In this way, it is argued that the political structures, world-views and identities of kingdoms and communities were negotiated through the making and remaking of social memory. A wide range of studies have explored the roles and interactions between literacy and oral tradition in actively selecting and transforming the past in the light of contemporary socio-political needs. Early medieval memory can be regarded as a social and ideological, rather than psychological, phenomenon. How was the past perceived and created in early medieval Europe? Recent studies have discussed the dual roles of literacy and orality as ways by which the past was produced, reproduced and sometimes invented. This interpretation suggests new perspectives on the relationships between death, material culture and social memory in early medieval Europe. Combs (and other objects used to maintain the body's surface in life) served to articulate the reconstruction of the deceased's personhood in death through strategies of remembering and forgetting. The frequent discovery of combs in early medieval cremation burials can be explained by their mnemonic significance in the post-cremation rite. This paper argues that mortuary practices can be understood as 'techno-logies of remembrance'. Such theories need to engage with broad cross-cultural themes and also remain sensitive to the considerable variety of mortuary procedures involving fire used at different times and in different places. Therefore, alongside increasingly refined methodologies for investigating burnt bones, it is argued that archaeologists need to redress this imbalance by developing explicit theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of cremation. This relative failure to adequately engage with the complexity and the variability of cremation practices across cultures seems connected to the fact that most of the theoretical debates and developments in mortuary archaeology have, until quite recently, been primarily geared to the investigation of unburned human remains. This chapter argues that in contrast to the rich and widespread evidence for cremation in the archaeological record, theoretical approaches in the archaeology of cremation have been relatively thin on the ground until very recently. How can we begin to understand and explain the changing significance of cremation in past societies? From many parts of the world and for many periods of human history from as early as the Upper Palaeolithic (Bowler et al., 1980) to recent centuries, archaeologists have uncovered and investigated material evidence for the use of fire as a means of transforming and disposing of the dead. NOTE: This is a modestly revised 2nd edition of my 2008 paper with the same title.
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