Burial Customs in Ancient Times

(Jody Gray): The Neolithic period represents change from hunter-gatherers to establishing settlements centered around agricultural practices. Permanent structures were built both for the living and the dead. Burials were collective, containing several bodies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chambered_cairn Chambered cairn, is a burial mound, usually constructed during the Neolithic Age (beginning about 10,200 BC), consisting of a sizable (usually stone) chamber around which a cairn of stones [pile or stack of stones, serving as burial monuments] was constructed. Some chambered cairns are also passage-graves. They are found throughout Britain and Ireland, with the largest number in Scotland. (illustration, left, Maeshowe chambered cairn, Orkney Island, Scotland)

  Typically, the chamber is larger than a cist, and will contain a larger number of interments, which are either excarnated bones or inhumations (cremations). Most were situated near a settlement, and served as that community’s “graveyard.”

  During the late Neolithic Age henge sites were constructed and single burials began to become more commonplace; by the Bronze Age it is possible that even where chambered cairns were still being built they had become the burial places of prominent individuals rather than of communities as a whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cist Cist, a small stone-built coffin-like box or ossuary used to hold the bodies of the dead. Examples can be found across Europe and in the Middle East… Several cists are sometimes found close together within the same cairn or barrow. Often ornaments have been found within an excavated cist, indicating the wealth or prominence of the interred individual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kistvaen Kistvaen, a tomb or burial chamber formed from flat stone slabs in a box-like shape… often take the form of small rectangular pits about 3 ft long by 2 feet wide; usually covered with a mound of earth and surrounded by a circle of small stones. When a body was placed in the kistvaen, it was usually lain in a contracted position; sometimes the body as cremated with the ashes placed in a cinerary urn. (illustration, left, Kistvaen burial chamber, Dartmoor, England)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary Ossuary, a chest, box, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains.  They are frequently used where burial space is scarce. A body is first buried in a temporary grave, then after some years the skeletal remains are removed and placed in an ossuary. The greatly reduced space taken up by an ossuary means that it is possible to store the remains of many more people in a single tomb that if the original coffins were left as is. (illustration, left, Ossuary, Hallstatt, Austria)
  Many examples of ossuaries are found within Europe... The village of Wamba in the province of Valladolid, Spain, has an impressive ossuary of over a thousand skulls inside the local church, dating from between the 12th and 18th centuries... The Catacombs of Paris represents another famous ossuary.
The use of ossuaries is a longstanding tradition in the Orthodox Church. The remains of an Orthodox Christian are treated with special reverence, in conformity with the biblical teaching that the body of a believer is a "temple of the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians 6:19), having been sanctified and transfigured by Baptism, Holy Communion and the participation in the mystical life of the Church.

In Orthodox monasteries, when one of the brethren dies, his remains are buried for one to three years, and then disinterred, cleaned and gathered into the monastery's charnel house. If there is reason to believe that the departed is a saint, the remains may be placed in a reliquary; otherwise the bones are usually mingled together (skulls in one place, long bones in another, etc.). The remains of an abbot may be placed in a separate ossuary made out of wood or metal.(illustration, left) Ursulakammer, Basiica of St. Ursula, Cologne, where in the 17th century the largest mosaic in human bones ever was created, that covers the four walls of the room.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary Sedlec Ossuary, a small Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutna Hora… estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 to 70,000 people, whose bones have, in many cases, been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel -among the most visited tourist attractions of the Czech Republic (over 200,000 visitors annually). History. In 1287, Henry, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, was sent to the Holy Land by King Otakar II of Bohemia. He returned with him a small amount of earth he had removed from Golgotha and sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery -it became a desirable burial site… In the mid 14th century, during the Black Death, and after the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century, many thousands were buried in the abbey cemetery, so it had to be greatly enlarged.
Around 1400, a Gothic church was built in the center of the cemetery with a vaulted upper level and a lower chapel to be used as an ossuary for the mass graves unearthed during the construction, or simply slated for demolition to make room for new burials. After 1511, the task of exhuming skeletons and stacking their bones in the chapel was given to a half-blind monk of the order. Between 1703 and 1710, a new entrance was constructed to support the front wall, which was leaning outward, and the upper chapel was rebuilt…

In 1870, a woodcarver was employed by the Schwarzenberg family to put the bone heaps into order, yielding a macabre result [the quality of having a grim or ghastly atmosphere -emphasize the details and symbols of death]. (illustration, left, the Schwarzenberg coat-of-arms).

There is another famous ossuary, the Skull Chapel in Czerma, Poland. The chapel was built in 1776 by the Czech local parish priest Waclaw Tomazek. It is the mass grave of people who died during the Thirty Years Was (1618-1648), three Silesian Wars (1740-1763), as well as of people who died because of cholera epidemics, plague, syphilis and hunger. Together with J. Schmidt and grave digger J. Langer, father Tomaszek who was inspired by the Capuchin cemetery while on pilgrimage to Rome, collected the casulaites' bones, cleaned and put them in the chapel within 18 years (from 1776 to 1794). Walls of this small, baroque church are filled with three thousand skulls, and there are also bones of another 21 thousand people interred in the basement. The skulls of people who built the chapel, including father Tomazek, were placed in the center of the building and on the altar in 1804. Note, slide-show on the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Chapel,_Czermna
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**BP: Religion, Cross Reference. http://indextoblogposts.*