Lecture | Barge Forum
Breaking and making the ancestors
- Date
- Saturday 14 November 2026
- Time
- Location
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- Grotiuszaal (A0.51)
Making sense of the inconspicuous 99% of urnfield graves (ca. 1300 – 400 BCE)
In the second millennium BCE, a major shift in funerary practices takes place across Europe. Where at the beginning of the millennium most people were still being inhumed, at the end of the millennium (the Late Bronze Age) most people are now being cremated before interment in extensive cemeteries also known as ‘urnfields’.
Urnfield graves are traditionally interpreted as representing a simple funerary tradition by egalitarian peasant societies. However, when closer attention is being paid to these seemingly simple graves, a whole wealth of practices can still be distilled from the tacit bones deposited in urnfield graves hinting at complex stories about how in the Bronze Age world people, objects and places were strongly intertwined.