CREMATION VS. INHUMATION: MODELING CULTURAL CHANGES IN FUNERARY PRACTICES FROM THE MESOLITHIC TO THE MIDDLE AGES IN BELGIUM USING KERNEL DENSITY ANALYSIS ON¹⁴C DATA

Abstract

The adoption of a new funerary ritual with all its social and cognitive meanings is of great importance to understanding social transformations of past societies. The first known occurrence of cremation in the territory corresponding to modern Belgium dates back to the Mesolithic period. From the end of the Neolithic onward, the practice of cremation was characterized by periods in which this rite was predominant and periods of contractions, defined by a decrease in the use of this funerary ritual. This paper aims to quantify such phenomenon for the first time by modeling discontinuities in burial practices through kernel density analysis of 1428 radiocarbon (14C) dates from 311 archaeological sites located in Belgium from the Mesolithic to the Middle Ages. Despite possible taphonomic and sampling biases, the results highlight the existence of periods with a large uptake of cremation rite followed by periods of contractions; such discontinuities took place in correlation with changes in the socio-economical structure of local communities, as, for example, during the later Middle Bronze Age and at the end of the Roman Period.

Is it hot enough? A multi-proxy approach shows variations in cremation conditions during the Metal Ages in Belgium

“…1200-800 BCE), cremation seems to be the predominant funeral rite, but it was already used on a large scale from the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) (ca. 1800-1200 BCE) onwards Capuzzo et al 2020). Both the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (EIA) are characterised by urnfield cemeteries and the adoption of cremation as a pan-European phenomenon (Barceló et al 2014;Capuzzo & Barceló 2015).…”

Final Neolithic and Bronze Age Funerary Practices and Population Dynamics in Belgium, the Impact of Radiocarbon Dating Cremated Bones

“…The first two were produced using the OxCal tool KDE_Plot and aimed at testing if the new dating campaign managed to fill the temporal gaps detected in the previous study (Capuzzo et al 2020) Four KDE curves were modeled using the tool KDE_Model to infer changes in funerary practices and at the same time as a proxy to detect palaeodemographic variations between 3000 and 800 BC. The first one includes radiocarbon dates from Final Neolithic and Bronze Age inhumation burials in Belgium (Capuzzo et al 2020), two others gather 14 C dates from cremation deposits in burial mounds (barrows) and flat graves, respectively, and . In all the models the default values to N(0,1) and U(0,1) were used for the Kernel and factor in the OxCal code.…”

Bayesian 14C-rationality, Heisenberg Uncertainty, and Fourier Transform

“…Many papers have been published with approaches that need either shape correction of archaeological and environmental 14 C-histograms (e.g., Stolk et al 1994), summed calibrated distributions (e.g., Williams et al 2012), or else -more recently -for their Bayesian counterparts in the form of kernel density plots (Bronk Ramsey 2017;Feeser et al 2019;Loftus et al 2019;Capuzzo et al 2020;Mazzucco et al 2020). An idea common to all these approaches is that since we can relate the existence of certain peaks, troughs, or spikes in the diagrams to the calibration curve shape, we expect it should be possible to apply an appropriate correction to the histo- 3b).…”