Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen is Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. She has made important contributions to the scholarship on the European Bronze in a range of topics, including dress, creativity, the construction of identities, and the role of 'things.' Katharina Rebay-Salisbury is Research Group Leader at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She specializes in interdisciplinary approaches to analysis of Bronze and Iron Age burials. She was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for her project 'The value of mothers to society.'

• 1. Introduction: changing practices and perception of the body; 2. A brief history of urns, urnfields and burials in the Urnfield Culture; 3. Theoretical framework; 4. The Bronze Age: setting the scene; 5. The changing Bronze Age body – introduction of case studies; 6. The treatment of the body: compatibility and divergence; 7. The construction of graves: coherence and variations; 8. After the burial: prolonged engagement with the body; 9. Conclusions: on the nature of change in burial practices.

'The (renewed) focus on the agency of the (dead) body is refreshing indeed and I think that Stig Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury have taken an important step towards a new interpretative paradigm. This has been achieved by not only attributing agency to the dead body but, in my view, even more so by attributing agency to local communities by not just seeing them as the passive recipients of new ideas coming from elsewhere. It will be interesting to use their book as a thinking platform in its own right for more detailed and comparative research in the years to come.' Arjan Louwen, Antiquity

Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen is Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. She has made important contributions to the scholarship on the European Bronze in a range of topics, including dress, creativity, the construction of identities, and the role of 'things.' Katharina Rebay-Salisbury is Research Group Leader at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She specializes in interdisciplinary approaches to analysis of Bronze and Iron Age burials. She was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for her project 'The value of mothers to society.'

• 1. Introduction: changing practices and perception of the body; 2. A brief history of urns, urnfields and burials in the Urnfield Culture; 3. Theoretical framework; 4. The Bronze Age: setting the scene; 5. The changing Bronze Age body – introduction of case studies; 6. The treatment of the body: compatibility and divergence; 7. The construction of graves: coherence and variations; 8. After the burial: prolonged engagement with the body; 9. Conclusions: on the nature of change in burial practices.

'The (renewed) focus on the agency of the (dead) body is refreshing indeed and I think that Stig Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury have taken an important step towards a new interpretative paradigm. This has been achieved by not only attributing agency to the dead body but, in my view, even more so by attributing agency to local communities by not just seeing them as the passive recipients of new ideas coming from elsewhere. It will be interesting to use their book as a thinking platform in its own right for more detailed and comparative research in the years to come.' Arjan Louwen, Antiquity

Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen is Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. She has made important contributions to the scholarship on the European Bronze in a range of topics, including dress, creativity, the construction of identities, and the role of 'things.' Katharina Rebay-Salisbury is Research Group Leader at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She specializes in interdisciplinary approaches to analysis of Bronze and Iron Age burials. She was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for her project 'The value of mothers to society.'

• 1. Introduction: changing practices and perception of the body; 2. A brief history of urns, urnfields and burials in the Urnfield Culture; 3. Theoretical framework; 4. The Bronze Age: setting the scene; 5. The changing Bronze Age body – introduction of case studies; 6. The treatment of the body: compatibility and divergence; 7. The construction of graves: coherence and variations; 8. After the burial: prolonged engagement with the body; 9. Conclusions: on the nature of change in burial practices.

'The (renewed) focus on the agency of the (dead) body is refreshing indeed and I think that Stig Sørensen and Rebay-Salisbury have taken an important step towards a new interpretative paradigm. This has been achieved by not only attributing agency to the dead body but, in my view, even more so by attributing agency to local communities by not just seeing them as the passive recipients of new ideas coming from elsewhere. It will be interesting to use their book as a thinking platform in its own right for more detailed and comparative research in the years to come.' Arjan Louwen, Antiquity