Before public parks, Americans picnicked and raced carriages in cemeteries
Cemetery comes from a Greek word for a sleeping place. The idea is ancient, with a Moroccan cave holding burials around 15,000 years old, but the landscaped burial ground outside town is a 19th-century invention, born of cholera, crowding and reform. In the United States these new grounds doubled as the first parks.
Taforalt cave in Morocco may be the oldest known cemetery, holding at least 34 Iberomaurusian people, most dated to between 15,100 and 14,000 years ago. Burial customs matter enormously to archaeologists: whole prehistoric cultures, such as the Bronze Age Urnfield culture, are named for how they buried their dead. Strictly, a graveyard is a burial ground within a churchyard, while the word cemetery first referred to Rome's catacombs.
Commemoration has waxed and waned. According to the historian Philippe Ariès, Roman-style inscriptions naming a person, their dates, trade and family faded in Western Europe from the fifth century, and most early medieval tombs became anonymous. From about the seventh century the Church controlled burial, allowing it only in consecrated ground. The powerful lay in named crypts inside churches, often with coats of arms, while families who could afford a stonemason bought headstones and sometimes competed over carved angels. The poorest made do with wooden crosses that rotted in the weather.
Industrial cities broke that system. London's population more than doubled in the first half of the 19th century, from 1 million to 2.3 million, and churchyards overflowed into the water supply. The cholera epidemic of 1831 killed 52,000 people in Britain. Parliament moved in 1832 to encourage large cemeteries outside London and closed inner-city churchyards to new burials, and a ring of seven great cemeteries followed, beginning with Kensal Green. Norwich's Rosary Cemetery, opened in 1819, took people of every faith. In Paris, remains from graveyards across the city had already been moved in the 18th century to the catacombs, now holding the bones of an estimated six million people.
Père Lachaise in Paris set the model of a landscaped, state-run cemetery, spread across Europe by Napoleon's armies. Across the Atlantic, rural cemeteries hosted picnics, hunts and carriage races. Neglected urban cemeteries today often shelter birds and plants found nowhere else in their cities.
Source: Cemetery
