Cremation and present pasts: A contemporary archaeology of Swedish memory groves

Abstract

I present a case study in the contemporary archaeology of death: an investigation of the minneslunden (‘memory groves’) of present-day Sweden. In recent decades, memory groves have been adapted and condensed from their original suburban cemetery locations and added to rural churchyard settings. Eschewing individual memorials with text or images, memory groves serve as architectonic environments that facilitate the staging of the presence of the cremated dead and encouraging ongoing relationships between the living and the dead through personal commemorative practice. I argue that memory groves choreograph commemoration through the diffusion and sublimation of ashes into landscape utopias with implicit, and sometimes explicit, archaeological themes. In rural churchyards, memory groves serve as ‘present-pasts’, newly-created ancient monuments and primordial sacred micro-landscapes, affording the cremated dead with a collective, emotive and mnemonic material presence and simultaneously serving to revitalising the commemorative use of traditional churchyard space within a largely secular and mobile contemporary society. Using memory groves as a case study, the paper seeks to demonstrate the potential in the archaeological investigation of contemporary death and its material culture.

Keywords:

• churchyards
• cremation
• memory groves
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Ing-Marie Back Danielsson, Lisa Brundle, Mats Burström, Martin Rundkvist, Tim Fløhr Sørensen, Estella Weiss-Krejci, Anna Wessman, Elizabeth Williams and anonymous referees for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks to Martin for supplying translations for the paper.

Notes

[1] I thank Ing-Marie Back Danielsson for her personal observations on this issue.

[2] Subsequently I refer to ‘memory groves’ rather than ‘memorial groves’. ‘Minneslund’ has a poetic air, meaning ‘grove of memories’ that suggests the contemplation of personal reminiscences of the dead rather than the formal remembrance of people and events implied by the use of the term ‘memorial grove’ in English. ‘Memory groves’ serves as a useful compromise to allude to the contemplative and personal nature of remembrance suggested by these memorial places.

[3] http://www.skogskyrkogarden.se/en/

[4] I owe this point to Ing-Marie Back Danielsson.

[5] Each site is referred to in relation to its historic region, a system somewhat anachronistic but familiar to archaeologists and commensurate with emphasising the historical background to each site: Blekinge (Bl), Gotland (Go), Södermanland (Sö), Uppland (Up), Öland (Öl) and Östergötland (Ög).

[6] I thank Elizabeth Williams for making this observation.

[7] I thank Martin Rundkvist for making this observation.

[8]I thank Martin Rundkvist for explaining the apparent error in the Swedish text, the missing word seeming is från/from.