Cremation and contemporary churchyards

35 CREMATION AND CONTEMPORARY CHURCHYARDS Howard Williams and Elizabeth Williams Williams, H. and Williams, E. 2019. Cremation and contemporary churchyards, in S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High, E. Koskinen-Koivisto (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. London: Routledge, pp. 367–383. Introduction Cremation is a complex and variable fiery technology. Across the human past and present, fire has been variously deployed to transform the dead in a range of spatial and social contexts. Often operating together with other disposal methods, cremation has risen and fallen in popularity in association with many shifts in mortuary practice since the Stone Age (Cerezo-Román & Williams 2014;Williams et al. 2017).Yet ‘cremation’ is far more than just the fiery dissolution of the human cadaver: in the human past and present it is often part of a multi-staged mortuary process that can afford a range of distinctive spatial and material possibilities for the translation and curation of the ‘cremains’ or ‘ashes’ together with a range of other material cultures and substances. By rendering cadavers fragmented, shrunken, and distorted, burning bodies not only denies decomposition and speeds corpse transformation, it renders the dead portable and partible. In a range of subsequent post-cremation practices and beliefs, ‘ashes’ from pyres can be considered a versatile mnemonic and numinous substance which might be consigned to graves and tombs, but also readily strewn over land and water or integrated into above-ground architectures and portable material cultures. Hence, not only does cremation involve fiery transformation, it facilitates the creation of varied and distinctive landscapes of death and memory through the deposition and commemoration of the dead in which ashes facilitate remembering and forgetting through their presence and their staged absence. This characterisation of cremation prompts the archaeological investigation of cremation in the present as well as the past. For this chapter we take this approach by addressing examples from the English county of Cheshire, and the Welsh county borough of Wrexham to reflect on broader tends in the Global West: how Christian churchyards have been adapted in response to the rise of cremation practices over the last century. We refer to these environments as ‘deathscapes’ to encapsulate the social, emotional, material, and spatial dimensions of cremation burials and memorials in churchyards (Maddrell & Sidaway 2010). By deathscapes, we refer not only to the individual cremation plaques and gravestones, and the burial plots in which they are situated, but also the networks of relationships (both planned and perhaps incidental) between cremation burials with other churchyard features, including gates, walls, paths, borders, inhumation graves, war memorials, and church buildings.We contend that through these spatial and material intersections, as much as the individual depositions and memorials themselves, cremation has increasingly configured social memory for mourners and churchyard visitors of the last half century. The creation, use, and reuse of specific arrangements of cremation memorials stage the presence and absence of the dead body (cf. Sørensen 2009), and thus show the tensions between diocesan rules and regulations, and choices negotiated by parochial 367 Howard Williams and Elizabeth Williams councils, church wardens, and local people regarding how their churchyard is managed and used (see also Rugg 2013a and b). As such, the patterns and the variability we encounter show the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century development of the churchyard as a site of memory. An archaeological approach to this theme can shed light on trends and variations hitherto unexplored by other disciplines who, as Julie Rugg (2013a) has rightly criticised, have tended to overlook the detailed and nuanced resistance to regulations through individual and group agency in churchyard use. Furthermore, she challenges the tendencies of researchers to equate the rise of cremation with a decline in the desire for monumental memorialisation (Rugg 2013a: 223). Tackling the material evidence from churchyards counters such characterisations, and paves the way for a new ‘contemporary archaeology of cremation’ in the churchyard that responds to recent arguments for foregrounding the material and spatial dimensions of death in modernity. In particular, it shows how a fine-grained archaeological perspective affords a detailed and contextual approach to death and memory in contemporary landscapes, which responds to sociological critiques with a single grand narrative about mortality in the modern world (e.g. Woodthorpe 2010a). Simultaneously, we provide a case study in how contemporary archaeologists can address global themes regarding memory and landscape through relatively small-scale local and regional investigations of mortuary environments (cf. Harrison & Schofield 2011). Background: cremation in the modern world Cremation re-emerged in Europe and North America in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and has risen inexorably in popularity over the last 150 years (Davies with Mates 2005: 432–473). Cremation today is often crudely caricatured as part of the ‘modernist’ project, and in particular owes much to developments in disposing of the dead in the post–Second World War era (Mytum 2004a: 164–165; Grainger 2005; Parsons 2005). For example, almost four in five people in the United Kingdom are now disposed of by cremation (Rugg 2013b: 340). Likewise, across much of the Global West as well as other parts of the world, under the technological, urban, demographic, economic, environmental, medical, and consumer trends and pressures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cremation has emerged as the dominant mode of disposal and commemoration practised by many different cultural and religious groups. The relationship between cremation and religion is complex and changing. Not only is there diversity within as well as between religious traditions in attitudes towards cremation, but the choice and manner of cremation is also influenced by a host of other social, cultural, economic, and political factors.Yet in general terms, while some major world religious traditions have been staunchly opposed to cremating the dead – notably Islam (Turner 2005: 271–273) and Judaism (Pursell 2005: 286–287) – many religious traditions have long preferred cremation (Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism). In Europe and elsewhere, Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches have staunchly support inhumation and discourage cremation (Davies with Mates 2005: xx; Newton 2005: 108–109), yet cremation has continued to rise in popularity in nations influenced by these traditions. Meanwhile Protestant Christian and secular nations have become the most cremation dominated (Davies with Mates 2005: xxi). For Catholics in the United Kingdom, cremation has been permitted since 1963, while Anglican attitudes have shifted and become increasingly positive towards cremation, mirroring the widespread popularisation of cremation from the 1950s onwards (Jupp 2005). Hence, cremation cross-cuts many religious traditions and is the choice disposal method for many who have no fixed or firm cultural or religious views on the afterlife. Reflecting both intense regulation over both the dead body and cemetery space, but also individual agency regarding the choice of disposal and memorial form, location, and elaboration (see Dawdy 2013; Anthony 2016; Williams & Wessman 2017), cremation is thus a global phenomenon of modernity. As such, it has participated in the emergence of new, complex, and distributed mortuary environments (e.g.Williams 2011a). Furthermore, cremation’s material impact on the landscape has augmented and transformed traditional cemeteries and churchyards, originally designed exclusively or primarily for the inhumed (unburned) disposal of corpses. 368 Cremation and contemporary churchyards Studying contemporary cremation As the dominant disposal method, cremation has been subject to interdisciplinary research from a range of historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives. These include exploring crematoria architecture and their gardens of remembrance (e.g. Davies 1996; Grainger 2005, 2010), cemeteries (Woodthorpe 2010a 2010 b, 2011), the relationship between cremation burials and the ‘traditional’ grave (Kellaher et al. 2005). Discussions have also focused on ash-scattering and memorialisation in the ‘new’ designed landscape and the countryside (e.g. Prendergast et al. 2006; Hockey et al. 2007; Kellaher & Worpole 2010; Kellaher et al. 2010). What can archaeology bring to such studies? Contemporary archaeology – exploring the material cultures and landscapes of modernity – is a burgeoning field of research. It deploys specifically archaeological methods and/or focuses attention on the testimony of material culture and landscapes to reveal processes and patterns in human societies (Harrison & Schofield 2011). While contemporary archaeologists have tackled a wide range of present-day environments and themes, from parks to council houses, most studies of the ‘contemporary past’ have largely eschewed mortuary environments with their attendant ethical challenges (Harrison 2011; Harrison & Schofield 2011; Graves-Brown et al. 2013).While not denying there are multiple ethical issues with interviewing and recording extant and still-used mortuary environments during fieldwork and writing, there is considerable potential for archaeological explorations of both below- and above-ground contemporary deathscapes (Williams 2011a and b; see also Anthony 2016). Indeed, it might be argued that archaeologists need to actively challenge and contextualise the perceived ‘taboo’ nature of contemporary mortuary environments for academic discussion (see also Woodthorpe 2010a), especially as the study of ‘past life’ to the exclusion of death is integral to the tropes of archaeology as a modernist project (cf. Harrison 2011). Hence, the absence of mortuary and commemorative traces from theoretical debates regarding the nature of archaeological investigations of the contemporary world reveals the struggles we continue to tackle in conceptualising the archaeologist’s theoretical and methodological toolkit for investigating today’s societies. In particular, the churchyard can be considered a deep memorial set of ‘surfaces’ constituted by generations of intercutting graves and memorials as well as the complex three-dimensional memorial space that is the church building itself, as well as an accumulating and fluctuating ‘assemblage’ of both living people (worshippers, mourners, and others) and material traces of past lives. A small range of archaeological researchers have begun to buck the life-focused trend of contemporary archaeology to explore the material and spatial dimensions, above and below ground, of later-twentiethand early-twenty-first-century death ways (notably Mytum 2004a and b; Sørensen & Bille 2008; Sørensen 2009; Corkill & Moore 2012; Rebay-Salisbury 2012; Dawdy 2013; Parker & McVeigh 2013; Anthony 2016).Within this research, cremation has been both directly and indirectly tackled, focusing on how crematoria operate in technological and ritual terms (Back Danielsson 2009; Oestigaard 2013), as well as how cremation has augmented and transformed Europe’s suburban cemeteries (Parker Pearson 1982; Anthony 2016; Williams & Wessman 2017). There have been discussions of relationships between ash-disposal and memorialisation in new environments, notably zoos and animal sanctuaries (Williams 2011a).1 Furthermore, cremation’s materialities and spatialities can be understood in relation to a wide range of cenotaphic memorial landscapes (e.g.Williams 2014). Indeed, the relationship between present-day cremation and the way we display cremation from the human past in modern museums sheds light on the role of archaeological and museological practices in engagements with mortality past and present (Williams 2016).2 Yet how might we apply these archaeological perspectives on cremation towards churchyards specifically? Despite the relatively greater distances of rural churchyards from crematoria (in contrast to municipal cemeteries) cremation has become an integral part of churchyard transformations in the later twentieth century. However, cremation’s impact on churchyards has been ignored in detail (see Rugg 2013a and b). To date, this specific dimension of cremation in late modernity has received limited material and spatial attention beyond a recognition that PCCs (parish county councils) often chose different memorial options 369 Howard Williams and Elizabeth Williams and regulation for cremation interments and scattering (e.g. Rugg 2013b: 346–348). This is where an archaeological perspective can help: focusing on the material and spatial arrangements of cremation practices and offering new perspectives on this phenomenon. The approach adopted here is therefore broadly framed in relation to recent trends in the archaeology of the post-medieval and contemporary past (see also Mytum 2004a;Williams 2011b; Anthony 2016) rather than the use of the present to provide a specific set of analogies for the interpretation of the human past (see Parker Pearson 1982; Downes 1999). Equally, the approach adopted is as much an extension of recent approaches to emotion, personhood, and social memory in mortuary archaeological research. Specifically, it can be considered in relation to the subfields of the archaeology of cremation (Cerezo-Román & Williams 2014; Williams et al. 2017) and the public archaeology and heritage of death and memory (Holtorf & Williams 2006; Giles & Williams 2016), as well as a contribution to the contemporary archaeology of death (see Anthony 2016). Archaeologists are, therefore, well placed to identify the complexity and variability of how the technology of cremation both facilitates and offers new opportunities for memorialisation in the most traditional of spaces: the churchyard. Previous research has explored the materialities and spatialities of Danish churchyards, including their ‘lawn cemeteries’ (Sørensen 2009) and of Swedish rural churchyards and their ‘minneslundar’ (gardens of remembrance) (Williams 2011c, 2012). For the United Kingdom, we have tackled how cremation plots constitute distinctive elements of churchyards to be studied and explored within public archaeology projects (Williams & Williams 2007). We now return to this phenomenon following years of conducting archaeological surveys of churchyards and field visits in Cheshire and north-east Wales.3 Archaeologists can readily identify themes, but also local variations, in considering the interplay of cremation-related spaces and practices in churchyards, thus challenging simplistic narratives about the rise of cremation in modernity. Rather than the rise of cremation and its memorial indices being seen as anonymous and amorphous: a weakening of the connection between body and landscape with ritual and mourners (Curl 2002; Worpole 2003: 183–187; Mytum 2004a: 164–165), this chapter looks at the intersectional agencies of diocesan regulations, parish councils and individual mourners to create a diverse range of new memorial environments. Likewise, the consistency and modesty of cremation memorials are also regarded as evidence of the strict regulatory control over how the dead are to be commemorated in twentieth-century societies (e.g. Mytum 2004b), and yet, as Rugg (2013a) clearly argues, this approach denies the agency of mourners to select and adapt the memorial choices available to them within capitalist consumerist societies in which death is often a money-making industry as well as a regulated civil service. In this regard, cremation is not simply associated with restricted disposal choices, on the contrary, cremation facilitates a wide range of new commemorative strategies, fuelled by new technologies and business initiatives.The memorial modesty and/or neglect associated with cremation is therefore not a symptom of those opting for cremation failing to memorialise per se or the triumph of regulation over individuality, but a shifting relationship between memory and material culture and the ongoing tension between regulation and individual/family strategies of commemorative expression and material consumption during death rituals. Within the diversity of ash disposal strategies associated with modern cremation, many may indeed choose to do nothing with the ashes or else have them disposed of in ephemeral ways outside the cemetery. For those choosing to deploy traditional churchyards, cremation promotes the extension and reuse of the environment, facilitating ongoing bonds with the dead and the places connected the living and the dead. Churchyards in this sense have a series of distinctive and evolving roles. Churchyard features and the church: cremation switchback Mytum (2004b) notes how historic churchyards often exhibit horizontal stratigraphy. Later gravestones are situated farther from the church in a regulated fashion, with many often located in one or more churchyard extensions.This applies to cases where extensions append the historic churchyard, and widespread examples 370 Cremation and contemporary churchyards where space is not available for such extensions and instead separate parochial cemeteries are established disconnected from the original yard. Cremation memorials support, but can also subvert, this spatial trend: a phenomenon I refer to as ‘cremation switchback.’ This refers to the opportunity afforded by cremation burial to reuse older – usually nineteenth-century – parts of the churchyard by recent cremation plots. Such plots often afford close proximities to the church building itself and other prominent ‘landmark’ features of the historic churchyard, such as sundials and First and Second World War memorials (see also Walls 2011). Cremation interments are shallow, and therefore, reoccupying such spaces need not disturb earlier inhumation graves located far deeper in the ground. Therefore, cremation memorials constitute a surface reuse: overlaying but not disrupting earlier graves. A good, modest-sized example of this trend is the cremation plot at St Peter’s, Delamere (Cheshire). Here, there is a hedged cremation burial plot that contains a patio of small, square cremation plaques of consistent grey colour dating to the 1980s and 2000s (Figure 35.1a). The plot is situated beside the path immediately south of the church. As well as proximity to the church and its principal south door, the memorials wrap around two nineteenth-century grave-slabs, so the respect for, and integration with, the existing, historic space is articulated.A memorial bench provides a place to reflect and look out over the cremation plot and the wider churchyard. The space is therefore between church and churchyard, situated in its own space. Figure 35.1 Cremation memorials beside medieval churches at (a) St Peter’s, Delamere (Cheshire), (b) and (c) St Mary’s, Chirk (Wrexham). Source: Photographs: Howard Williams (2009). 371 Howard Williams and Elizabeth Williams In further instances, the cremation switchback is complemented by further cremation plots established in the most recent churchyard extensions or parochial cemeteries. Such instances sometimes appear when the original cremation plot close to the church becomes full, but in other occasions the cremated dead are afforded contemporaneous options for location either beside the church or in the churchyard extension.The most elaborate example encountered is situated at the east end of St Bartholomew, Great Barrow church (Cheshire), where there is an ornate and enclosed rockery garden with a diversity of styles of memorials to the cremated dead dating to the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. These include headstones, horizontal plaques of different stone colour and shape, a bird bath, memorial trees, and rose bushes as well as memorials built into the front wall of the rockery.These are adjacent to the path running around the east end of the church and opposite a series of surviving nineteenth-century crosses, headstones, and chest tombs. Amidst the rockery, and operating as the focus of the cremation memorial, is a late nineteenth-century diminutive memorial to the daughter of the Rector of the parish. This space is accessed from the rest of the churchyard through a portal through a high hedge.This private, concealed space for the cremated dead, reusing the site of a child’s grave, therefore sits in close proximity to the church. The same relationship was observed at St Mary’s, Chirk (Wrexham) where cremation memorials are situated in an open lawned plot at the east end of the church and dating from the 1960s to the 2000s.This is augmented by a larger dedicated cremation burial plot in the churchyard extension from the mid-1970s to the 2000s, but clearly both locations have operated and been augmented in parallel (Figure 35.1b and c). In these instances, the church and its yard are revitalised with the condensed clustering of cremation memorials in multiple locations. Figure 35.1 (Continued) 372 Cremation and contemporary churchyards Figure 35.1 (Continued) Populating paths and walls Cremation memorials are often small, but through their location, arranged in rows or small plots, they might be prominent within churchyard spaces. Memorials from the 1980s to the present can be seen prominently interpolated within areas of surviving Victorian graves in many churchyards, as at All Saints, Gresford (Wrexham) and St James’, Christleton (Cheshire): in the latter case the plot was succeeded by more formalised cremation plots in the churchyard extension from the mid-2000s (Figure 35.2). 373 Howard Williams and Elizabeth Williams Figure 35.2 Cremation memorials in defined plots at St James’ Christleton (Cheshire). Source: Photograph: Howard Williams (2009). There are many further cases where cremation memorials interact with the layout of churchyards in a distinctive set of ways, filling in gaps too narrow for inhumation graves, and often situated alongside paths and/or beside walls.The cremated dead are thus connected to key routes of movement through the churchyard and to the church. At St Dunawd’s, Bangor on Dee (Wrexham), the main line of cremation memorials – largely consistent black headstones of standard height comparable to inhumation graves and dated from the late 1980s through to the early 2000s, flank the principal path on its west side from the lychgate towards the south door of the church (Figure 35.3a). Further cremation plaques are situated east of the church dating to the 2000s. 374 Figure 35.3 Cremation memorials beside paths at (a) St Dunawd’s, Bangor on Dee (Wrexham), (b) St Chad’s, Farndon (Cheshire), and (c) St Marcella’s, Marchwiel (Wrexham). Source: Photographs: Howard Williams (a: 2018, b/c: 2009). Howard Williams and Elizabeth Williams Figure 35.3 (Continued) A fuller-still integration of cremation memorials can be found at St Chad’s, Farndon (Cheshire). Here, all the main pathways around the south-side of the churchyard are framed by the cremated dead of the late 1960s to 2000s, interpolated between Victorian gravestones and framing approaches to the sundial and the war memorial (Figure 35.3b).They are thus situated in contrasting orientations as they face the path itself rather than a conventional W–E alignment of the nineteenth-century headstones and chest tombs. At St Deiniol and St Marcella’s, Marchwiel (Wrexham), cremation memorials wrap around the east end of the church from the 1980s, but also the border between the churchyard wall and the path in the extension during the 1990s and 2000s (Figure 35.3c). Complementing these examples where paths are the foci, there are instances where historic churchyard walls are deployed to frame new cremation memorials. Looking inward, at St Boniface, Bunbury (Cheshire), a regular distinctive yellow-grey colour of miniature headstone has been adopted for most memorials since the late 1990s. They are positioned inside the churchyard boundary looking inward towards the church and over the Victorian memorials (Figure 35.4a). Looking outwards, cremation burials of different 376 Figure 35.4 Cremation memorials beside churchyard walls at (a) St Boniface, Bunbury (Cheshire) and (b) St Mary’s, Eccleston (Cheshire). Source: Photographs: Howard Williams (2009). Howard Williams and Elizabeth Williams forms are situated along the low, original churchyard boundary for the now-abandoned ruined historic church at St Mary’s, Eccleston (Cheshire) (Figure 35.4b). Whether paths, walls, or both, these examples show how cremation plots, and individual memorials, can be integrated into the deathscape of the historic churchyard, juxtaposed next to far older memorials and thus revitalising the space and those traversing it en route to the church. Elaborating extensions We have already alluded to cremation plots in churchyard extensions and it is to these we will now turn. Mytum (2004b) offers a regulatory view of cremation plots in discussing the longue durée of the traditional churchyard at Kellington, North Yorkshire, suggesting they reflect an ‘industrial management’ affecting inhumations and cremations alike. However, in management and appearance, churchyard extensions offer a range of options for cremation plots that challenge Mytum’s characterisation. At St Helen’s, Tarporley (Cheshire), the cremation memorials are clustered in a comparable plot to the inhumation graves, but their small size and close proximity affords them a distinctive appearance. Another fine example of this phenomenon is at St Peter’s,Waverton (Cheshire), where the extension to the churchyard took place in two stages to the south of the historic churchyard (Figure 35.5a). The principal WSW–ENE orientation of the inhumation graves in ordered rows towards a path that runs NNW–SSE Figure 35.5 Cremation memorials in relation to churchyard extensions at (a) St Peter’s, Waverton (Cheshire) and (b and c) St Andrew’s,Tarvin (Cheshire). Source: Photographs: Howard Williams (a: 2009, b/c: 2018). 378 Figure 35.5 (Continued) Howard Williams and Elizabeth Williams close to the eastern border of the plot.While the inhumation memorials face ENE, in contrast, the cremation memorials – small headstones mostly dating from the 1980s onwards – are situated in two rows on the narrow space between the path and the fence, facing WSW towards the path and opposing the inhumation memorials. The forms of the memorials vary, but they are generally reduced-size versions of standard headstones. At St Andrew’s, Tarvin, the second, most recent, churchyard extension contains inhumation graves aligned upon a centrally situated ‘garden of remembrance,’ with a bench, a dwarf wall around which memorial flower holders are situated, and an inner area for floral offerings (Figure 35.5b). Further memorials dating from the very late 1990s onwards are fixed to the outside of the old churchyard wall, augmented by a parallel dwarf wall (Figure 35.5c). These examples suffice to show how churchyard extensions divide the dead between those inhumed and those that cremate, but the extension also facilitates a dialogue or interplay between the memorial spaces.The cremated dead are afforded a distinctive set of alternative deathscapes upon both horizontal and vertical surfaces, set apart from, but in close proximity to, the inhumed dead. Conclusions Julie Rugg (2013a) has robustly criticised how the twentieth-century (and we would add, also earlytwenty-first-century) history of death is largely under-researched, with attempts to mischaracterise modernity and its attitudes to death in crude and general terms in contrast to a caricatured Victorian way of dead. She identifies increasing regulation as resulting in more modest commemorative expressions rather than ‘disengagement’ from mortality, yet she herself does not explore in detail the new and emergent deathscapes for the cremated dead of the latter part of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century (Rugg 2013b: 316, 346–348). Contemporary archaeology, focusing on the emergent surfaces and spaces, materials, and material cultures of death, offers one avenue to counter grand narratives regarding death in modernity, but also to see modernity as an unfinished project (see Harrison 2011: 153). Indeed, by contemporary archaeology exploring within the gates of the cemetery and churchyard challenges the bracketing of mortuary spaces as ethically ‘out of bounds.’ It also challenges the romanticisation of these spaces as ruins and relics of earlier epochs, thus making us look afresh at spaces traditionally investigated by medieval archaeologists. It allows us to explore the fine-grained detail of how mourner’s personal/family agency, and community agency more broadly, interacts with regulations controlling cemeteries. Archaeological surveys and observations reveal how cremation has facilitated new, modest, miniature, and condensed memorials. The superficial ‘banality’ or ‘monotony’ of these memorials and motifs (Rugg 2013a: 229–230) conceals considerable personal choice and variability, sometimes planned or improvised (contra Mytum 2004b). A dismissive view of modern churchyard memorials thus fails to recognise the distinctive ways cremation memorials interact with churchyard space and architecture.Whether by design or happenstance, these planned yet cumulative and condensed, almost intimate and collective, arrangements of cremation memorials have created new forms of emotive and mnemonic deathscape, perpetuating and diversifying engagements between the living and the dead within the churchyard space for mourners and visitors alike. In the examples discussed in this short chapter, we can see how even a brief survey of trends reveals the fluctuating and innovative uses of churchyard space, including the revitalisation of areas around church buildings, paths, and walls, and churchyard extensions with small and miniature, but intense and vibrant memorial practices. Rather than complementing existing narratives of death in England in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we can start to chart varied avenues by which local communities adapt and adopt churchyards for the memorialisation of the dead, often deliberately interpolating the cremated dead with far older features to integrate them with the perceived antiquity and sacrality of holy ground.This highlights the enduring mnemonic and numinous significance of ashes’ relationship to place and memory.Also, it serves as 380 Cremation and contemporary churchyards a key example of what Harrison (2011) constitutes as a key shift in archaeology’s focus to the present and the future, yet challenges the still near-exclusive focus of archaeology on modern ‘life’ and ‘living’ without adequate dialogue with other discipline’s explorations of contemporary death ways.Yet how we engage with mortality and memorialisation is central to our concerns, and challenging the life focus of archaeology is to critique one of archaeology’s most distinctive traits as a modernist project.This has implications on individual and community levels, but also for our present-day landscapes, including holy sites. In exploring contemporary archaeologists of the churchyard as a deathscape, in which the complex interplay between inhumation and cremation are fostering emergent dialogues between the living and the dead within churchyards. Acknowledgements This chapter began its life as a conference presentation at the 2010 A Good Send Off conference organised by the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath.We thank the organiser and audience of this event, and subsequently, after years in gestation, to the editors for their invitation to contribute and their constructive input. Notes 1 Ash-scattering, for example, is a regular feature of heritage sites including castle ruins – https://howardwilliamsblog. wordpress.com/2017/01/04/ashes-at-the-castle/; https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2016/11/09/ashesaround-castell-dinas-bran/; and https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/the-secret-dead/. For a cremation memorial on country estates in the care of the National Trust: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress. com/2017/11/05/whose-ashes-rest-here-cremation-and-memorial-archaism-at-attingham-park/. A further example is this private burial ground beside a café and motel: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2017/12/03/ an-island-of-the-cremated-dead/. 2 For other discussions of cremation in museums, see: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/14/ cremation-on-display-at-the-museum-of-london/ For memorial environments, see: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/10/the-alrewas-beakerthe-use-of-the-bronze-age-in-the-21st-century-commemoration/ 3 See also myArchaeodeath blog for entries relating to cremation in the contemporary churchyard for:Pennant Melangell: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2014/07/19/horizontal-stratigraphy-and-cremation-switchback-in- thewelsh-churchyard/; Bangor-is-y-Coed: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/cremationswitchback-at-bangor-is-y-coed/; Meifod: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/sun-time-andcremation-meifod-memorials/; Wrexham: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/eliugh-yalestomb/ References Anthony, S. 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