“Particularly important are the graves that shed new light on the funerary ritual at the end of the Bronze Age in north-eastern Banat. It was found that the dead were deposited on a pyre where items from the funerary trousseau were also burned.” This included “a table-altar of clay on which they brought funerary offerings, stone grinders and various pots that were used for the funeral banquet. Modern methods of radioactive carbon dating method shows that the necropolis at Păru dates between 1300 and 1200 BC” Ph.D. Florin Drasovean told www.tion.ro.
“In terms of inventory, there were discovered pots that were used in the funeral banquet and various fragments of altars, on which the deceased was cremated. Subsequently, the funeral was done in circular pits of 1 meter diameter, grouped in nests, probably because individuals came from the same family,” explained Professor Drasovean.
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| Part of the excavated necropolis |
Contextualizing
also found further West, where it is most strongly associated to the Urnfield culture (as well as others more or less related ones), later, in the Iron Age, cremation is also associated to stone circle burials in Scandinavia and the Pyrenees. Therefore one could fathom that the transition between the Bronze and Iron Age in Europe North and West of the Balcans could well be described also as the Age of Cremation, even if (of course), there are also many areas where such practice never caught up.
For what they were... we are 