary statistics in SPSS, I investigate three hypotheses to attempt to explain these differential commemoration rates: a lack of psychological attachment to the elderly, […]

This communication delves into the process of identifying individuals who perished in disasters in Cameroon, focusing on two specific events: the Nsam fire on February 14, 1998, in Yaoundé, resulting in the loss of over 300 lives, and the Eséka train derailment on October 21, 2016, causing the death of more than 80 people. The study explores the various stages of recognizing the deceased and victims of the Nsam disaster, initially accused of being thieves before gaining national recognition marked by the declaration of a national day of mourning. […]