IN OUR MODERN AMERICAN COMMERCIAL SOCIETY, canny consumers take for granted the techniques of advertising and marketing and their innovations in print, radio, and television. They are expected as part of making any sizable purchase, such as an automobile or an appliance. However, when they are applied to advertising a casket, such techniques still tend to give us pause. Though modern Americans grant that the purchase of a casket is a necessary burial expense, we may still be appalled at the crass materialism of strategies that govern their marketing and advertising. Some contemporary sociologists and historians would have us believe that this is a twentieth-century phenomenon, that the coffin was imbued with religious significance until recently, when commercial interests gutted its symbolic nature. In fact, from the beginning, burial in America was a very commercial affair, with the casket as the most central element, and the process by which coffins were transformed from mere container to a commodity is intertwined with the story of the changing burial and funeral practices in America. While the origins of coffins lie in religion-the Christian belief in the Resurrection-the coffin was established early on as a commercial item whose production, appearance, and use were dictated by fashion only. A variety of cultural systems incorporated and

Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, the majority of English dead were laid to rest in nothing more than winding sheets (or shrouds) that were used to cover the corpse, to contain its fluids, and to allow its easy transport to the burial site. The wrapped corpse was most often carried on a bier to the grave. Some biers were merely platforms with handles, but others were constructed as boxes. These reusable containers are more likely the physical precedent for the common wooden coffin of the seventeenth century than were any of the stone, lead, and ceramic contraptions of the elite sometimes found in earlier graves. l

The origin of coffins lies in the integration that death promised within the cultural system of Christianity. Body and soul would eventually be reunified through the Resurrection; the funeral service addressed the preservation of the soul, and burial in a coffin promised better preservation of the body than a winding sheet. In his book The Art of Embalming (1705), English surgeon Thomas Greenhill encouraged embalming as an ideal part of Christian burial: "[The 1 ultimate End of Burial is in order to future Resurrection ... [t 1 hat Bodies are piously to be laid up in the Earth, like to Corn sowed, to confirm the assured Hope of the Resurrection."2 Greenhill felt that only embalming ensured proper respect for the body and its best preservation for the Resurrection. However, most people could not afford this procedure. So for Anglo populations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffin provided the most economical compromise between the winding sheet and embalming, to aid in the preservation of the body. At this time, coffined burial grew from a popular to a universal custom.