Flames of transformation: the role of fire in cremation practices Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille Abstract This paper explores the transformative power of fire, its fundamental ability to change material worlds and affect our experience of its materiality. The paper examines material transformations related to death as a means of illustrating the powerful property of fire as a materially destructive yet socially generative and creative element. While fire has been widely discussed archaeologically as a technological element, and recently coupled with the social and symbolic powers of pyrotechnology, we focus on the sensuous staging of fire in disposal practices. The paper employs two case studies focusing on cremation burial from Bronze Age (c.1300–1100 BC) and modern Denmark in order to demonstrate widely different sensuous engagements with fire and its experiential significance in a cremation context. Keywords Fire; burial; cremation; Early Bronze Age; Denmark. Fire suggests the desire to change, to speed up the passage of time, to bring all life to its conclusion, to its hereafter. In these circumstances the reverie becomes truly fascinating and dramatic; it magnifies human destiny; it links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of a world. The fascinated individual hears the call of the funeral pyre. For him destruction is more than a change, it is a renewal. (Bachelard 1968: 16, emphasis in the original) The presence and impermanence of fire Fire is an element that triggers an ambiguous fascination for most human beings at a material as well as at a psychological level. Fire may devastate us, destroy our homes and World Archaeology Vol. 40(2): 253–267 Elemental Archaeologies ª 2008 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online DOI: 10.1080/00438240802008593 Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in World Archaeology on 19 Aug 2009, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ full/10.1080/00438240802008593