A thought occurred to me recently as I was reading about the Urnfield culture and the two components of the Andronovo horizon, the Alakul and Fedorovo cultures which contrasted in their practice of cremation vs. inhumation. It seems that the cremation ritual rose to prominence during the Bronze Age and then largely waned during the Iron Age.
Of course, this did not occur everywhere, not was it an entirely linear process. For example, most of the patrician Roman gentes practiced cremation into historical times. The Greeks, on the other hand, who mostly practiced inhumation during the Bronze Age, seem to have adopted cremation during the Dark Age, and this was the custom immortalized by Homer. Of the Indo-Iranians, one branch leading to the modern Hindus adopted a cremation ritual, while another, leading to the Zoroastrian Persians adopted the well-known exposure ritual.
But, nonetheless, it is a fact that the cremation burial first rose to prominence during the Bronze Age, and this requires an explanation.
I don't know whether this hypothesis has been advanced before, but it seems to me that the most practical reason for the cremation burial is to facilitate transportation of remains.
In modern times, the desire to be buried in familiar surroundings is often strong, and people are often buried in a different place than where they die. Of course, thanks to technological advanced related to preservation and transportation, this is often practical. But, this would not have been so in the past: cremation may have been devised as a way to dispose of the dead and carry their remains.
I have argued before that a sort of "globalization" took place during the Bronze Age, as extensive networks associated with metallurgy, combining prospecting, mining, metalworking, distribution, and security were formed. The non-local nature of these natures was driven by the need to co-ordinate a range of activities that took place in geographically distant areas: sources of ore needed to be identified and mined; metal needed to be worked on by talented experts who could fashion it into useful instruments of high added value; the end products had to be protected (because of their high value) and transported to areas where it would be in demand.
In the context of this theory, the rise of the cremation burial makes sense. In Paleolithic times, there was no concept of "home", as humans lived nomadic lives, endlessly driven away in search of resources. In Neolithic times, a strong concept of "home" emerged, as humans were tied to their crops and domesticated animals, and to the dwellings they had created. And, indeed, people were literally buried under their homes in the earliest Neoltihic.
The revolution of the Metal Age was the rise of mobility. This was facilitated by advanced in transportation technology associated with wheeled vehicles, and was driven by the trade in metal objects and other specialized, high-value items. The segment of the population involved in this business formed the elite, because of their access to weaponry and wealth, and these elites were intrinsically mobile for the reasons enumerated above. They, like other Neolithic peoples, had inherited a "love of home" and were territorial, but their way of life demanded that they live and fight away from "home".
Hence, the rise of the cremation ritual, which was then copied by others, due to its association with the elite, as well as its signalling effect, because a proper full cremation requires a large quantity of wood and is expensive to prepare and carry out. The intensification of warfare during the Bronze Age may have been an additional factor in the rise of the cremation ritual, because it is a convenient way to dispose of the dead at a battle site, or away from an established cemetery.
My hypothesis may not capture all the complexities of the phenomenon, but I think that a utilitarian origin of the ritual, which later assumed ideological, social, or religious connotations may make good sense of at least the origins of the practice at a wide level during the Bronze Age.
An obvious downside of the cremation ritual is its almost certain detrimental consequences for the preservation of ancient DNA. As more DNA evidence from the prehistoric past continues to accumulate, it is useful to remember that part of the puzzle may have been irretrievably lost, although I suspect that the transience of the practice in many parts of the world and its co-existence with inhumation in others may have left us with enough evidence to work out the larger picture.
