The effect of fire on human remains is one of the most powerful techniques of transforming the body after death and breaking it into several parts without entirely destroying it. The exposure of the body to fire causes various physical and chemical alterations that involve shrinkage, breakage, warping, complete deformation, removal of the organic component, and modification of the inorganic crystal component of the bones.
Varying degrees of heat-induced effects predominate on human remains due to fire set up deliberately in direct contact with the human body. These are interpreted as the result of an elaborate and time-consuming procedure widely known as cremation. Similar effects are also evident when burning is applied in funerary contexts as an act of fumigation, practical cleansing of the human bones, or a symbolic practice. Variations in the firing procedure may reflect different social behaviors and ideological and cosmological attitudes to the human body by the living communities.
In ancient Greece, the burning of the human body was identified almost exclusively with the practice of cremation. The use of fire in funerary ceremonies has been observed, without interruption and with a variety in the treatment of the dead, as early as in the Neolithic period (7th-4th mill. BCE) and the Bronze Age (3rd-2nd mill. BCE). Later on, cremation marks the Early Iron Age in Greece (11th-9th c. BC), when it either dominates or co-exists in high proportions with inhumations on a broad regional scale.
Although the practice was extensively discussed within the context of the social transformations that took place in the Early Iron Age, the particular components of the burning of the human body, such as the technology of fire and the bio-anthropology of the people who were subjected to thermal alterations were never investigated in-depth at a regional as well as a temporal scale. Macroscopic studies of human remains from ancient Greece are limited, while novel analytical microscopic and isotopic methods on heat-induced bone remains have never been undertaken.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki