The History of Cremation
Scholars today quite generally agree that cremation probably began in any real sense during the early Stone
Age -- around 3000 B.C. -- and most likely in Europe and the Near
During the late Stone Age cremation began
to spread across northern Europe, as evidenced by particularly informative
finds of decorative pottery urns in western Russia among the Slavic
With the advent of the Bronze Age -- 2500
to 1000 B.C. -- cremation moved into the British Isles and into
what is now Spain and Portugal. Cemeteries for cremation developed
in Hungary and northern Italy, spreading to northern Europe and
In the Mycenaean Age -- circa 1000 B.C.
-- cremation became an integral part of the elaborate Grecian burial
custom. In fact, it became the dominant mode of disposition by the
time of Homer in 800 B.C. and was actually encouraged for reasons
of health and expedient burial of slain warriors in this battle-ravaged
Following this Grecian trend, the early
Romans probably embraced cremation some time around 600 B.C. and
it apparently became so prevalent that an official decree had to
be issued in the mid 5th Century against the cremation of bodies
within the city.
By the time of the Roman Empire -- 27 B.C.
to 395 A.D. -- it was widely practiced, and cremated remains were
generally stored in elaborate urns, often within columbarium-like
Prevalent though the practice was among
the Romans, cremation was rare with the early Christians who considered
it pagan and in the Jewish culture where traditional sepulcher entombment
However, by 400 A.D., as a result of Constantine's
Christianization of the Empire, earth burial had completely replaced
cremation except for rare instances of plague or war, and for the
next 1,500 years remained the accepted mode of disposition throughout
Modern cremation, as we know it, actually
began only a little over a century ago, after years of experimentation
into the development of a dependable chamber. When Professor Brunetti
of Italy finally perfected his model and displayed it at the 1873
Vienna Exposition, the cremation movement started almost simultaneously
on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the British Isles, the movement was fostered
by Queen Victoria's surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson. Concerned with
hazardous health conditions, Sir Henry and his colleagues founded
the Cremation Society of England in 1874. The first crematories
in Europe were built in 1878 in Woking, England and Gotha, Germany.
Meanwhile in North America, although there
had been two recorded instances of cremation before 1800, the real
start began in 1876 when Dr. Julius LeMoyne built the first crematory
in Washington, Pennsylvania.
In 1884 the second crematory opened in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania and, as was true of many of the early crematories,
it was owned and operated by a cremation society. Other forces behind
early crematory openings were Protestant clergy who desired to reform
burial practices and the medical profession concerned with health
conditions around early cemeteries.
Crematories soon sprang up in Buffalo, New
York, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Detroit and Los Angeles. By 1900,
there were already 20 crematories in operation, and by the time
that Dr. Hugo Erichsen founded the Cremation Association of America
in 1913, there were 52 crematories in North America and over 10,000
cremations took place in that year.
In 1975, the name was changed to the Cremation
Association of North America to be more indicative of the membership
composition of the United States and Canada. At that time, there
were over 425 crematories and nearly 150,000 cremations.
In 1999, there were 1,468 crematories and
595,617 cremations, a percentage of 25.39% of all deaths in the
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