ABSTRACT
All the previous chapters have concentrated on inhumation burials. Now is the time to think about the nature of cremated bone and what we can learn from it. Cremation causes bones and teeth to break up into small fragments and also causes changes in its composition, including destruction of the organic component. This severely limits the application of the techniques described in previous chapters. Partly because of this, most studies of cremated bone concentrate not on demography, or normal or pathological variation in the skeleton, but on ancient funerary practices, and they use different techniques, based on diffractometry and spectroscopy to do this. These are described in this chapter.
