Burial Methods
In many cultures, human corpses were usually buried in soil. The roots of burial as a practice reach back into the Middle Palaeolithic and coincides with the appearance of Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens, in Europe and Africa respectively. As a result, burial grounds are found throughout the world. Through time, Mounds of earth, temples, and underground caverns were used to store the dead bodies of ancestors. In modern times, the custom of burying dead people below ground with a stone marker to indicated the burial place is used in most modern cultures, although other means such as cremation are becoming more popular in the West (cremation is the norm in India and mandatory in Japan).
Some burial practices are heavily ritualized; others are simply practical.
Read more about this topic: Burials
Famous quotes containing the words burial and/or methods:
“On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: “his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)