History
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, any cremation which took place was on an outdoor, open pyre. With firewood, and to a lesser extent, coal being the only available fuel options and the low energy efficiency inherent in such a configuration, it is no surprise that cremation enjoyed minimal popularity in densely populated areas up until furnace technology developed during the Industrial Revolution could be applied to cremation to make it more practical in an urbanizing world.
Read more about this topic: Crematory
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“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
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“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
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